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The Empty Family

3.66 of 5 stars 3.66 · rating details · 868 ratings · 185 reviews

On the heels of his breakout success, the bestselling and award-winning novel Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín returns with a stunning collection of new stories, written in prose as “elegant in its simplicity as it is complex in the emotions it evokes” ( The New York Times Magazine ).

Critics praised Brooklyn as a “beautifully rendered portrait of Brooklyn and provincial Ireland in th

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Hardcover, 275 pages

Published January 4th 2011 by Scribner (first published 2010)

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Jun 11, 2011 Sheenagh Pugh rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-stories

If all the stories in this collection were as absorbing as "Silence" and "The Colour of Shadows", I'd have given it a 5 or 4. On the other hand, if they were all as inconsequential and self-absorbed as "Barcelona, 1975" or "One Minus One" it'd be a 1.

They all concern people alienated in some way from home and family, and usually returning home if only temporarily. I'm not sure if I like collections of stories to be as themed and alike as this. I think one advantage of a collection of stories is...more If all the stories in this collection were as absorbing as "Silence" and "The Colour of Shadows", I'd have given it a 5 or 4. On the other hand, if they were all as inconsequential and self-absorbed as "Barcelona, 1975" or "One Minus One" it'd be a 1.

They all concern people alienated in some way from home and family, and usually returning home if only temporarily. I'm not sure if I like collections of stories to be as themed and alike as this. I think one advantage of a collection of stories is the variety of theme and voice it can contain, and there really isn't much of that here. In particular this is true of the first-person stories, in which the voice is seemingly always an Irish gay man who is estranged from his family, working (if at all) in the arts and putting it about quite a lot. This character, under different guises, crops up in America, Dublin and Spain and he's pretty infuriating everywhere. He is given to saying over-dramatic things like "The moon hangs low over Texas. The moon is my mother" ("One Minus One"), which is an opening to make the heart sink. He's also given to describing his sex life in that mechanical "fit tab A into slot B" style that manages to be both tedious and risible and is surely a candidate for the Literary Review's Bad Sex Awards.

I generally liked the third-person stories far better than the first-person ones. This isn't an infallible guide: the first-person story "The Pearl Fishers" has more humour, momentum and observation than the other first-person stories, while the third-person "The Street" seemed, at least to this reader, interminable and could surely have been told at half the length. But by and large, the third-person stories seem to me to have way more to say, and it isn't all about him, as it generally is when he uses first person. With most writers, "I" is a lie; they use first person to get under the skin of people who aren't them. I don't think he does; I fear his "I" really is, more or less, himself, and the writing is the less interesting for that.

The third-person "Silence" is a fascinating speculative fictionalisation of the lives of Lady Gregory and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. It's beautifully written, in a style that somehow suits 19th-century people without actually being 19th-century, and has some interesting things to say about how we use fiction to cope with reality. And in "The Colour of Shadows" the situation of a man caring for his aged aunt and reassessing other loyalties is brought sensitively alive. The male protagonist, Paul, is again the Archetypal Gay Irishman Distanced From Family, but he comes over as far more tolerable than this character in the first person, partly because he seems more concerned with his aunt than with himself, eg at a moment when his aunt, her faculties beginning to fail, mistakes him for someone else and begins talking about him:

"Paul got involved with a rotten crowd up in Dublin, Tom. A rotten crowd!" [...]
"Aunt Josie, it's Paul. This is Paul."
In the shadowy light she stopped talking and peered towards him.
"What?" she asked.
He wondered if it would be possible to run out of the room and behave as if this scene had never taken place, make her feel that she might have dreamed a visitor, so that she could put it out of her mind, as he would, too.

If Paul had been one of his first-person protagonists, I suspect this rather moving concern for the aunt's feelings would have been absent; it'd have been all about him.

