You’ll want to take each of these nine stories slowly ... It’s to be expected. Tóibín’s trademark insight, clarity, and precision demand full-hearted attention. In fact, his prose may deserve a literary patent, if only for its music: a particular purity and resonance in the reading ear ... Oddly, several of these pieces don’t pack Tóibín’s customary punch ... It’s all there: the burnished density of atmosphere, the sentences built simply yet so solidly they issue their own force field — wondrous for sheer grace. Perhaps the term 'Tóibínian' will come to stand for this exact quality of satisfaction.
These stories show a wonderful breadth of vision ... It’s often said that Tóibín is at his best when writing about love, and once again he’s delivered characters raw with intimacy. Still, this collection should remind fans that for serious writers the personal and political always go hand-in-hand. The News from Dublin provides all the pleasure and pain a reader could ask for — even, perhaps especially, in these jaded times.
Deft ... The short form is ideal for Tóibín’s skills: he’s a writer for whom every word must do its job, and he tells these lives with efficiency, directing the reader only gently, and leaving space for us to complete the work ... There’s no sense of this book as scraps gathered, of secondary work that would not have been published without an established author’s name. Even if they had been discovered anonymously, floating in a bottle — off the coast of Ireland, say, or Spain — these stories would still astonish and delight.
Compressing the broad sweep of a lifetime into the dimensions of a short story, Tóibín tends to prioritise efficiency over texture. Whole decades pass by in the space of a paragraph break, a click of the fingers; when this is repeated across successive stories, a feeling of apathy sets in ... At times, even the interior consciousness is strangely bureaucratic ... Perhaps fittingly, given the collection’s concern with displacement, Tóibín’s touch is surest when the material is closer to home. ... Poignant.
Tóibín enters imaginatively into the circumstances and inner lives of his characters without manipulating the reader’s sympathies ... Through these studies of humans and their chosen homes, Colm Tóibín demonstrates once again the depth of his emotional and moral imagination.
Abstraction is the essential quality of Tóibín’s collection ... If there’s a flaw in the...stories, it’s that the sense of abstraction can tip over into a lack of feeling; the characters at times read as dispassionate observers of their lives and circumstances, rather than flesh-and-blood participants.
Tóibín is particularly deft at constructing relationships inhabited by a kind of hesitant tenderness that never gives way to schmaltz ... The work of a writer who has once again demonstrated a complete command of his craft.
Toibin is a master of understatement, his work characterised by great emotional intelligence coupled with redoubtable restraint ... The quiet intensity brings deep satisfaction. As always, Toibin conjures up turbulent microcosms beneath the still, calm surface of the lake of life.
What his characters feel in silence, Colm Tóibín tends to render exquisitely plain though never simple ... There’s great power coiled into these held-back responses to the world. Now in his seventies, Tóibín is getting sparer, more crystalline, losing everything that might have the faintest whiff of sentimentality.
Sits well within Tóibín’s wider catalogue, and his masterful style is evident in this new offering with prose that is tidy and deliberate like geometry. In each of the entries, readers are left to do the math. Most of the time the result is a story that has the ability to be sensational without exaggeration ... Tóibín strikes a distinct, delicate balance: the negative space holds the emotional timbre.
The disciplined calm of the prose adds to the stories’ suggestion that lives are most decisively altered not by dramatic announcements but by what is absorbed slowly, through attention and memory.
Restraint could be the watchword for Tóibín’s style. These stories quietly inhabit each character, their experiences, observations and slow comings-to-terms with difficult realities, which makes for compelling and often surprisingly suspenseful reading. As in so much of Tóibín’s work, the stories in The News From Dublin also powerfully highlight what characters choose not to say, and the consequences of not speaking. All together, it’s a beautiful, well-rounded collection.
