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 ... 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.
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.
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.