I haven't read any Toibin before. If I do try the novels, I'll check first and see if I can find something that isn't first-person and obsessed with his favourite protagonist, because I suspect this avatar will never be anywhere near as fascinating to anyone else as he is to his author. (less)

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Mar 27, 2011 Josh rated it 5 of 5 stars

I really love Colm Toibin's writing at this point. At first I was a bit underwhelmed but with time it's become apparent that his work lingers and there is a distinct way to read it. "Silence" sticks out especially for its conveyance of regret; specifically the way regret sits, alive but unobtrusive, within a person. The same can be said of "Two Women," a story which, alongside "The Pearl Fishers," reveals a surprisingly modern wit. Toibin works beautifully with historical settings (maybe because...more

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Apr 07, 2012 Madeline rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012, short-stories, queer, family, ireland, historical-fiction, love-story, marriage-lets-you-down

I do not think short stories are Tóibín's strongest suit - I think longer forms serve him better (my favorite story was the longest story). A good short story can be (though I don't want to make any really strong normative claims) a bit like a slap out of nowhere, and he doesn't have that talent, which I think I . . . probably should have guessed before reading these.

But my evaluation of this book is probably not totally fair, because Brooklyn is still fresh in my mind, and I love Brooklyn with...more

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Oct 14, 2010 Gail rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I knew he wanted me to move the telescope, to focus now on Rosslare Harbour, on Tuskar Rock, on Raven Point, on the strand at Curracloe, agree with him that they could be seen so clearly even in this faded evening light. But what he showed me first had amazed me. The sight of the waves, miles out, their dutiful and frenetic solitude, their dull indifference to their fate, made me want to cry out, made me want to ask him if he could leave me alone for some time to take this in. I could hear him b...more

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Nov 05, 2012 Alan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-stories, read-in-2012

just come in at the library

Another Irish story collection (after Kevin Barry’s), just as good but very different. The writing here has a more sombre, formal approach, dead right for such a Henry James devotee. In fact one of the stories is inspired by an incident related in Henry James' notebook ('Silence'). Most of them though are about growing up gay in Ireland in the 60s/70s and the problems encountered, mostly with family members (particularly mothers). However there are a couple of stories...more

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Mar 27, 2013 Uncle rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

The stories in Colm Toibin's book The Empty Family all deal with issues of love, family, and memory. Each story seems rooted in a very definite time and place, and yet often story, characters move fluidly between the present and past. The characters in these stories find themselves at a cross road, often confronting an uncertain future, or a troubled past. In most of the stories, characters find themselves coming to terms with the miracle of love, and yet how terrible it can be when love fails....more

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Feb 22, 2013 Cian rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-stories, fiction, lgbtqixyz

Read this book. It contains some of the most compelling and beautiful writing that I have read in years.

Although I typically am not a fan of short stories, I picked up The Empty Family because it was a 2012 Lambda Literary Award Winner for gay general fiction. Sadly, it sat on my shelf for months, as I repeatedly started and stopped the first story (Silence).

But once I arrived at the second (and title) story, I was hooked. These carefully crafted stories seem to amble along, subtly ensnaring yo...more

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Sep 02, 2012 Alan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Nine exquisitely crafted stories make up this gem of a book, set in present-day Ireland, 1970’s Spain, and nineteenth-century England. Each story is a unique perspective on loneliness, desire, and love-lost.

“Silence” presents Lady Gregory, a woman married to a man she abhors. Her loneliness is temporarily quenched by an impeccable lover, but she is then abandoned by love and forced to live out her life, never being able to speak of her one great passion.

“Two Women” tells of a prickly set designe...more

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Aug 12, 2012 David Hallman rated it 5 of 5 stars

Melancholia - Tóibín’s, Pamuk’s, and Mine

Reading Colm Tóibín’s collection of short stories “The Empty Family”, I was reminded of Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk’s poignant evocation of his hometown in his part-history part-memoir entitled “Istanbul – Memories and the City.” The pervasive ethos throughout “Istanbul” is melancholy—for a lost childhood innocence, for a family diminished in its once prominent social standing, and for a city whose culture is but a shadow of its former grandeur.

