A Long Winter

When I first started this book, I had just read Peacee by Richard Bausch. Both start with a family getting ready for a child to leave for wartime military service at the beginning of a long winter. But the two books could not be more different.

The idea of how long winter came to Colm Tóibín when he was in the Spanish Pyrenees with his friend, looking for a house with a garden in the rural area. He came upon a tale,told by the locals and it’s stuck in his head for sometime until he decided to put the story into a book.

I’m so glad he did because this little piece of work is a gem, even more so when you read the end note and work out the way Tóibín worked on the story in order to create the novella. In doing so Tóibín describes show more how he came upon his short novella and goes through the steps of how the story developed in his mind. He believes that if a story can’t be told as a ballad, it probably can’t be told as a story.

The is indeed a ballad-like quality to A Long Winter. Without giving too much away, the story is set in a tiny village in the Spanish Pyrenees in the mid twentieth century. It starts with the younger of two sons being sent off to military service. Later we find that this was Tóibín’s way of ensuring that there was only one son prominent in the story, which is told in his third person from Miquel the elders son’s point of view.

He’s recently returned from military service and is a quiet sort of chap with latent homosexual feelings. These feelings are exquisitely described by Tóibín that they could almost be missed in the. beginning. Homosexuality does not play a defining part In the beginning of the story, but it helps to explain Miquel’s careful interaction with men.

Miquel’s father is an unpleasant fellow who has isolated himself from other villagers, and has a sarcastic tone when dealing with members of his family. Miquel’s mother does everything in the house and this is important only later in the book when the fact becomes a major stumbling block. We reap what we sow.

When Miquel discovers that his mother is a cupboard alcoholic, Miquel doesn’t know what to do about it. He reluctantly accepts his father‘s solution, which is drastic and has terrible consequences..

To go further would be to ruin the book for others and I don’t even want to use a spoiler alert because the rest of the story as it would take up so much of the review.In any case, you can see the plot elsewhere, given that we now have AI that manages to bland descriptions of almost any book you ask about.

A Short Winter will go down as one of my favorite books of this year. It is indeed a story, a story that will hold you in you mind, just as the story that inspired the author remained in his.

I highly recommend this little page-turner which will hold you, not only because you want to know what happens, but because of the characters described so exquisitely by the author. show less

A novella. Atmospheric but not very insightful. Disappointing.