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It is Enniscorthy in the southeast of Ireland in the early 1950s. Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find work at home. Thus when a job is offered in America, it is clear to everyone that she must go. Leaving her family and country, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn, and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady’s intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation.
Slowly, however, the pain of parting is buried beneath the rhythms of her new life — until she begins to realize that she has found a sort of happiness. As she falls in love, news comes from home that forces her back to Enniscorthy, not to the constrictions of her old life, but to new possibilities which conflict deeply with the life she has left behind in Brooklyn.
In the quiet character of Eilis Lacey, Colm Tóibín has created one of fiction’s most memorable heroines and in Brooklyn, a luminous novel of devastating power. Tóibín demonstrates once again his astonishing range and that he is a true master of nuanced prose, emotional depth, and narrative virtuosity.
Enniscorthy is a real town (today's population: about 3,700), located on the River Slaney, dominated by St. Aidan's Cathedral. It's the homeplace of the fine Irish novelist Colm Toíbín and has inspired much of his fiction. But in his previous novel, The Master (2004), Toíbín gave us, to high critical applause, a portrait of Henry James and lived imaginatively in London, Paris, Rome, and Florence. In Brooklyn, he returns to Enniscorthy.
Toíbín's main character is a young woman named Eilis Lacey. She is probably 18, jobless when the story begins, studying accounting, living with her sister Rose, who is 30, and their mother. The mother is never named, appearing in the first and last acts of the story as "her mother." Eilis's three brothers have gone to England to work. Her father is dead. Rose is everything that Eilis is not: beautiful, confident, successful by the town's standards, a fixture at the local golf club on warm summer evenings and weekends. Her job supports Eilis and her mother, as do sporadic remittances from the three brothers.
Early on, Eilis is offered a Sunday job at a food shop run by a Miss Kelly. She accepts the offer, but her mother is not pleased. "That Miss Kelly," her mother said, "is as bad as her mother, and I heard from someone who worked there that that woman is evil incarnate."
In small towns, someone is always hearing from someone, particularly if the news is nasty. As long ago as 1918, an Irish writer named Brinsley MacNamara published a portrait of small-town vindictiveness called The Valley of the Squinting Windows and established a genre. In Toíbín's Enniscorthy, the windows still squint. Sexuality is rigidly policed. Even at a weekly dance, where young women arrive to be inspected by young men, there's a sense of a prevailing script. Eilis goes with a girlfriend, Nancy, and they discuss tactics in a diffident way. Nancy is appalled, noting the men on the far side of the room. She says, "They look like they are at a cattle mart." But George, the young man Nancy desires, finally asks her to dance. Eilis leaves alone.
A few days later Rose announces that a Father Flood, who was originally from Enniscorthy and was on his first trip home since before World War Two, was coming for tea. He had known the father of Eilis and Rose; their mother never heard of him, she says. But he comes for tea anyway. And then suggests that Eilis should try America. He could arrange the papers, a ticket, a job in Brooklyn, even a place to stay. "Parts of Brooklyn," the priest explains, "are just like Ireland. They're full of Irish." Her mother is silent. The usually voluble Rose offers no comment. Eilis understands what is being thought, but not said.
And then it occurred to her that she was already feeling that she would need to remember this room, her sister, this scene, as though from a distance. In the silence that had lingered, she realized, it had somehow been tacitly arranged that Eilis would go to America.
The prospect fills her with anxiety.
Until now, Eilis had always presumed that she would live in the town, all her life, as her mother had done, knowing everyone, having the same friends and neighbours, the same routines in the same streets...Now, she felt that she was being singled out for something for which she was not in any way prepared, and this, despite the fear it carried with it, gave her a feeling, or more a set of feelings, she thought she might experience in the days before her wedding...
But she goes to America, as if the journey had been decided by others. It has. The trip across in a third-class cabin is vividly described, full of vomiting, bleariness, anxiety. This is not mere seasickness; it's the emotional and physical equivalent of both childbirth and miscarriage, full of fear of the unknown. The gut-churning experience of immigrant homesickness has seldom been captured with such power. Eilis is helped by a tough, valiant older woman, who cracks open the locked bathroom with a nail file and starts cleaning the mess, all the while aching for a cigarette. She even helps Eilis on the morning of arrival, applying makeup, adjusting her clothes. Father Flood is waiting. Then it's into Brooklyn.