There a...more

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Aug 02, 2012 Mom rated it 3 of 5 stars

Wow. This collection of short stories is difficult to rate/review. Colm Toibin, the author, is skilled and his spare elegant language expressed deep emotions and ideas. Some of the stories, especially "The Colour of Shadows" and "Two Women" are heart-stopping in their intensity and depth. Many of the characters are unpleasant, but Toibin leads us to understand them and find them sympathetic. The descriptive language is startling and beautiful.

However, I found some of the stories (in particular,...more

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Oct 26, 2011 Sequelguerrier rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Short stories are not my preferred fare but for Colm Tòibìn I make and exception - gladly! His spare language so full of feeling and understanding is, if anything, even more suited to these short pieces than to the already brilliant novels. In the nine stories that make up 'The Empty Family' he revisits his preferred places and themes: Barcelona Enniscorthy, Wexford, Dublin; the strangeness of the familiar, the familiarity of strangers, mothers and sons, displacement both geographical and of the...more Short stories are not my preferred fare but for Colm Tòibìn I make and exception - gladly! His spare language so full of feeling and understanding is, if anything, even more suited to these short pieces than to the already brilliant novels. In the nine stories that make up 'The Empty Family' he revisits his preferred places and themes: Barcelona Enniscorthy, Wexford, Dublin; the strangeness of the familiar, the familiarity of strangers, mothers and sons, displacement both geographical and of the heart. Nine stories, nine individual worlds. There is the touching and true farewell of a nephew - more than son - from his old aunt in 'The Colour of Shadows'. If I had to pick just one of these stories, this would be it. There is the strangeness of the circumscribed universe of immigrant Pakistanis in Barcelona in 'The Street'. Showing that Tòibìns range can go well beyond the western and Caucasian. There is the joyful discovery of sex in 'Barcelona 75' where a young, self-centred Irishman happily fucks away the time as the old Dictator dies and Spain prepares to confront a new world. In 'One Minus One' Tòibìn creates another of does partings he does so well in his deceptively simple, undemonstrative language. A son returns from the States to be with sister and brother when their mother dies. A world of the unsaid being expressed in just a few hours. Closure of another fraught relationship and, behind it, that of the son and his former partner. Another exile returns and confronts part of her past and the new Ireland in 'Two Women'. And Bizet's 'The Pearl Fishers' are long left unexplained in the story of the same name where and other solitary man confronts change in old friends and what has remained the same and finally accepts he is content to be who he is, as content as he'll ever be. The title story is another atmospheric reflection on home and abroad. 'The New Spain' on the other hand is as sunny as it gets with the story of another prodigal's return to post Franco Barcelona and Majorca where she finds she still doesn't like her parents very much nor some of the changes they wrought but that some of what was good in the past is still there and welcomes her back. Finally, the is 'Silence' a story clearly from the universe of 'The Master', sexy and gently mocking.

Tòibìn's writing, as always, is supremely crafted and elegant, while appearing simple and spare. His eye for the telling detail or quirk and his gift to create atmosphere almost as if his stories were suffused with the light of the places they describe make these short stories into complete creations each. Whoever he writes about he does so with great astuteness but also great tenderness for both their strengths and their weaknesses. Compared to 'Mothers and Sons' this is a much more openly sexy collection of stories as well as a more openly gay one. Even if some of the strongest characters remain heterosexual women and some of the hotter scenes involve them. Stuff actually happens on page, so to speak, in five of the nine stories. Tòibìn here too proves himself a master craftsman, never once falling into the lewd or pornographic while being quite frankly sexy.

If you haven't read Colm Tòibìn yet, what are you waiting for?(less)

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Sep 28, 2011 Grady rated it 5 of 5 stars

The Power of Colm Tóibín's Prose

THE EMPTY ROOM is a priceless collection of short stories from the brilliant author Colm Tóibín. It could be easily said that once hooked on Tóibín's writing the bond is permanent. This exquisite collection is a series of indecisive moments in the lives of folk who are well into middle life, shackled between remembered emotion and the inevitable aging tranquility that is their future. He creates a panorama of characters about whom we come to know and with whom we...more The Power of Colm Tóibín's Prose

THE EMPTY ROOM is a priceless collection of short stories from the brilliant author Colm Tóibín. It could be easily said that once hooked on Tóibín's writing the bond is permanent. This exquisite collection is a series of indecisive moments in the lives of folk who are well into middle life, shackled between remembered emotion and the inevitable aging tranquility that is their future. He creates a panorama of characters about whom we come to know and with whom we empathize, but at the same time these created people are laid out on the near-necropsy postmortem table for us to touch and examine and step away.

