| title: Brooklyn by: Tóibín, Colm published: 2015 read: 2024-05 preview | |
Tóibín has long been on my wish list, after reading an interview with him in the FT. And now that his new novel Long Island is published (it’s called the long-awaited sequel to Brooklyn), I decided to… read Brooklyn.
Silly me, I did not realise I’d seen the movie (which I sort-of liked). Perhaps all the better, or else I would never have purchased this book.
But let me not get ahead of myself. Set in the early 1950s, the story follows Eilis Lacey, a young woman from a small town in Ireland, as she emigrates to Brooklyn, New York. She gets a job there, through the help of a priest:
In Bartocci’s, she had to clock in, which was easy, and then go to her locker in the women’s room downstairs and change into the blue uniform that girls on the shop floor had to wear. She was there most mornings before most of the other girls arrived. Some of them often did not appear until the last second. Miss Fortini, who was the supervisor, disapproved of this, Eilis knew.
And also makes sure she gets an education. Eilis excels in everything she does:
She sat until suppertime going through the introduction, no wiser at the end as to what the “jurisprudence” mentioned at the beginning might be. That evening at supper, when she had noticed that neither Miss McAdam nor Sheila Heffernan was still speaking to her, Eilis thought of asking Patty and Diana if she could go to the dance with them the following night, or meet them before it somewhere.
Naturally, a main topic is love. Eilis’s relationships are central to the story, particularly her bond with her family back in Ireland and her romance with the Italian boy Tony. And when she travels to Ireland to support her mother after her sister died, Eilis’s truthfulness to Tony wavers. And thus ends the book: which of her two lovers will she stay with?
An acclaimed novel. Tóibín tells a beautiful story with authenticity and emotional honesty, and a lot of attention to detail which make the characters live.
But it didn’t touch me.