The scene on the ship is not typical of Toíbín's writing. He has said in interviews that he's a believer in Ernest Hemingway's dictum that "the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water." So he writes sparely, demanding careful reading; often the deepest emotions are present in what is not said. This works very well with a passive character like Eilis, who never jumps into conversations, and who is not filled with large romantic longings she hopes will be realized in her Brooklyn exile. In Brooklyn, she has a full-time job. She enrolls at Brooklyn College to finish her accounting studies at night. She has a room in a boardinghouse run by another Irish woman who has no husband on the premises. The other boarders are all young women, most of them Irish too. Eilis accepts the routines of her Brooklyn life and does not protest against the tedium.
She doesn't seem to see much. I was 16 in that Brooklyn, but I don't recognize it in this novel. It's not clear where she lives, but it's near State Street, within walking distance of the shopping district along Fulton Street, where she works in a clothing store. It's probably what the real estate people now call Cobble Hill. My aunt Rose lived in Tompkins Place in Cobble Hill and took in male Irish boarders. There were boardinghouses, almost all for men, in other neighborhoods too. And many neighborhoods, including mine (now named the South Slope), resembled urban hamlets. They were still named for parishes (Holy Name, Immaculate Heart, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, etc.), and some of the people were as trapped in their limited ways as they might have been in Enniscorthy. The young men at least had the Army or Navy to break the patterns, and the G.I. Bill would enable many of them to leave forever. The women didn't have such options.
But Eilis seems to lack curiosity beyond her own essential places, and that is probably Toíbín's intention. The crude version: you can take the girl out of Enniscorthy, but you can't take Enniscorthy out of the girl. Brooklyn in those years was home to almost three million people, bound together by a daily newspaper called the Brooklyn Eagle, the subway system, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the Brooklyn Democratic machine. The Korean War was raging, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard employed 70,000 men in three shifts. You'd know none of this from Eilis. Later in the novel, a young, blond Italian man named Tony does take her to Ebbets Field, and she loves his passion for baseball, our secular religion, but she hasn't a clue about the game.
She is also generally immune to the beauties of Brooklyn: the slanting Edward Hopper light, the handsome brownstones, the low sky with its spectacular sunsets, the ridge across Prospect Park, the views of the harbor and the Manhattan skyline beyond (in her part of Brooklyn, most men were engaged in the commerce of the harbor, as longshoremen, tugboat captains, truck drivers carting waterborne goods to the markets). She does make it to Coney Island with Tony, and there the stifled erotic begins to stir. But the rest of Brooklyn remains a blank.
Almost certainly this blankness is purposeful, for in his journalism and travel writing Toíbín has a fine sense of place. His blank spaces work here like certain kinds of music. They urge us to fill them in with what we know, or remember. After The Master, which is muscular and full of large, complex feelings, this is chamber music. It is also a love story, told in small incremental moments. In the third act, after the romance with Tony turns more serious, Eilis is called back to Enniscorthy when her sister suddenly dies. She is now bound to Tony, even marries him in a civil ceremony, and promises to return. Then slowly, back in the small town, she is tempted never to return to America. The pull of the familiar, the place with limits and certainties, begins to work it powers on her. A haughty young man from that first dance is attracted to her. She is attracted to him. In the eyes of the Church, after all, a civil ceremony is meaningless.
The novel turns on her decision, made by herself and for herself. Two countries, and two men, and two possible lives. She agonizes, she weeps. But when she decides at last, this reader uttered a melancholy cheer. For Eilis Lacey, and for Colm Toíbín. --Pete Hamill
Pete Hamill is the author of North River, Forever, Downtown, A Drinking Life, and many other works of fiction and nonfiction.
"When I went down to get my groceries, people stopped their car and got out of them and waved at me and looked at me as though I was an athlete and shouted at me, ‘Come on, you can do it. You can do it,' " Tóibín said on NPR's All Things Considered in 2000. "And I basked in the sunshine of Irish approval and love for about three weeks.... You know, sort of -- I keep wondering when this, you know, backlash or something is going to happen, but I'm afraid it isn't going to happen. I'm afraid the country has changed, and being a writer there is actually quite a nice thing these days."