The nine stories included in this volume include 'Silence', a story transplanted to another time in which a Lady Gregory, an abandoned widow who has lost her recent lover, has a peppery dinner conversation with Henry James. In 'The New Spain', 'exiles return to bury loved ones, and ruminate on what other past associates might be up to. A Leftist dissident from Franco's Spain comes back home to a cool reception at the family villa in Menorca.' 'The Pearl Fishers' is a "grim, almost plotless thriller with gay subplots" and "overwrought and graphically violent screenplays." Our hero is invited to have dinner with a married couple, a man named Donnacha and a woman named Grainne, both of whom he has known since they were at school together decades earlier. The two boys (as they were then) were lovers before Donnacha linked up with the fiery, strong-willed Grainne, a religious reformer who has gained some notoriety by insisting "that she and other like-minded lay people represented the true Catholic Church more than the bishops and priests."

Much of what we read in The Empty Family is Tóibín's apparent obsessive interest in 'the principal torments available to the educated, Left-leaning, upwardly mobile, male baby boomer in middle age. The men and women who brought us up, and bustled us off to the good schools they never got to attend, will weaken and die, and our professional success won't help them or us deal with that.' For this reader the most compelling story is the very genteel love story represented in 'The Street' - a tale of Pakistani immigrants in Barcelona who somehow survive the threat of being outsiders and in the case of Malik and Abdul discover their same sex needs and find some fulfillment despite the narrow confines of living in a hostile world.

Colm Tóibín is a Master Craftsman, a wordsmith without peer, and everything he touches radiates a magic that only he is capable of transforming ordinary lives into extraordinary experiences for the reader. This, then, is literary genius.

Grady Harp(less)

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Apr 27, 2011 Adam rated it 4 of 5 stars

The more Colm Toibin I read the more I marvel at his mastery of the English language. Sparse yet rich, the language allows me to identify with many of Colm's characters. This of course could be due to the fact that the author is also a gay man but the feeling of always being slightly different, removed from those around you is something that I think is common to many gay men.

'The Street' simply blew me away with honesty and was the highlight of the book. 'The New Spain' my least favourite. In t...more

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Mar 15, 2011 4cats rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is the first time I've read Colm Toibin, and it won't be the last. This collection of short stories is a wonderful addition to anyone's bookshelf. I am a fan of the short story especially when a writer is skilled at allowing the reader to enter into a character's world for a brief moment and garner so much about that person, and that is what Toibin has achieved with this collection.

Some of the stories are better than others, I loved One Minus One which deals with a son returning to Ireland...more

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Jan 23, 2011 Terzah rated it 4 of 5 stars

I love Colm Toibin's writing. It's so spot on much of the time that you wonder if there could possibly be any other way to say the things he says. I love the women he creates. They're so real, from the crusty to the geriatric to the young and the fierce and the selfish. Many of the stories in this collection didn't let me down. A big fan of his novel "Brooklyn", I was once again amazed at the reality of his characters and situations: the awkwardness of reconciling adolescent activities and attit...more

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Jan 22, 2011 Tyler rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: literature

In a hyper-connected world, where friends, family, and even people we hardly know are only a text, Skype, email, Poke, Tweet, Re-tweet, IM, or call away, there is something about willed isolation, the desire to remain cut-off and removed from the heartbeat of anything resembling a loving community that is all the more chilling.

Colm Toibin, in this collection of short fiction, has managed a masterful array of stories, and a collage of characters that unveil with melancholic ardor the pain, loss,...more In a hyper-connected world, where friends, family, and even people we hardly know are only a text, Skype, email, Poke, Tweet, Re-tweet, IM, or call away, there is something about willed isolation, the desire to remain cut-off and removed from the heartbeat of anything resembling a loving community that is all the more chilling.

