276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Nora Webster

£4.995£9.99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

Unlike Eilis Lacey, Nora does not cross the Atlantic, she learns to sing. The discovery of music in her life gives her “a line towards brightness, or some beginning”, writes Tóibín, a master of less is more. At the same time, because he is also exploring Ireland at a crossroads, an infinitely fascinating web of allusion, taut with nuance and subtlety, and because no Irish writer returning to his or her homeland can ever quite step out of Joyce’s shadow, Nora Webster carries a burden of detail missing from Brooklyn. Put simply, Tóibín’s novel contains an awful lot of its author and his resonant sonority. This cuts both ways, good and bad.

Nora Webster, Tóibín's new novel, draws on his memories of his father's death – in doing so, it joins a rich tradition of writing about loss, from Sophocles to Joan Didion I wrote the first chapter of my novel Nora Webster in the spring of 2000, in the same season as I wrote the first chapter of The Master, my novel about Henry James. Both books dealt with a protagonist over four or five years. Alone in the world, both James and Nora Webster attempted to find a way out of failure or grief or loss. Although The Master required a great deal of research and Nora Webster almost none, I found The Master easier to work on, and easier to finish. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Brown, Mark (23 March 2015). "Akhil Sharma wins Folio prize for fiction". the Guardian . Retrieved 7 January 2022.This idea of the personality as suddenly protean under the pressure of loss belongs fundamentally to the literature of grief because, of course, it belongs to the experience. But I must have sat up when I came to this passage in Lavin's story "Happiness": "When Father went to hospital Mother went with him and stayed in a small hotel across the street so she could be with him all day from early to late. 'Because it was so awful for him, being in Dublin,' she said. 'You have no idea how he hated it.' Maybe I thought this would be in other books in the future – such a precise image of what had happened to us – but I never found it again. It was only there. It is in the novel I have written, Nora Webster, but it took me a long time to find a dramatic form for those words. Slowly, his name ceased to be mentioned in the house. CS Lewis has a description of the same silence after his wife's death: "I cannot talk to the children about her. The moment I try, there appears on their faces neither grief, nor love, nor fear, nor pity, but the most fatal of non-conductors, embarrassment. They look as if I were committing an indecency. They are longing for me to stop. I felt just the same after my mother's death when my father mentioned her. I can't blame them. It's the way boys are." Morales, Macey (8 April 2015). "ALA unveils shortlist for 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction". American Library Association . Retrieved 7 January 2022.

I thought at first of writing the book from my own perspective, rather than my mother's, but when I tried to set some of that down, I found there was nothing, or not enough for a novel. It was as though the experience had hollowed me out and was, from my perspective, too filled with silence and distance for me to be able to harness it for a novel's purposes. Meanwhile, Nora can’t stop thinking about Maurice and how much she needs him. Unable to imagine her life improving, she feels her best days are behind her. Seeing how much she’s struggling, Maurice’s family offers her money. They pay for Fiona’s training and they help Aine with her fees. Nora thinks she is a bad mother because she can’t look after her own children. BEA 2015: Shortlist for the Carnegie Medals". PublishersWeekly.com. 27 May 2015 . Retrieved 7 January 2022.Colm Tóibín is the author of ten novels, including The Magician, his most recent novel; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster, as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. Three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York. Brown, Mark (18 November 2014). "Costa 2014 book awards shortlist includes first novel by ex-Mormon". the Guardian . Retrieved 7 January 2022.

Sussler, Betsy (3 November 2014). "Awards: Irish Book; Banff Mountain". Shelf Awareness . Retrieved 7 January 2022. I enjoyed this quiet and unassuming novel, watching Nora and the boys change as Nora learns to live her own life. I loved the moment, three years later, when she realizes she can do what she wants now, that there is no one who can tell her she can't. In this case, it was about redecorating her home. I loved the two boys, they too change in many ways, but the youngest watches closely everything that goes on. It takes great skill as a writer to make the most common events interesting and for me this author did just that.In plain and unsentimental prose, Toibin gives us the story of a woman, Nora Webster, whose husband of many years has died. Leaving her alone, with two younger boys and two older daughters, she must find her way through life for herself and her children. The writing of Lewis and Barnes and Oates about grief is deeply personal, precise and particular. The feeling they describe is unique because the person grieved over was unique. The loss happened only once. But the writing is also public; it does not come in diary form with many cryptic references. Its source is perhaps the very source of fiction itself – the mysterious and compulsive need to find a rhythm and an artful tone to suggest and communicate the most private feelings and imaginings and facts to someone else, to make sentences which will move from mirroring the writer to allowing the reader to catch a more intense glimpse of the world. The book came as the result of a battle between the night and the day. At night I would think of a scene that might work in the book. By the time I went to sleep I almost had it ready for the morning. In the morning, however, it did not pass the unforgiving test called the hard light of day.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment