The Empty Family: Stories

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.

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".

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.

I love Colm Toibin’s work & this little book is perfect. His phrasing & language is beautiful and linger in your mind. Perfect to dip in & out of - the stories are best savoured little & often! Lovely gift or treat!

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 am a great lover of Colm Toibin but had not read his short stories before. The stories are as well crafted as his novels and packed with original insight

I enjoyed the first stories - last two were very explicit and homosexual

A book full of alienated and alienating characters. Are they alone through choice or accident of place? The ambivalence is part of the fun of the book. Beautifully written as always and deeply thought-provoking from the point of view of an Irish emigrant.