Colm Toibin, in this collection of short fiction, has managed a masterful array of stories, and a collage of characters that unveil with melancholic ardor the pain, loss, and empty hearts of people who have refused, run away from, or been denied love. Love lingers in their lives like an open wound, borne from an encounter decades ago.

Toibin- like with "Brooklyn" and "The Master" - in these works of short fiction displays deft restraint. His prose is terse and powerful. His characters' pain is the simple product of a series of wrong turns- that combined and compounded into something more. Central to almost every character in these stories is a lack of reconciliation with the past. Toibin's characters are running- from pain, love lost, truth, loneliness, confusion, time.

With each passing decade, the onion adds layers. Toibin gives readers of "The Empty Family" first the mature, ripe onion- followed by a series of glimpses into its core. In this way, the structure of Toibin's stories mimic the rhythm and construction of memory. Nothing is more detailed than now. But the emotion of the past, we cannot escape. The impact of moments, whose importance only grow with age, become more clear, and sometimes painful, in the repeating now. The past emerges to the surface like the first, petite bubbles in a pot of stovetop water that is about to turn over into a violent boil.

Frances, in "Two Women", is in the twilight of her life and career. She is a woman "that did not allow herself to feel pain." Frances, on a trip for work to Ireland, is reminded of her 12-year love affair with a man named Luke. "Besides her career, nothing interested her now except her house and her own mind." But for Frances, like so many characters in these stories, the house and mind are not a place of growth and expansion, but rather of retreat. It is a place Frances goes to hide. She resigns from the vulnerability of love in the familiar and routine machinations of her work. Luke was a big decision in her life that she fumbled; and now it haunts her.

Through the pain and loss that Toibin orchestrates with the touch of a puppeteer in these stories, through the absence of love, we are given perhaps the most powerful testament of its presence. Love ceaselessly beckons through the void. "The Empty Family" unveils, in all its subtle splendors, this tug of war between the safeness and isolation of a life without love versus the allure and vulnerability of one where love is present. Toibin offers us a powerful portrait of the ruinous effects of a hardened heart on the soul; and in so doing, champions the importance of an open and ever mindful heart.
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Feb 06, 2012 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2012, spain-in-mind

With the exception of the title story, whose nameless first-person narrator's tortured elliptical reminiscences were too baffling to be affecting, the stories in this collection are terrific. With his characteristic understated prose and perfect pitch, Toibin examines themes of exile, loss, and regret. Most of the characters in these stories have made a choice to leave their place of origin (Ireland, Spain, Pakistan - in most of the stories Toibin is interested in exploring the regrets that such...more

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Mar 24, 2011 Kim G rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011

First of all, this collection is totally being nominated for the Bad Sex Writing awards. There has to be a rule about how many times you can use the word penis on a page, things get way too hilariously clinical otherwise.

That being said, this is a lovely collection by Mr. Tóibín. Uneven, yes, but when it's good, it's 5 stars good, and when it meanders a bit it's still well worth reading.

My favorites were Two Women (I love Tóibín's female characters, my god) and The Colour of Shadows, which is...more

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Feb 06, 2011 Teresa rated it 4 of 5 stars

I've given this 4 stars, instead of 5, because I liked his Mothers and Sons: Stories even more. And because one story in the middle, while just as well-written as the others, eluded me. As usual, his work is full of characters that live, and his stories are written in such a deceptively simple style that the endings hit you with a quiet devastation -- something that can make a story for me. And I don't think the 'devastation' is necessarily bleak, as the character is showing an accommodation to...more

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Jul 26, 2011 Ian Young added it · review of another edition

The Empty Family is Toibin’s second volume of short stories. The previous series (Mothers and Sons) focussed on one specific aspect of family relationships. The Mother-Son relationship features in this volume as well - however, most of these stories focus on broader aspects of what it means to exist in a family, or to exist without one. Toibin writes beautifully, and his books repay careful reading. He is reflective, and often somewhat downbeat. Small observations have great significance, and so...more

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Dec 07, 2012 Helen rated it 2 of 5 stars

I’m a bit ambivalent about this collection of short stories by Colm Toibin, and I can’t decide what to make of it.

