Brooklyn

Colm Toíbín is the subtlest kind of magician. Reading this book, you watch his hands move gracefully through the simplest of motions as he conjures up a world, realizing only after that he has taken the watch off your wrist and the heart out of your chest. This is a book they will study a hundred years from now, trying to figure out exactly how he manages to levitate such large emotions with such smooth prose. Worth it for the complicated dread implied by an umbrella left at a post office.

This is a charming, simple story about a sweet, straightforward young woman – until the final section, when it sears the reader’s heart and soars into another realm.

The first part is a delightful picture of small-town Ireland in the 1950s. The middle two parts chart Eilis’ arrival and settling in to life and study in Brooklyn. Not much happens. It’s well done, but I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Then she is unexpectedly summoned home. The situation and dilemmas arising could be crass, predictable and dull, or overly sentimental, or just implausible. They are none of those things.

The ending was brave and brilliant, and pushed the book from 3.5* to 5*. The most powerful aspect for me was big spoiler coming up: that show more she went back to Brooklyn, presumably to Tony, but carefully puts the photo of her and Jim on the beach in the bottom of her suitcase.

I hope Toibin is never tempted to write a sequel.

So Much Unsaid

There is a gradually intensifying theme of important things going unsaid: lips sealed, omissions from letters, replies unread.

It’s no great insight that the longer one waits to reveal something, the harder it becomes, and the more complex the consequences. Toibin’s skill is in making chronic inarticulacy agonisingly convincing: there’s always the nagging hope that if one puts it off, it may somehow not be necessary.

Eilis’ inexperience may look like naivety, but the more we understand of her inner thoughts, the more her intelligence, introspection, and perceptiveness about other people’s motives peek through. She’s not inarticulate in her head, only in real life, though she tries to suppress her own thoughts as well, “The best thing to do… was to put the whole thing out of her mind”.

The gaps in her letters home mean “they would never know her now” and maybe they never had, otherwise they would not have sent her to this strange land where she does not fit.

But it’s not just Eilis: all the main characters hide their true selves and desires (hence a brief scene with lesbian overtones), and even prevent others from doing so: “It was hard to speak since her mother seemed to have prepared in advance every word that she said” and had a way of “speaking that seemed to welcome no reply”.

“Not telling her mother and friends made every day she had spent in America a sort of fantasy.” You can rewrite a fantasy, which makes reticence appealing, but it doesn’t change the truth – or the ramifications.

Appropriately, the plot hinges on someone who DOES speak up, but whether the consequences are good or ill is suitably ambiguous. Toibin has consistently demonstrated the problems of what goes unsaid, but he stops short of recommending honesty at all times, because there is no single answer. We each have to decide for ourselves when to hold back and when to open up. Either way is risky. Inertia, manifested as silence or omission, often seems easier, as Eilis knows so well – yet she does it again and again.

Pulled Two Ways: An Outsider in Two Realms

Eilis moves from her predictable and familiar town where she has spent (and expected to spend) her whole life, to a city where even the staples of bread, butter, tea and milk, are strange, and “everything [is] frenzied and fast”.

She may speak the language, but “She was nobody here… a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything… She… tried to think… of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing… It was as though she had been locked away.”

Just as she’s becoming at ease with Brooklyn, she finds herself an outsider again, when she gets to know an Italian family, and finally when she goes back to Ireland, changed.

This is the obvious theme, and it’s why I chose the photo of the Anthony Gormley sculpture. But because it’s more obvious, and is part of the reason for all the unsaid things, it somehow felt less important. Or maybe it was secondary because I identify with it too strongly: there are so many axes along which I have been, and still am, neither one thing nor another, even though I’ve never lived more than 150 miles from my birthplace.

However, Eilis learned to fit in in America, and having found that chameleon quality, I am hopeful for her.

Plot

Eilis is a young woman in a small town in 1950s Ireland, studying bookkeeping. Her older brothers live and work in England, and her older sister, Rose, works to pay for Eilis and their widowed mother. With little prospect of local employment, Eilis is despatched to Brooklyn, with the aid of Father Flood, a friend of Rose.