In fiction, travelogues, essays, and newspaper columns, Tóibín has established himself as a writer who can connect both the political and the personal to a sense of place. Though his work has often been informed by the political history of Ireland, he has also drawn on his travels to places like Spain and Argentina to create settings for his work.
And, even though his current home of Dublin has never made an appearance in any of his fiction, the environs of his youth -- County Wexford -- have been prominent.
The Washington Post, in a 2000 review of The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction, which Tóibín edited, called him a "journalist and critic of influence, a brilliant novelist steadily harvesting his own postage-stamp piece of Wexford as diligently as Faulkner worked Mississippi."
"Colm Tóibín has established himself as a major and distinctive voice in contemporary Irish fiction," the Dictionary of Literary Biography has noted. "While his work makes much of the complex associations between people and place, he eschews easy stereotypes of Irishness in favor of the often-contradictory impulses that pull on contemporary lives.
Tóibín was born into a family that had a long history in his hometown. His father, who died when Tóibín was 12, was a local schoolteacher, and his grandfather was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and was twice imprisoned by British authorities for civil disobedience against British rule.
Tóibín explored this history as a writer, following four years teaching English in Barcelona, Spain. He began as a features editor but moved to editing a current affairs magazine and joined the Sunday Independent in Dublin in 1985 as a columnist. As an author, he started by writing travelogues on Ireland and Spain before publishing his first novel in 1990. The South, which draws on Ireland's Catholic-Protestant tensions as well as Tóibín's life in Spain, is about an Irish woman who leaves her husband and son and moves to Spain, falls in love with a political artist, and returns to Ireland as an artist herself, once her son is grown.
This novel would establish Tóibín's reputation as a writer with a keen sensibility for characterization ("His novels have been noted for their deft characterizations, particularly of women, as evidenced by the strong female protagonist in The South," noted Contemporary Literary Criticism), but it wasn't until later novels such as The Story of the Night and The Blackwater Lightship that readers would realize his insight into gay characters as well.
"This is not a simple, upbeat story about gay liberation or political activism," Merle Rubin wrote in The Christian Science Monitor in 1997. "Powerfully imagined and tautly written, it is a subtly shaded portrait of a country in transition, a culture beginning to reflect important political changes, and a man coming to a new understanding of himself."
David Bahr, writing in The Advocate in 2000, predicted that The Blackwater Lightship -- now that it had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize -- would finally make Tóibín known outside his magazine's primary readership: "His latest...should finally prove to straight American readers what many gay people have long known: that Tóibín is one of the more honest and subtly powerful novelists publishing today.... Perceptive and moving, The Blackwater Lightship again reveals Tóibín to be the kind of restrained, quiet writer whose prose feels as natural as breathing. His poetic narrative is so understated that its profound lyricism often takes you by surprise, infusing a potentially familiar tale with vibrant new life."
Mixing fiction and biography in 2004, Tóibín penned a novel inspired by the life of Henry James. "Ambitious and gracefully plotted," said the New Statesman. In the pages of London's Observer, a previous Tóibín skeptic confessed he had been swayed. "There's little in Colm Tóibín's previous work, to some of which this reviewer has been immune or even mildly allergic, to prepare for the startling excellence of his new novel," Adam Mars Jones wrote, "The Master is a portrait of Henry James that has the depth and finish of great sculpture."
Moving fully into nonfiction, Tóibín continued to impress.
The New Statesman observed that The Irish Famine: A Documentary was "no arid survey of the historiography of the famine, but a stimulating quest, prompted by a personal and vocational curiosity. And Joseph Olshan, writing in Entertainment Weekly in 1995, awarded Tóibín's The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe an A, not only for its ability to dissect the Church's close relationship with European politics and social order. "[W]hat Tóibín comes back to is the transcendent power of Catholic ritual," Olshan writes. "Indeed, in a very moving centerpiece, Tóibín describes a therapy session during which he relives his father's death and comes to realize that his most profound wish is to bless his deceased parent with the sign of the cross. This is an extraordinary document."
But it may always be the intensely personal moments in his fiction that will always stand out. Susan Salter Reynolds noted as much in the Los Angeles Times in 2000. "There is little reconciliation in Colm Tóibín's novels; moments in which the stage is set for it usually pass," she wrote. "His novels build to these moments, fraught with potential, from which the air goes out with a nasty little hiss, and a new chapter, full of reasons not to live, begins.... It's good to read Tóibín's honest novels, in which human beings fail to forgive, fail to understand. We spend so much of our lives in the dark, shouldn't literature face this as squarely as we must?"