All 9 stories share a mix of recurring common themes: a combination of pain, loss, loneliness or “separateness”, sadness, and regret. Essentially they are a portrayal of love, loss and longing, and all the attendant complexities.

Some of the stories are breath-taking and grip the reader totally – for example the first one in the book, which I had to read twice just to savour the perf...more

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Apr 24, 2011 Ally Armistead rated it 5 of 5 stars

I can't remember the last time I was blown away by a short story collection, but Colm Toibin's "Empty Family" left me breathless, envious, inspired, and overjoyed to have found a writer whose stories are about something other than the fumbling of adolescence.

The stories, set in Dublin, Barcelona, and America, all capture moments of difficult intimacy: the desire, pain, and loss between men and women, men and men, men and their mothers and grandmothers, and women and their families. In each, Toib...more

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Apr 11, 2011 Rachelle Urist rated it 4 of 5 stars

I love reading Colm Toibin. (His name is pronounced Column Toe-BEAN. Just learned that.) Reading anything by him is like being enveloped in velvet, or in the softest cashmere in the world. It's soft, warm, and comforting. This book's short stories are infused with a gay sensibility. After reading CT's BROOKLYN, I assumed he was heterosexual. Then I read THE MASTER, discovered CT's fascination with Henry James, and now see that he's also written a non-fiction study of the master. BROOKLYN is thou...more

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Oct 20, 2010 Teresa rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'm not an avid reader of short stories, they usually leave me unsatisfied, but I loved Brooklyn, Colm Toibin's award winning recent novel so I decided to try again. The Empty Family is a collection of nine short stories which are linked by the themes of exile, loneliness and family. Most of the protagonists find themselves in limbo-like situations, caught in a pivotal moment where the past and present collide, where home and belonging seem vague and elusive concepts.

All of the stories (whether...more

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Dec 09, 2012 Gaurav Sethi rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín is an intriguing selection of short stories about the desire for connections. One could argue that this is the plot for every major work of literature but Tóibín digs into this subject throughout this collection. If you've read any other Tóibín then you'll know that his other primary concerns are: motherhood & Ireland.

Many of these stories are about Irish immigrants that find themselves in other parts of the world and feel this pull to return back to their ho...more

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Mar 13, 2011 Julie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary-fiction, read-2011, shorts

Colm Tóibín has a breathtaking range, from the modern Irish voice in The Blackwater Lightship to Henry James's cultured and tortured 19th century tones in The Master to an immigrant naïf coming of age in 1950's Brooklyn. His writing is exquisite, resonant, and pure. He writes with incredible compassion for his characters, but allows them to fail of their own accord. He shows the reader the beauty of imperfection.

This latest collection of stories The Empty Family was a mixed bag for me. The theme...more Colm Tóibín has a breathtaking range, from the modern Irish voice in The Blackwater Lightship to Henry James's cultured and tortured 19th century tones in The Master to an immigrant naïf coming of age in 1950's Brooklyn. His writing is exquisite, resonant, and pure. He writes with incredible compassion for his characters, but allows them to fail of their own accord. He shows the reader the beauty of imperfection.

This latest collection of stories The Empty Family was a mixed bag for me. The theme of returning from or entering into exile appears in most of the stories. The characters are seeking redemption or facing rejection as they return to familiar places or attempt to settle into new lands. Yet, as someone who has moved hither and yon, across borders and languages, I felt oddly distanced by some of Tóibín's stories, including those that seemed the most personal.

Most touching were The Colour of Shadows, where a middle-aged man returns to his small Irish hometown to place his aunt in managed care; Two Women, which features a famous, aging set designer who returns to Ireland after nearly a lifetime away and confronts the ghosts of a past love (pages I will reread in months to come as an example of a perfectly rendered short story); Silence for which Tóibín again assumes the narrative voice of a 19th century writer; and One Minus One, where the main character relives the days before his mother's funeral. Confronting one's mortality in the face of aging relatives and wistfully remembered love affairs resonate deeply in Tóibín's tender prose.

