Colm Tóibín has an extraordinary head. It looks as if it was sculpted by someone with enormous powers of expression, but fairly rudimentary chisel skills.
Authors Colm Tóibín
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[Tóibín] resists scepticism about American creative courses and describes how he banishes critical theory texts about texts from the seminar room , preferring, instead, to conduct his class through a line-by-line reading of the classics—Pride and Prejudice, Daniel Deronda, The Portrait of a Lady.
John Preston
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In Tóibín’s disturbing body of work, the inarticulate, mulish past always recaptures us. History teaches, inspires, embitters and harms us. Tóibín’s genius is that he makes it impossible for us to walk away.
Colm Tóibín’s opinions on others
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At Swim-Two-Birds can be read as an assault on Joyce’s ambitions, an attempt by a talented young writer to destroy Joyce’s synthesising process, to dismantle the great controlling ambition and mapped-out plenitude of Ulysses. The aim of Joyce’s book was not to destroy the novel but to re-create it and make it larger, more inclusive, more faithful to life and life’s complexities. The aim of At Swim-Two-Birds was to lose control, to take the pieces and refuse to reconcile them, to insist that it was too late for such trickery.
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James, like most artists, knew what he was doing only some of the time.
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James’s language in his fiction was both mask and pure revelation; he played with the drama between circumlocution and bald statement.
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McEwan seems highly alert to the comic possibilities of this story, which could well be a bawdy ballad, and, as a way of keeping the reader’s face straight, manages a tone of almost reverent care for all their responses, for each moment in their history.
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He was fearless in his depiction of the play of [Isabel’s] consciousness; her high ideals, her need for freedom were dramatized against repression and dark restriction. In concentrating on her fate in the world, he created one of the most magnificent figures in the large and sprawling house of fiction.
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Just as cliché is freely used, and animal imagery freely employed to describe the locals, sex is always close by.
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Long before the sin of Orientalism was discovered, Paul Bowles had frequently been guilty of it, in word, in thought and in deed.
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It would be easy to describe the relationship between Capote and the people who helped him with his book as cynical and staged, but it was more interesting than that. His charm did not only work outwards. He grew to love those whom he charmed.
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He writes about the mind’s ability to notice and speculate, desire and understand, with an old-fashioned novelist’s ease. He writes wonderfully about changes in mood, a new arrival in a room, the aura around an object, the power of weather.
At Swim-Two-Birds
Colm Tóibín
Henry James
On Chesil Beach
The Portrait of a Lady
The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles
In Cold Blood
The Line of Beauty
The Blackwater Lightship