She lives in a boarding house, headed by Mrs Kehoe, has a job in a department store, and goes to night school to qualify as a bookkeeper, all arranged by Fr Flood, who also organises Friday church dances, from where she gains an Italian boyfriend, Tony. Rather than an explicit proposal, he talks of future plans that “suggested that marriage been already tacitly agreed”.

A sudden death sends her home for a short visit. She secretly marries Tony before leaving.. Emotional and practical manipulation inevitably extend the trip. Time to fall in love, perhaps: heart and duty, separated by the Atlantic.

Seasickness, homesickness, new people, strange food, love, death, love triangle, Catholic guilt.

Just another bildungsroman? No, it’s so much more.

UPDATE re Film

Overall, I thought the film was pretty good. It was understated and looked and felt "right" to me. The luminously ethereal Saoirse Ronan is perfect as Eilis, and the screenplay and cinematography included lingering shots of her pensive face, showing something of her inner doubts and struggles about what to say and what to leave out. Julie Walters is excellent as Mrs Kehoe, and dinner at her lodging house is suitably on the knife-edge between fun and awkwardness.

Inevitably, some things were missed out: no brothers (a sensible omission), almost nothing about Rose (Eilis is on the boat within minutes, and without much explanation), and no hint she has ambitions until Fr Flood enrolls her at Brooklyn College. But none of that impairs understanding or changes the nature of the story.

My one gripe is the one I feared: the ending was tidier. Not only did she definitely return to Tony, but the photo of her and Jim on the beach was never taken, let alone packed in her case back to Brooklyn. However, there was one really good addition near the end, on the boat, she gets talking to a young Irish girl heading to Brooklyn for the first time, and she takes on the role of advisor, as Georgina had done for her. That's when the cameras should have stopped rolling, imo.

Quotes

• “No one who went to America missed home. Instead they were happy there and proud. She wondered if that could be true.”

• “She did not allow herself to conclude that she did not want to go.”

• “She felt she was being singled out for something for which she was not in any way prepared.”

• “The letters told Eilis little; there was hardly anything personal in them and nothing that sounded like anyone’s own voice.”

• “She wanted to allow for the possibility that everyone’s motives were good.”

• “In Bartocci’s she had learned to be brave and decisive with the customers, but once she herself was a customer she knew that she was too hesitant and slow.”

• “Looking like a horse-dealer’s wife in Enniscorthy on a fair day.”

• “In Brooklyn it was not always as easy to guess someone’s character by their job.”

• “She would have to slow him down, but she had no idea how to do so in a way that did not involve being unpleasant.”

• Etiquette of ogling on the beach:
“In Ireland no one looks… It would be bad manners.
In Italy it would be bad manners not to look.”

• “The [bad] news and the visitors had caused excitement, distracted her pleasantly from the tedium of the day.”

Image source (work by Anthony Gormley):
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EoNMfeXg4L0/TvsVFOhLSoI/AAAAAAAAAz0/qtff7xVYMjg/s1600/.... show less

A young woman, stuck in a small Irish town in the 1950s, with no sign of any opportunity to make something of her life beyond a humiliating one-day-a-week job in a grocery shop, gets the chance to emigrate and make a new life for herself in the USA. It's all very lovingly crafted, with plenty of engaging details of life in Ireland and Brooklyn and insights into what a frightening adventure it would be for someone who has never travelled anywhere suddenly to find herself having to manage all this on her own. I enjoyed all the stuff about how department stores worked and had to laugh at the innocent pleasure the parish priest takes in his power to manipulate people (in a good way, naturally). Tóibín clearly did his research.

But it's a show more bit disappointing to find that everything descends into a kind of pastiche Victorian novel in the last half of the book, with Eilis torn between the two good men who both love her on their respective sides of the ocean. We all love a good, weepy romance, but surely a writer like Tóibín could have come up with something a little more original — and a little more worthy of twenty-first century insight. show less

Paced to perfection, this book recounts the quiet day to day life of a young girl who has emigrated from Ireland to the United States in the 1950s. Eilis has her ups, her downs, her sadnesses and joys. Moments of confusion, irritation, guilt. While two loomingly significant events frame this book, her emigration and her return to Ireland when she receives devastating news from home, it is the little moments told without fanfare, just with a loving matter-of-factness, that make this book the treasure that it is and a great joy over which to linger.
Following as the shy Eilis slowly emerges from a cocoon of uncertainty and drabness, coming into her own, no longer overshadowed by her confident, beautiful elder sister is one of the real show more beauties of the book. This is not a book for anyone who needs thrills and chills, but rather for readers who desire a closely rendered portrait of a young woman in the slow journey to herself. show less