He counts two books by James Baldwin -- Giovanni's Room and Go Tell It on the Mountain -- as major influences on his work.
Tóibín covered the downfall of the military dictatorship in Argentina in 1985.
He joined such authors as Roddy Doyle in the 1997 novel Finbar's Hotel, in which each of the seven authors wrote individual chapters set in the same 24-hour period at a fading hotel.
Eilis Lacey, sitting at the window of the upstairs living room in the house on Friary Street, noticed her sister walking briskly from work. She watched Rose crossing the street from sunlight into shade, carrying the new leather handbag that she had bought in Clerys in Dublin in the sale. Rose was wearing a cream-coloured cardigan over her shoulders. Her golf clubs were in the hall; in a few minutes, Eilis knew, someone would call for her and her sister would not return until the summer evening had faded.
Eilis’s bookkeeping classes were almost ended now; she had a manual on her lap about systems of accounting, and on the table behind her was a ledger where she had entered, as her homework, on the debit and credit sides, the daily business of a company whose details she had taken down in notes in the Vocational School the week before.
As soon as she heard the front door open, Eilis went downstairs. Rose, in the hall, was holding her pocket mirror in front of her face. She was studying herself closely as she applied lipstick and eye make-up before glancing at her overall appearance in the large hall mirror, settling her hair. Eilis looked on silently as her sister moistened her lips and then checked herself one more time in the pocket mirror before putting it away.
Their mother came from the kitchen to the hall.
“You look lovely, Rose,” she said. “You’ll be the belle of the golf club.”
“I’m starving,” Rose said, “but I’ve no time to eat.”
“I’ll make a special tea for you later,” her mother said. “Eilis and myself are going to have our tea now.”
Rose reached into her handbag and took out her purse. She placed a one-shilling piece on the hallstand. “That’s in case you want to go to the pictures,” she said to Eilis.
“And what about me?” her mother asked.
“She’ll tell you the story when she gets home,” Rose replied.
“That’s a nice thing to say!” her mother said.
All three laughed as they heard a car stop outside the door and beep its horn. Rose picked up her golf clubs and was gone.
Later, as her mother washed the dishes and Eilis dried them, another knock came to the door. When Eilis answered it, she found a girl whom she recognized from Kelly’s grocery shop beside the cathedral.
“Miss Kelly sent me with a message for you,” the girl said. “She wants to see you.”
“Does she?” Eilis asked. “And did she say what it was about?”
“No. You’re just to call up there tonight.”
“But why does she want to see me?”
“God, I don’t know, miss. I didn’t ask her. Do you want me to go back and ask her?”
“No, it’s all right. But are you sure the message is for me?”
“I am, miss. She says you are to call in on her.”
Since she had decided in any case to go to the pictures some other evening, and being tired of her ledger, Eilis changed her dress and put on a cardigan and left the house. She walked along Friary Street and Rafter Street into the Market Square and then up the hill to the cathedral. Miss Kelly’s shop was closed, so Eilis knocked on the side door, which led to the upstairs part where she knew Miss Kelly lived. The door was answered by the young girl who had come to the house earlier, who told her to wait in the hall.
Eilis could hear voices and movement on the floor above and then the young girl came down and said that Miss Kelly would be with her before long.
She knew Miss Kelly by sight, but her mother did not deal in her shop as it was too expensive. Also, she believed that her mother did not like Miss Kelly, although she could think of no reason for this. It was said that Miss Kelly sold the best ham in the town and the best creamery butter and the freshest of everything including cream, but Eilis did not think she had ever been in the shop, merely glanced into the interior as she passed and noticed Miss Kelly at the counter.
Miss Kelly slowly came down the stairs into the hallway and turned on a light.
“Now,” she said, and repeated it as though it were a greeting. She did not smile.
Eilis was about to explain that she had been sent for, and to ask politely if this was the right time to come, but Miss Kelly’s way of looking her up and down made her decide to say nothing. Because of Miss Kelly’s manner, Eilis wondered if she had been offended by someone in the town and had mistaken her for that person.
“Here you are, then,” Miss Kelly said.
Eilis noticed a number of black umbrellas resting against the hallstand.