A few stories, including the long Barcelona, 1975 and the longer The Street were perfectly written and captured my attention, but not my heart. These featured, at times, careless love, passionless sex, obsession, and the ugliest of human behavior that elicited neither sympathy nor outrage, just exasperation and contempt.

Tóibín is one of my favorite writers. He writes humanity with such clarity; man, woman, gay, straight, modern and of the ages- he speaks their Babel of languages as well as any native. He seems to embrace life with ferocity, but also holds Death closer than arm distance, accepting its inevitability with equal passion. How very Irish of him.
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Feb 08, 2011 Tress Huntley rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011-reading-list

What I enjoy about Colm Toibin's writing style is its simultaneous urgency and quietness. This effect was much more powerful in his novel Brooklyn, and drew me to want to read more of his writing. The Empty Family is a collection of short stories set in modern day Ireland, 1970s Spain and ninteenth Century England. Each story focuses on the emotional truth of its central character, a truth that is private and deeply held. Toibin has an almost magical way of drawing out these emotional truths whi...more What I enjoy about Colm Toibin's writing style is its simultaneous urgency and quietness. This effect was much more powerful in his novel Brooklyn, and drew me to want to read more of his writing. The Empty Family is a collection of short stories set in modern day Ireland, 1970s Spain and ninteenth Century England. Each story focuses on the emotional truth of its central character, a truth that is private and deeply held. Toibin has an almost magical way of drawing out these emotional truths while not exploiting his characters or making caricatures of them. For instance, the first story in the book, "Silence", which is set in the late 1800s, is about a widow who had been married to a much older man of some political clout and who now finds herself in demand at dinner parties as something of a decoration:

"She had liked being married; she had enjoyed being noticed as the young wife of an old man, had known the effect her quiet gaze could have on friends of her husband's who thought she might be dull because she was not pretty. She had let them know, carefully, tactfully, keeping her voice low, that she was someone on whom nothing was lost. She had read all the latest books and she chose her words slowly when she came to discuss them. She did not want to appear clever. She made sure that she was silent without seeming shy, polite and reserved without seeming intimidated. She had no natural grace and she made up for this by having no empty opinions. She took the view that it was a mistake for a woman with her looks ever to show her teeth. In any case, she disliked laughter and preferred to smile using her eyes."

I find the writing here to be quite elegant and well paced. This is probably my favorite story in the book as well, as the widow finds herself seated next to Henry James one night. She tells him a story from her own life, but carefully changes certain details so as to disguise herself in it and to protect a rather scandalous thing she has done from being found out. It was a very interesting twist in an otherwise quiet story.

Unfortunately, I found myself growing progressively disenchanted with Toibin with every story. While his writing held up, the subject matter became increasingly pornographic. The majority of the stories' protagonists were gay men; each story after about the first two seemed to delve a little further into the details of the men's sexual encounters, and really, it became exploitative. It seemed like a bait and switch to me. The reading experience for the first quarter of the book was completely divorced from the experience of the rest of it. This actually seems to happen a lot with short story collections, and every time I finish one I wonder why I keep trying them. (less)

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Oct 17, 2011 Shannon rated it 2 of 5 stars

I read one Toibin novel, which I loved (The Master) and one volume of short stories which I liked (Mothers and Sons). This volume of short stories about alienation amongst family members was, on the whole, disappointing. The few gems were Silence, The Pearl Fishers, and The Colour of Shadows. While I read one reviewer who called the sex scenes (which are many) tender, I found them more mechanical, repetitive, and boring. There are only so many ways to talk about lubrication, penentration, and th...more

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Jul 06, 2012 Victor Carson rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-foreign

Without realizing it, I bought this book twice, once as an audiobook and once as a Kindle book. Although the audiobook was excellently produced, I preferred reading the short stories of The Empty Family as text, so that I could savor and ponder each sentence. The majority of the stories involve homoerotic sexual love, but each conveys a deep understanding of the characters. I especially liked the story of a man raised by his aunt (his deceased father's sister.) The aunt never lets his mother ree...more

