Volume 54, Number 3 · March 1, 2007
Gorgeously Minimal
By Jennifer Schuessler
Mothers and Sons: Stories
by Colm Tóibìn
Scribner, 271 pp., $24.00
Since the publication of his first novel, The South (1990), Colm Tóibìn has established himself as a writer with an unusual grasp of lives lived in the shadow of history, of both the national and familial variety. What his fictions tend to lack in hopeful endings and other easy consolations, they make up for in keen empathy, gorgeous prose, and a certain recurring wanderlust. Tóibìn is a rooted cosmopolitan, ranging widely in period and geography while generally wearing his Irishness—sometimes subtly, and always unsentimentally—on his sleeve.
Review, 1687 words
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