The Empty Family: Stories

by Colm Tóibín

Paperback, 2012

Status

Available

Genres

Collection

Edwin Mitoma Collection

Publication

Scribner (2012), 288 pages

Description

A collection of short fiction includes "The Street," in which Pakistani workers in Barcelona pursue a taboo affair; and "Two Women," in which a taciturn Irish set designer confronts repressed emotions while working in her homeland.

User reviews

LibraryThing member Cariola

Toibin presents nine moving stories about love, loss, and longing that span decades, eras, countries, and lifestyles. The effect of such diversity is the recognition of the emotions we all share. In the opening story, Lady Gregory, young wife of an older and no longer terribly interested husband,

falls into a dangerous and short-lived affair with a married poet. Two of the stories deal with young men handling the deaths of the mother figures in their lives. In "One Minus One," a young Irish man, now living in Texas, recalls his earlier return to Dublin for his mother's funeral and the loss of his gay lover. In "The Colour of Shadows," Paul, a young gay Irishman, must take responsibility for the last days of the aunt who raised him as she falls deeper into Alzheimer's and ill health. Aunt Josie tends to forget who he is, and when she remembers, she expresses rigid disapproval of his lifestyle. "Two Women" features an elderly, cantankerous but renowned set designer who returns to Dublin to work on what may be her last film. Along the way, she finds herself reminiscing about an early love. The longest and perhaps most touching story in the collection, "The Street" focuses on two Pakistani men who fall in love while working under exploitive conditions in post-Franco Barcelona.

Toibin's gentle, poetic prose hits just the right notes for each of these stories. He reminds us that, even though we inevitably realize that love is not necessarily forever, it's part of the human condition to yearn for it, seek for it, bring it back to life within our hearts and minds, if only as the shadow of a memory.

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LibraryThing member Laura400

I thought this collection was good but uneven. To me, the stories were all over the map, some bland, some brave and frank, some so-so, some good. The explicit sex in two stories may not be to everyone's taste. On the other hand, those were also two of the better stories in my opinion. It's nice to

read work from Toibin that features contemporary settings, and in some cases characters who are out gay men. That's a nice change of pace from his wonderful fiction set in the past. I just wish I liked more of the stories here.

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LibraryThing member Trapnel

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 focu...s 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 sometimes what is omitted or unseen is as important as what is written. A number of these stories include strong elements of his own experience, discernible from knowledge of his previous biographical writings. Many, but not all, reflect on being a gay man, and this writing may be uncomfortably explicit for some readers. However, Toibin’s writing continues to accumulate admirers and his reputation to rise, and this book will only add to that process.

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LibraryThing member presto

If the stories in this collection have one thing in common, it is solitude. Many on the protagonists are alone, perhaps they were once in a relationship, perhaps they just prefer it that way, yet there is an air of melancholy that seems to pervade each story.

Many of the stories feature a central

gay male character, and a few of the stories are explicit. The final story and the longest centres on a young Pakistani immigrant in Spain living in a closed community of fellow immigrants. It differs from the majority of the stories in this collection in that here we follow a developing relationship as Malik, the younger man, develops an attachment to the older Abdul. It is a story fraught with difficulties, not helped by Abdul's reticence, yet it is a beautiful and touching account.

The Empty Family is a fine collection of short stories, very perceptive, involving and moving, above all the they are beautifully written, drawing the reader into the private worlds of the participants, and as such they are deeply affecting.

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LibraryThing member grheault

Nice writing, short stories. A little depressing, so will pickup again at a sunnier time.

LibraryThing member nbarman

I really liked this book. Toibin writes in a sparse, quiet fashion but it hits home. The last story, "The Street" was absolutely beautiful. Toibin's portrayal of Pakistani immigrant men living in Madrid was spot on. Reading it was so authentic that I would have mistaken Toibin for being a South

Asian writer. This is a gentle book, beautifully written. Savor it.

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LibraryThing member LisFlynn

Mix of sad short stories - okay

LibraryThing member EBT1002

This is a mixed bag of short stories. A couple of them earn about 1.5 or 2 stars from me, but a few earn closer to 4 or even 4.5 stars. The end result? An okay collection worth working one's way through but with disappointments as well as rewards.

"Silence" was forgettable.

"The Empty Family" was a

five-star short story, a wonderfully wrought first-person narrative with some lovely language: "I wish I knew how colours came to be made. Some days when I was teaching I looked out the window and thought that everything I was saying was easy to find out and had already been surmised." Ah yes; I completely resonated with this.

"Two Women" was poignant, engaging, interesting.

"One Minus One" -- meh.