“I hear you have no job at all but a great head for figures.”
“Is that right?”
“Oh, the whole town, anyone who is anyone, comes into the shop and I hear everything.”
Eilis wondered if this was a reference to her own mother’s consistent dealing in another grocery shop, but she was not sure. Miss Kelly’s thick glasses made the expression on her face difficult to read.
“And we are worked off our feet every Sunday here. Sure, there’s nothing else open. And we get all sorts, good, bad and indifferent. And, as a rule, I open after seven mass, and between the end of nine o’clock mass until eleven mass is well over, there isn’t room to move in this shop. I have Mary here to help, but she’s slow enough at the best of times, so I was on the lookout for someone sharp, someone who would know people and give the right change. But only on Sundays, mind. The rest of the week we can manage ourselves. And you were recommended. I made inquiries about you and it would be seven and six a week, it might help your mother a bit.”
Miss Kelly spoke, Eilis thought, as though she were describing a slight done to her, closing her mouth tightly between each phrase.
“So that’s all I have to say now. You can start on Sunday, but come in tomorrow and learn off all the prices and we’ll show you how to use the scales and the slicer. You’ll have to tie your hair back and get a good shop coat in Dan Bolger’s or Burke O’Leary’s.”
Eilis was already saving this conversation for her mother and Rose; she wished she could think of something smart to say to Miss Kelly without being openly rude. Instead, she remained silent.
“Well?” Miss Kelly asked.
Eilis realized that she could not turn down the offer. It would be better than nothing and, at the moment, she had nothing.
“Oh, yes, Miss Kelly,” she said. “I’ll start whenever you like.”
“And on Sunday you can go to seven o’clock mass. That’s what we do, and we open when it’s over.”
“That’s lovely,” Eilis said.
“So, come in tomorrow, then. And if I’m busy I’ll send you home, or you can fill bags of sugar while you wait, but if I’m not busy, I’ll show you all the ropes.”
“Thank you, Miss Kelly,” Eilis said.
“Your mother’ll be pleased that you have something. And your sister,” Miss Kelly said. “I hear she’s great at the golf. So go home now like a good girl. You can let yourself out.”
Miss Kelly turned and began to walk slowly up the stairs. Eilis knew as she made her way home that her mother would indeed be happy that she had found some way of making money of her own, but that Rose would think working behind the counter of a grocery shop was not good enough for her. She wondered if Rose would say this to her directly.
1. How would you describe Eilis’ family in terms of their feelings for each other and the ways they communicate?
2. Miss Kelly notes disapprovingly to Eilis that some people come into her shop on a Sunday to buy things, such as soap or toothpaste, that they should have bought during the week. Unspoken, because Miss Kelly and Eilis both understand it, is the Catholic belief that only necessary foods should be bought on Sunday. The Catholicism of all the main characters in the book is so taken for granted that very little is made of it, at least overtly. And yet it determines the characters’ most central values and beliefs. Give some examples of this.
3. Particularly at the beginning of the novel, some crucial scenes are not written. We never see the scene, for example, where Eilis and her family decide that she will go to America. We never see her farewell to her mother, except in a sentence recalled later. Why would Colm Toibin omit these scenes? Do these exclusions work for you? Do they suit – and reflect – the Lacey family, or the society as a whole?
4. The two societies depicted in the novel, mid-century Brooklyn and Enniscorthy, are quite stratified as to class. What are some examples of this? How does Eilis react to the class divisions?
5. Miss Fortini tells Eilis that Broadway is changing and Bartocci’s, the store they work for, must change with it. Post-war America was indeed a time of great social ferment. What are some of the ways the society is evolving, as we encounter them through Eilis’ experience?
6. During a clamorous sale at Bartocci’s, Eilis remembers a scene from home: "she thought in a flash of an early evening in October walking with her mother down by the prom in Enniscorthy, the Slaney River glassy and full, and the smell of leaves burning from somewhere close by, and the daylight going slowly and gently." Discuss this as a piece of descriptive writing, and its function in this particular scene. How would you describe Toibin’s chosen style for this book and how it reflects the subject matter?
7. Toibin’s last book, The Master, centred on the novelist Henry James. In Brooklyn, he has chosen a very different central character, a young woman with a gift for bookkeeping and very little life experience. What are some of the techniques he uses to authentically portray this female character?
