The Empty Family: Stories (Bestselling Short Stories)

THE EMPTY ROOM is a priceless collection of short stories from the brilliant author Colm Tóibín. It could be easily said that once hooked on Tóibín's writing the bond is permanent. This exquisite collection is a series of indecisive moments in the lives of folk who are well into middle life, shackled between remembered emotion and the inevitable aging tranquility that is their future. He creates a panorama of characters about whom we come to know and with whom we empathize, but at the same time these created people are laid out on the near-necropsy postmortem table for us to touch and examine and step away. The nine stories included in this volume include 'Silence', a story transplanted to another time in which a Lady Gregory, an abandoned widow who has lost her recent lover, has a peppery dinner conversation with Henry James. In 'The New Spain', 'exiles return to bury loved ones, and ruminate on what other past associates might be up to. A Leftist dissident from Franco's Spain comes back home to a cool reception at the family villa in Menorca.' 'The Pearl Fishers' is a "grim, almost plotless thriller with gay subplots" and "overwrought and graphically violent screenplays." Our hero is invited to have dinner with a married couple, a man named Donnacha and a woman named Grainne, both of whom he has known since they were at school together decades earlier. The two boys (as they were then) were lovers before Donnacha linked up with the fiery, strong-willed Grainne, a religious reformer who has gained some notoriety by insisting "that she and other like-minded lay people represented the true Catholic Church more than the bishops and priests." Much of what we read in The Empty Family is Tóibín's apparent obsessive interest in 'the principal torments available to the educated, Left-leaning, upwardly mobile, male baby boomer in middle age. The men and women who brought us up, and bustled us off to the good schools they never got to attend, will weaken and die, and our professional success won't help them or us deal with that.' For this reader the most compelling story is the very genteel love story represented in 'The Street' - a tale of Pakistani immigrants in Barcelona who somehow survive the threat of being outsiders and in the case of Malik and Abdul discover their same sex needs and find some fulfillment despite the narrow confines of living in a hostile world. Colm Tóibín is a Master Craftsman, a wordsmith without peer, and everything he touches radiates a magic that only he is capable of transforming ordinary lives into extraordinary experiences for the reader. This, then, is literary genius. Grady Harp, September 11

In a hyper-connected world, where friends, family, and even people we hardly know are only a text, Skype, email, Poke, Tweet, Re-tweet, IM, or call away, there is something about willed isolation, the desire to remain cut-off and removed from the heartbeat of anything resembling a loving community that is all the more chilling. Colm Toibin, in this collection of short fiction, has managed a masterful array of stories, and a collage of characters that unveil with melancholic ardor the pain, loss, and empty hearts of people who have refused, run away from, or been denied love. Love lingers in their lives like an open wound, borne from an encounter decades ago. Toibin- like with "Brooklyn" and "The Master" - in these works displays deft restraint. His prose is terse and powerful. His characters' pain is the simple product of a series of wrong turns- that combined and compounded into something more. Central to almost every character in these stories is a lack of reconciliation with the past. Toibin's characters are running- from pain, love lost, truth, loneliness, confusion, time. With each passing decade, the onion adds layers. Toibin gives readers of "The Empty Family" first the mature, ripe onion- followed by a series of glimpses into its core. In this way, the structure of Toibin's stories mimic the rhythm and construction of memory. Nothing is more detailed than now. But the emotion of the past, we cannot escape. The impact of moments, whose importance only grow with age, become more clear, and sometimes painful, in the repeating now. The past emerges to the surface like the first, petite bubbles in a pot of stovetop water that is about to turn over into a violent boil. Frances, in "Two Women", is in the twilight of her life and career. She is a woman "that did not allow herself to feel pain." Frances, on a trip for work to Ireland, is reminded of her 12-year love affair with a man named Luke. "Besides her career, nothing interested her now except her house and her own mind." But for Frances, like so many characters in these stories, the house and mind are not a place of growth and expansion, but rather of retreat. It is a place Frances goes to hide. She resigns from the vulnerability of love in the familiar and routine machinations of her work. Luke was a big decision in her life that she fumbled; and now it haunts her. Through the pain and loss that Toibin orchestrates with the touch of a puppeteer in these stories, through the absence of love, we are given perhaps the most powerful testament of its presence. Love ceaselessly beckons through the void. "The Empty Family" unveils, in all its subtle splendors, this tug of war between the safeness and isolation of a life without love versus the allure and vulnerability of one where love is present. Toibin offers us a powerful portrait of the ruinous effects of a hardened heart on the soul; and in so doing, champions the importance of an open and ever mindful heart.

