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Synopsis

In The Empty Family, Colm Toibin has extended his imagination further, offering an incredible range of periods and characters—people linked by love, loneliness, desire. The long story "The Street" describes a relationship between Pakistani workers in Barcelona—a taboo affair in a community ruled by obedience and silence. In "Two Women", an eminent and taciturn Irish set designer takes a job in her homeland, and must confront emotions she has long repressed. "Silence" is a historical set piece about Lady Gregory, who tells the writer Henry James a confessional story at a dinner party.

Review from Telegraph.co.uk:

By Holly Kyte

Published: 5:50AM BST 10 Oct 2010

Family is an elastic word in the context of this short-story collection. Its meaning stretches beyond blood relations to include any people or places we might try – and often fail – to connect with in life. Colm Toíbín’s characters here all share an outsider quality, a feeling of un-belonging, having isolated themselves in some way from their past, their home and their 'family’, and it’s their unconscious need to find or replace what is missing that makes up the fine fabric of these tales.

There are the self-imposed exiles being pulled back home: the son in One Minus One, who travelled from New York to Dublin as his mother lay dying, weighed down by regret at the literal and emotional distance between them, but also unable to let go of the former boyfriend to whom he is outpouring in his head; or Carme, the leftist daughter in The New Spain, the only unsympathetic character of the lot, who returns to post-Franco Spain after years abroad to lay claim to her inheritance and finds herself at war with her family.

Then there are those who must keep their liaisons secret, whether that’s a past gay relationship or the extra-marital affair between Lady Gregory and poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt – she must 'take her pleasure in darkness’, writing her feelings into sonnets published as Blunt’s and slipping Henry James a confession skilfully veiled as a story idea.

It all culminates in the last and longest story, The Street, which follows Malik, an immigrant living in a Pakistani enclave of barbers and mobile-phone shops in Barcelona, away from home and unable to speak the language. He finds solace in the moody, uncommunicative Abdul, in a relationship that grows tentatively but is hindered by violence and secrecy. The unspoken subtext finds its voice when Abdul finally confesses to Malik, 'you are my real family’.

Certain echoes of Toíbín’s own life resound throughout the collection, dealing candidly as it does with middle age, nomadic living between Ireland, Spain and America and often disarmingly explicit gay experiences. That clarity of understanding is only part of its success. Each character is caught in, or reflecting upon, a crossroad moment in their lives, a defining relationship, and combined with Toíbín’s language – spare and poetic, with minimal, acerbic dialogue – it gives these stories a meditative quietude and a stealthy, understated power. Poised and complete, this is Toíbín in perfect control of his art.