8. Brooklyn naturally strikes Eilis as very different from Enniscorthy. But there is much continuity, as well as discontinuity, between the two places. Discuss some of the similarities (which Eilis usually takes for granted) and differences she finds.
9. What do you make of the scene where Miss Fiorito helps Eilis choose a bathing suit? How does it contribute to the novel as a whole?
10. Most good novels contain a mixture of plot, character portrayal and social observation. Some are largely plot-driven, others focus predominantly on the characters or the society in general. In which category does Brooklyn fall?
11. By far the largest question in the book is the motivation of Eilis. Describe her character, and her occasional ambivalence. Why do you think, after having accepted Tony’s proposal, she seems to change her allegiance with relative speed once she arrives in Ireland? Does the ease with which she gets involved with Jim surprise you? What do you think Toibin is saying about the conflict between duty and the human heart?
12. At the start of the book, Rose is charismatic, while Eilis is less so. But once Eilis leaves for America, she begins to act more like her sister, becoming more assertive and independent. Once she returns to Ireland after Rose’s death, her mother wants her to wear Rose’s clothing, to live with her as Rose did. Eilis even begins to work for Rose’s old company. There are continuing references to reality, shadows and ghosts in the novel, and Eilis feels that she is becoming Rose’s ghost. Discuss the relationship between the sisters, Mrs. Lacey’s expectations about Eilis, and Eilis’ reaction to those expectations.
13. Eilis’ mother is enigmatic in some ways. How does she strike you in the first part of the book, before Eilis leaves? Does she show a different side of herself, after Eilis returns to Ireland? How much do you think she knows about Eilis and Tony? How do you interpret her response to Eilis’s final decision?
14. Even before the reader discovers that Miss Kelly and Mrs. Kehoe are related, it’s noticeable that they have some traits in common. What are they? Could they possibly derive from something larger than the family connection?
15. Who is a better match for Eilis, Tony or Jim? Why?
16. What do you think would have happened if Miss Kelly had never summoned Eilis to her apartment? Re-imagine another ending for the novel.
MJinPA
Posted May 5, 2010
This Colm Toibin novel is one of the best books I have ever read. I love the delicate, thoughtful prose. The dialogue - such a hard thing for most writers to pull off - feels very real, too, as does the depiction of the immigrant experience. Slowly, patiently, and very deliberately, Toibin drew me in by narrating from protagonist Eilis' point of view and even reviewing previously-described events from Eilis' perspective. I was lulled into that state you may associate with a good movie: as you become attached to the characters, your stake in a particular sort of ending increases. And herein lies Toibin's skill: he drew me in *twice* -- tricked me with no trickery -- such that his quietly-worded ending delivered me an indescribably powerful punch. Unbelievable.
4 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.This is a simple and gentle story about a young woman's immigration to New York from Ireland in the years after WWII. Much of the novel contains her personal thoughts and her analyzing her future and decisions and life in general. It has an easy pace with lots of descriptive elements and a vast array of characters.
I really wanted to love this book, but it just seemed oversimplified. I think virtually anyone could have thought up the plot if they were given the basic elements (girl alone in big city, first real job, meeting new people, family crisis). In fact, at one point it felt like an After School Special.
While Toibin depicts the female brain very well in some areas, there are other things that don't ring true. For example, other than her work and classes, the main character seems to have no curiousity about the world in general, or about the exciting new country she has come to. In subjects such as racism and the Holocaust, not only does she know nothing but she has no interest in learning more. And while we hear much of her thoughts, some subjects she doesn't even visit mentally: when her female boss makes a sexual pass at her, she feels uncomfortable but never ponders it again. Yet she ponders so much more trivial stuff all the time throughout the book (what to wear or where to eat)
.
Additionally, while there are some tragic events, overall there doesn't seem to be enough conflict to make the story interesting. All the other characters are almost too good to be true, some crusty or cranky but all of them (excepting Miss Kelly) are big hearted and generous. Money is never really an issue, and things go amazingly smooth for such a huge life change. Again, that seems incredibly unrealistic. And the strange behavior of her fiance's moodiness, her mother's unpleasantness, and her landlady's suspicions are never really explored.
I intend to read more of his work (I have ordered the Blackwater Lightship) and I hope things become a bit more complex and realistic.