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Dec 24, 2010 Jennifer rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010, short-stories

When comparing novels to short stories, a friend of mine recently told me that she doesn't need all the detail and story line of a novel. She just wants to meet different characters, like chatting with someone on a train ride where you get just a glimpse into their life on that day. I've never been a good short story reader - I'm always looking for the story arc, wondering what the points was, and why there was no obvious resolution. So now I'm trying to approach them differently. It's hard work...more

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About Colm Tóibín

(From the authors website - http://www.colmtoibin.com/content/bio... )
"Colm Toibin was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in 1955. He studied at University College Dublin and lived in Barcelona between 1975 and 1978. Out of his experience in Barcelona be produced two books, the novel ‘The South’ (shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and winner of the Irish Times/ Aer Lingus First Fiction...more (From the authors website - http://www.colmtoibin.com/content/bio... )
"Colm Toibin was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in 1955. He studied at University College Dublin and lived in Barcelona between 1975 and 1978. Out of his experience in Barcelona be produced two books, the novel ‘The South’ (shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and winner of the Irish Times/ Aer Lingus First Fiction Award) and ‘Homage to Barcelona’, both published in 1990. When he returned to Ireland in 1978 he worked as a journalist for ‘In Dublin’, ‘Hibernia’ and ‘The Sunday Tribune’, becoming features editor of ‘In Dublin’ in 1981 and editor of Magill, Ireland’s current affairs magazine, in 1982. He left Magill in 1985 and travelled in Africa and South America. His journalism from the 1980s was collected in ‘The Trial of the Generals’ (1990). His other work as a journalist and travel writer includes ‘Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border’ (1987) and ‘The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe’ (1994). His other novels are: ‘The Heather Blazing (1992, winner of the Encore Award); ‘The Story of the Night’ (1996, winner of the Ferro-Grumley Prize); ‘The Blackwater Lightship’ (1999, shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Prize and the Booker Prize and made into a film starring Angela Lansbury); ‘The Master’ (2004, winner of the Dublin IMPAC Prize; the Prix du Meilleur Livre; the LA Times Novel of the Year; and shortlisted for the Booker Prize); ‘Brooklyn’ (2009, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year). His short story collections are ‘Mothers and Sons’ (2006, winner of the Edge Hill Prize) and ‘The Empty Family (2010). His play ‘Beauty in a Broken Place’ was performed at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin in 2004. His other books include: ‘The Modern Library: the 200 Best Novels Since 1950’ (with Carmen Callil); ‘Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush’ (2002); ‘Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar’ (2002) and ‘All a Novelist Needs: Essays on Henry James’ (2010). He has edited ‘The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction’. His work has been translated into thirty languages. In 2008, a book of essays on his work ‘Reading Colm Toibin’, edited by Paul Delaney, was published. He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Ulster and from University College Dublin. He is a regular contributor to the Dublin Review, the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. In 2006 he was appointed to the Arts Council in Ireland. He has twice been Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University and also been a visiting writer at the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently Leonard Milberg Lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton University.

Colm Toibin’s collection of stories ‘The Empty Family’ will be published in the UK in October 2010 and in the US and Canada in January 2011. His collection of essays on Henry James, ‘All a Novelist Needs’ will be published in November 2010."(less)

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Quotes from The Empty Family: Stories

“She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him.” — 4 people liked it

“I dreamed of setting it up out here in front of where I am sitting now, on the tripod that I would have ordered too, and starting, taking my time, to focus on a curling line of water, a piece of the world indifferent to the fact that there is language, that there are names to describe things, and grammar and verbs. My eye, solitary, filled with its own history, is desperate to evade, erase, forget; it is watching now, watching fiercely, like a scientist looking for a cure, deciding for some days to forget about words, to know at last that the words for colours, the blue-grey-green of the sea, the whiteness of the waves, will not work against thefullness of watching the rich chaos they yield and carry.” — 2 people liked it

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