Brooklyn is one of those quiet books, the kind that seems straightforward…until suddenly you realize it’s anything but. The story is simple, yet at its core it brims with truth. With unadorned narration, Tóibín follows Eilis through her rather ordinary life: starting a job, gossiping with fellow boarders, writing to her family, helping her sponsor with church functions. Her life is unremarkable, free from the sensationalism and breathtaking moments sprinkled throughout many contemporary novels. She could have been any young immigrant, leaving everyone and everything she has ever known to seek a better life. Yet somehow, in her ordinariness, Eilis is beautiful. I hung on every word of this one small soul’s story.

My full review is show more posted on my blog, Erin Reads. show less

Nos últimos dois anos vivenciei inúmeros lutos, sincronicamente nesse período acabei lendo muitos livros sobre luto sem sequer saber que seriam sobre luto, Brooklyn acabou se mostrando como um deles.
Dividido em quatro capítulos longos, dá para contabilizar diversos tipos de luto presentes no livro, o luto da mudança geográfica, o luto da perda de um ente querido, o luto de um amor perdido, o luto da pessoa que você era e não é mais.
O mais peculiar em ler o livro do Colm Toibin é que você não dado muita coisa por ele até o intenso último capítulo em que todos esses lutos se encontram e a nossa Eilie tem que dar um rumo à vida.

Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn gracefully bespelled me. He did it with ease, less prone to showy flair than to subtle intimation. After finishing the novel, letting this Irish immigrant to Brooklyn in the 1950's perambulate in my thoughts, I realized that her naiveté should have stricken me at some point as annoying or distracting or hand-wringing at the very least. Eilis Lacey never evokes a negative response from me however. Instead Tóibín manages to usher me in as a confidant to Eilis, following her bildungsroman as if learning details from a close friend. However even the best of friends reach a place of frustration at times with each other, but Eilis and I never quarreled. I never found her snappish or irritating or, that teetering show more abyss of the maturing protagonist, whiny. She has a composure and quietude, not born from confidence, though that she slowly develops, but rather from a simplicity of spirit and purpose. The machinations and hyperactivity around her do not seem to cultivate a similar responsive blossom; her Irish roots continue to send up calmly swaying green shoots even amidst the hustle of burgeoning Brooklyn.

Perhaps to say that her blossom does not hybridize with her surroundings is erroneous; rather, we might say we are altered in the same sun as she, drinking the same newness of place and peoples and earth, moving at such a pace that the changes that actually do unfold - a slight change in petal color and fragrance - are so natural and unhurried that it is not until a return trip to her home of Enniscorthy that the comparative growth can be witnessed.

Mayhap too contributing to this obnubilated sense of change is the knowledge that Eilis did not seek out this uprooting relocation to Brooklyn. Her sense of order and the path of her life never enfolded a replanting in America; indeed, her Enniscorthy roots were quite well grounded, entwined with her mother's and her friends', not seeking out new ground like a free-wheeling and voracious nettle. Yet, new ground Eilis was given, and part of the beauty of this book comes at the very end, when her choices are arrayed before her, not so dissimilar in isolation, yet contextually divergent, like a rose graft taken from its home and grown in different terroir.

Behind the friendship with Eilis that Tóibín elicits from me there is also a sense of historicity that nudges me on a deeply personal level. When Eilis meets and begins an affectionate courtship with the boyish Italian-American Tony, I felt recalled to the stories that my grandparents told of their own courtship, as if I was reading a more inclusive narrative from one of them, reliving with them the sensations and joys they would have experienced.

That Tóibín crafts a patient and tender maturation for Eilis, compelling and believable without treading within angst, and the sense of familial remembrance he evokes left me rather awed and with a lingering feeling of peace, like I'd just put my nose in a rose bloom and inhaled deeply, forgetful of the thorns that usually await, but, finding none, return to inhale once more. show less