4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.CelticReader
Posted June 5, 2010
I enjoyed "Brooklyn" a great deal. The character of Eilis was complex in personality; the story was well-written and it drew me in. The ending was not quite what I expected (a good thing!) The cultural issues of post-WWII Ireland and the US rang true as well. A lovely read!
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.BennNB
Posted April 25, 2010
Brooklyn is a quietly gripping story of a young woman finding her way through the challenges to her identity brought by an unchosen immigration from Ireland. Loss, uncertainty, the personal task of building a meaningful life in unfamiliar circumstances are managed with little guidance beyond her personal reflection - portrayed elegantly and believably by Toibin. The author's compassion for all of the characters gives this personal tale a sense of privileged peeking into the rich interior life of people who worked to live a life they themselves could respect.
Also, Toibin crafted the story such that surprise can catch you as you look back at Ireland from the cold streets of Brooklyn.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.LorraineWA
Posted May 12, 2009
I have to laugh a little as I write this review. I liked the book, enjoyed reading it, but still do now know why. Maybe this is what a good writer can do. Write on seemingly nothing and make it seem like something. The time and places (Ireland and Brooklyn) were not particularly interesting nor were the characters. None of them really did anything special except live their daily lives which were not interesting either. There you have it.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted August 26, 2011
Interesting story and very well-written. It was a fast read that kept my attention til the last page.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.9106447
Posted August 8, 2011
Descriptions here of the emotional life at once supremely tender and unsentimental. The work of a masterful hand.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted June 24, 2011
I did enjoy this book. Although it seemed to me that the author couldn't decide what direction he wanted Eilis to go (as far as her character went) but nevertheless I enjoyed it and would read it again a few years.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.There really wasn't much about Brooklyn in this novel, at least not enough for it to merit the title. As it is, it is a love story about an immigrant girl who enjoys her new home in America, but then is forced to return to Ireland after a death in the family. What I liked about the book stopped at this point and unnecessary confusion reigned from that point on. Little of what happened in Ireland made sense given what had preceded it. Other than some location material, and Dodger talk, if you come to this book expecting to revisit Fulton Street and an older Brooklyn, there is no nostalgia here as Brooklyn is but a minor character.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Imagine leaving everything one has ever known: family, culture, lifestyle, and moving 3,000 miles across the world. In Colm Tobin's "Brooklyn," Eilis Lacey completes the mind-boggling switch from a small town in Ireland to magnificent Brooklyn, New York. In a story filled with the unexpected and true love, Tobin uses believable characters and attention-grabbing plot to make "Brooklyn" an unforgettable read.
The novel begins in the struggling Irish economy where qualified Eilis is unable to find a job. An opportunity arises for Eilis to journey to America to find work, but she is unsure of what to do. Leaving her fragile, aging mother, older, sophisticated mother, and the life she expected to live proves to be a heart wrenching and difficult decision.
However, she makes her choice to leave Ireland and sails off to America. Life immediately takes off when Eilis gets a job and a boyfriend within the first few months of her arrival. As she is finally settling in, tragedy strikes at home and Eilis is required to return to Ireland. The extreme events that occur cause Eilis to question returning to America, her new life, and her true love.
Throughout the novel Eilis' character grows and the reader can't help but become attached. Eilis starts as an unsure woman who tries her hardest to please everyone around her, but by the end she is confident and takes a stand for herself. This is shown specifically when Eilis returns to Ireland. She causes quite a bit of gossip with her newfound confidence, style, and personality.
Just like Eilis, the plot starts unconfident and slow, but ends leaving readers attentive and excited. When the story leads to Eilis' decision to remain in Ireland or return to America, the suspense is unbearable.
Readers are able to connect with not only the characters, but the conflicts they face. "Brooklyn" is an unforgettable book because of the intriguing plot and realistic characters. Colm Tobin captures the readers on page one and never let's go.