The book discussion group read this collection of stores in December 2015. We had a fairly small group (which is great for discussion), who most enthusiastically liked or loved the book. The first story, "Silence," is a rather ornate return to the Henry James period and approach that Toibin used in "The Master," a novel that we genuinely loved when we read it in the group. The rest of the stories in the collection, however, are contemporary and many are much more sexually explicit. So, while this is a very fine story, it might be a bit of a false start for the collection. The stories (including the first, anomalous story) revolve around familial relationships, uncovering how families interact, and often exploring troubled or failed relationships. Many of the major characters are lonely and alienated from their families. They long to return to their families, usually in Ireland. Physically returning home is a common theme. In the final story ("The Street"), the statement "...my real family is you," sums up the families that number of the characters create for themselves. One of the things that separates short stories from novels is the tight number of characters in short stories. Toibin creates vivid and memorable characters: a flinty older art director ("Two Women"); two young men who had an affair years ago and meet again later, with one of them married to a woman journalist ("The Pearl Fishers"); a young man and his first lover, whom he loses ("Barcelona, 1975"); a gay man raised by his very opinionated but loving aunt ("The Color of Shadows"), a "bad" communist and her controlling mother ("The New Spain"), and the two Pakistani men who find each other under difficult circumstances ("The Street"). Another point is that novels are often processes and involve multiple changes, but stories are built around a single image, and the stronger the image appears in the story, the stronger the story seems. Images in these stories include a conversation between two women in a pub ("Two Women"); three characters having dinner in a fancy restaurant and one of the characters walking home alone ("The Pearl Fishers"); a gay orgy in a warren of rooms ("Barcelona, 1975"), an old sea-side home with tourist cottages built nearby, as well as a refrigerator chained shut ("The New Spain"), and finally a free concert filled with young Pakistani men, and later, two Pakistani men, one older and one younger, walking along the beach ("The Street"). I couldn't get a grasp on the title story, "The Empty Family." While full of beautiful imagery, I could never figure out the relationships between the characters or tell what had happened before the story began. A few too many of the stories use a dying parent or guardian as the central conceit of the story ("One Minus One", "The New Spain," and "The Colour of Shadows"). But I'm just pointing out quibbles. The stories are uniformly beautiful and sensuous and memorable. Colm Toibin is fabulous.

There is one very fine story here about a woman who returns to her family's vacation home off the coast of Spain. 2 good stories and the others you can forget. Is Toibin overrated? Probably.

Colm Toibin really pushes his range of writing styles and topics in this collection of short stories that is very varied and works to be international in scope. I found that the stories that worked best were those with an Irish element and that he really reached and perhaps didn't quite succeed in one of the non-Irish stories. But to watch a writer as great as Toibin possibly struggling is a joy in itself. Don't expect any stories like BROOKLYN, but be prepared for some great writing, clashes of interests, strong characters, as Toibin takes us on some very different journeys in this compelling collection.

I like a number of the stories there. Some of them are fairly erotic. the way toibin writes is so fluid that you flip through the pages as if you are not reading. As if you are watching tv. it is so effortless. I felt like i wanted more stories when i finished this book. Most of the scenes are either in Ireland or Spain and you can see the writer drawing on his own experiences. It is a great for anyone, gay or straight. But i would say some of the content is too explicit for the straight reader.

The nine elegiac stories that make up this exquisite collection feature characters united in their solitude, isolated souls reflecting on their lives and wounds. What unites the stories themselves is the sculpted beauty of Mr. Toibin's prose. Loss and longing are the emotional undercurrents, whether that of an adulterous affair, a gay love story in a repressive society, or the pain of a love affair that reached the end of its natural life but keeps up an afterlife unknown even to its protagonists. Ireland is the home that his characters (try to) escape from or are pulled back to, willingly and not. Other stories are voiced like love letters to the anonymous "you". Here is one writer who goes from strength to strength; he seems to just get better with each successive work. While the stories may vary in how satisfying one finds each of the narratives, Toibin's precise ability to catch the ebb and flow of his characters thoughts and emotions remains thrillingly constant. A collection worthy of the author of "The Master" and "Brooklyn".

Opportunity to read Henry James bio-fiction is somewhat unique. I am used to Colm Toibin's style and found that the language he employs in this work feels like James' and like it comes from another era although there is nothing that held me back from enjoying the novel as though it were contemporary. I love the way Toibin touches the edges of James' homosexual reputation. He also portrays the "Master" in less than stellar ethical fashion as he moves through his friend's (platonic lover's?) belongings after she commits suicide. The energy expressed in the muses James adopted over his lifetime is so well done whether the conversations of his Rhode Island cousin or his European friends. The novel is simply deftly handled by Toibin and though I can't be sure (not expert enough to gauge) I believe the JAmes voice is present in sentence structure and word choice. This is an excellent read and Colm Toibin is a contemporary Master. Robert

Good variety of stories, tho not being gay, I did get a bit tired of one or two stories. However, I think Toibin is a brilliant writer.

I really enjoyed it, just as much as I usually enjoy everything Colm Tóibin writes. If you've missed it, get it now.

Excellent read

A great writer. Pity about two very explicit gay themes

The Empty Family is beautifully written but the content is disturbing. The writing persuades the reader that a homosexual lifestyle will be acceptable to all and bring happiness to those who choose that life style, but it is not so. There is an unbearable sadness, yearning and emptiness in the characters who want to live fulfilled lives and are unable to do so. Some of the scenes in the book are sexually explicit.