"The Pearl Fishers" is a complex exploration of identity, sexuality, choices. The female character was disappointingly one-dimensional and shallow, but that is part of Tóibín's point here..... This story has one of my favorite sentences: "The future is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

"Barcelona, 1975" is simply a memoir of a young adult love affair, extremely explicit and (homo)erotic. I don't know that it's profound, but it's courageous.

In "The New Spain," Carme returns to Spain after 8 years away as a political activist in the UK -- our theme is the resolution of political commitment with family tradition, communism vs. inheritance of family wealth (and the resolution is less than fully comfortable on an individual level).

"The Colour of Shadows" is an excellent entry. Paul visits his aunt, who raised him, at a nursing home and spends time with her as she approaches her death. He makes a bold promise to her -- and finds a surprising peace.

Finally, "The Street" is the piece de resistance and singly makes the collection worthwhile. Malik is a young immigrant from Pakistan, making his way in Barcelona where he neither speaks the language nor understands the customs. At the mercy of Baldy, who makes arrangements and interacts with local officials, Malik finds himself emotionally and sexually drawn to the silent Abdul. After a tragic and brutal night, the two men face possible deportation or alienation from their small conservative community of barely-legal immigrants trying to make a living in this unfamiliar social and economic terrain. I'm avoiding spoilers here, but if you obtain this collection of short stories and simply skip to this one, so be it. This final story, all by itself, added a half-star to the collection's rating.

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LibraryThing member eachurch

Colm Toibin is one of my favorite writer. This collection of short stories confirms my high esteem for him. In these stories, he uses precise language to tell complex stories in a deceptively simple manner. The range of the stories is remarkable as his Toibin's ability to portray the inner workings

of diverse characters.

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LibraryThing member LovingLit

I was unable to feel much for this book through the first half. Although the writing was lovely, the stories told couldn't carry me along. But, about half way the stories changed from family relationships to sexual relationships. The excitement and promise that a new relationship holds is what got

me interested. Although the sexual part of the more often than not gay relationships was fairy graphically described, it didn't come over as sleazy and it offered me a window into lives I have no experience of.

The final story is a lot longer than the rest and had the makings of a novel all its own. It describes the forbidden relationship between two Muslim men living in Barcelona. They are involved in a scam whereby they are working off the cost of passage home in advance of the actual trip. They are living in overcrowded shared rooms, and are at the mercy of their boss who controls every aspect of their lives. When the boss comes across two men in an intimate situation, he reacts violently which of course is the source of much fear and uncertainly of future for the men involved. Even though this story didn't end the way I expected or wanted, it was a special portrayal of cultural dislocation and dislocation within culture. This story I rated 4 stars, but the entire collection 3.5 stars.

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LibraryThing member Ameise1

This was my second [[Tóibín]]'s reading and I liked it very much. This is a book full of short stories. What all the main characters have in common is that they have a special family background, childhood or adolescence and also some of them are gay. The scenery where the stories are taking place

are Ireland or Spain (mostly Barcelona). In any case, there is a lot of love for each protagonist and his story. It's written very carefully and as a reader I got soon the impression to be familiar with all of them.

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LibraryThing member Hebephrene

I confess I miss the appeal of Colm Toibin. A large number of literary luminaries helped with this collection of short stories but I found many unfinished, a few like Barcelona seemed artless. Credit must be given to Toibin for his fearlessness since a few stories give us fairly graphic gay sex

scenes, but the emotional stories are often misplaced. In Color of Shadows ,the storyteller doesn't provide much more than the character who lives in a narrow emotional field. His aunt is dying and yet there is the mystery of his mother who apparently tried to kill both herself and him and who is not even aware lives in the same town as his dying aunt. We learn nothing about his reaction to this. In another story, we follow the evolution of a relationship between two Pakistani men working in Spain who fall in love. Again the emotional world, except for the one man's thoughts of tenderness towards the other, are wafer thin. In the title story a man has come back to a house and is haunted by his memory of his lover but we are given , and I have to say deliberately, no details. Perhaps the allure of the work is that Toibin is open about gay love and longing in a way that has not been seen before. Thematically, all the stories feature a journey in which the main character finds themselves a stranger, even if they are returning to their own home. Estrangement and living as an outsider, either because one is gay, is hiding something, is foreign are seen throughout and one senses that Toibin is drawing, sometimes on the expatriot's return, which is in part his story. However, with a few exceptions I just didn't understand all the excitement.

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LibraryThing member gayla.bassham

Well-written but uneven. I wanted to love it, but I barely liked it. I am in a real reading slump lately! It feels like it's been weeks since I really liked anything!

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