anonymousMK
Posted August 2, 2010
"Brooklyn" gives the impression of being a good short story expanded into a dull novel. The first half of the book is merely a drawn out, rigidly chronological setting up of the second half. The characters are thinly drawn. Even the main character, the very passive Eilis, from whose point of view the story is told, remains a cipher who sort of sleepwalks into situations. The scenes of Ireland in the 1950s are the strongest part of the novel. This book is an easy read. So much so that at times it seems like something more suitable for the YA market. I am perplexed at the critical praise this novel received.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted June 15, 2010
I picked up this book knowing what a great writer Colm Toibin is but upon reading I am disappointed. The story is very readable and the characters settings and history real yet so lightly dealt with. Through the eyes of the main character Eilis we see her small Irish town, its way of life and inhabitants including her mother, sister, girlfriends and employer. She then is sent to Brooklyn and again we are shown her life of work, night classes, church dances, boarding house, friends, and "romance" but nothing really strikes deep. Things happen, people come and go and Eilis seems in a fog. I was rather insulted that Toibin wrote her as how else can I say it, stupid. I know an immigrant woman's choices were limited in that time period but this girl had no personality or interests. She just went with the flow in a deliberate almost plodding way.
I think what bothers me most is that there is so much that could have been dealt with and wasn't. Background about her professor, landlady, priest, sister, mother and even the homeless singer would have made this a meaty book of personalities, cultures and age to get into.
They say less is more but in this book for me, it just wasn't enough.
Anonymous
Posted June 3, 2010
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It was true to life in the era about shich it was written.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Justsooze
Posted June 2, 2010
"Colm Toibin's "Brooklyn" gently draws the reader into the life of a young Irish girl, Eilis Lacey. There is little work in post World War II Ireland. Her two older brothers had previously been forced to move to England to find work and due to the encouragement of her beloved older sister, Rose, and the sponsorship of a visiting priest from America, Eilis leaves the home she shares with Rose and their widowed mother and travels from a small town in Ireland to seek employment in Brooklyn. What I found most interesting was Eilis' gradual immersion into life in America, which was so different from the life she left behind. Brooklyn truly proves to be the land of opportunity for Eilis. She lives in a boarding house owned by an Irishwoman, finds work at a local department store and attends classes in bookkeeping at night. She meets a young Italian man, Tony, who introduces her to more of life in America. When a tragedy forces her to return to Ireland, she has to decide where her future lies. So much more than just the story of a young immigrant girl becoming an independent woman, Brooklyn itself, and the complexity, diversity and opportunity found there almost seems to be a character in the book."
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.eliseIL
Posted May 16, 2010
Bland. The stoicism of the characters was reflected in the writing. I found it hard to find any connection to the characters, hard to follow Eilis' emotions and felt her constant desire to be alone might have been a mental issue. The story itself has been done before, numerous times. I think it's done better when the reader can sympathize with the new immigrant's struggle. It was a decent story that may start a good book club conversation, but I wouldn't recommend it to Jane Doe looking for a book.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.DawnHS
Posted May 15, 2010
Although the plot was original, and the writing craftsman-like, I couldn't care about any of the characters, or what happened to them. So the novel ultimately fails its most important test: making the reader relate to the characters.
I don't recommend this book.
redheadedreaderMG
Posted May 15, 2010
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The story was a very sweet, coming of age book.. the main character evolved as the story went on.. an easy, enjoyable read.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.lbmii
Posted May 14, 2010
Not sure what all the hype is about. I found the characters dry and one sided. There were many characters brought in for a very small amount of time that didn't seem to have purpose.
The city of Chicago, IL chose it as their ONE city ONE read book for 2010 and I was highly disappointed.
I very much enjoyed reading this book. Colm Toibin's words made me feel like I was the main character. The only critism I have, was wanting more. I felt the story didn't have enough of an ending. This was a great book for a rainy day and could be finished in a day.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted April 19, 2010
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The author draws you in by slowly developing each character. By the middle of the book, you are cheering for the protagonists. By the end of the story, you are wishing for more. The book portrays the hard life of the millions of people who immigrated to America during that time period. It shows the promise of a new life, while exploring the pain of separation, lonliness and isolation from the family and friends they left behind. Colm Tiobin takes you from the quiet, safe, yet poor countryside of Ireland to the bustling opportunistic chaos of New York, showing the pros and cons of both. The author definitely set the stage for a sequel, and I hope that is the plan.
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Overview
It is Enniscorthy in the southeast of Ireland in the early 1950s. Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find work at home. Thus when a job is offered in America, it is clear to everyone that she must go. Leaving her family and country, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn, and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady’s intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation.
Slowly, however, the pain of parting is buried beneath the rhythms of her new life — until she begins to realize that she has found a sort of happiness. As she falls in love, news comes from home that forces her back to ...