Nora Webster

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Perhaps there was something there with Donal that could’ve been touched more upon with his stuttering (possible cause or trigger mechansim), his love of photography (although it did focus some time on it but it was from the perspective of Nora which didn’t lend any intrigue to the matter) and his and Conor’s distance with their mother. Tóibín’s immersion in James has helped him accumulate the tools of a fastidious yet empathetic craft, while his depiction of a loving but caustic and telluric Mary has prepared him for this novel, in which Tóibín witnesses his own grief as a teenage boy through the inner-workings of a bereaved mother’s mind. She is fiercely intelligent, at times difficult and impatient, at times kind, but she is trapped by her circumstances, and waiting for any chance which will lift her beyond them.

I stayed on my own in Wexford, in a house near the sea, and began to prepare for it, reading the scenes where the ghost of Hamlet’s father appeared, and also the ghost scene TS Eliot’s Little Gidding. She hasn’t worked outside the home in twenty-five years, has neither savings nor higher education and cannot look to extended family to support her, her two daughters pursuing University, or the two boys still at home.

Nora’s Uncle Jim was on the anti-Treaty side in the Irish civil war, and was temporarily interned by the Free State government. Taking place in Ireland against the backdrop of the Catholic protestant violence and the burning of the embassy, but also against the backdrop of wonderful music, Nora eventually finds her way forward. In the same way that, in Brookyln, Enniscorthy is depicted as a foundry of accent and lore on the old side of the Atlantic, the pre-Christian matriarchy of the Sidhe makes itself felt in Nora Webster through the power of nuns and aunts. I think that just encompassed my issue with the book, is the disconnect and the flatness of the story.

So, too, Philip Vellacott, who translated Euripides's version of the play, wonders about this scene and identifies the point "where Orestes should reveal himself … He does not reveal himself. Tóibín also knows that when it comes to expressing ‘the within of things’ – to borrow a phrase from Teilhard de Chardin, the Catholic paleontologist whose influence in the Vatican II era is evident in the milieu of this book – social realism can be as sharp and as subtle a mode as there is. It seemed in all these books that I was circling the story that was Nora Webster’s, working out ways of writing about family and loss and trauma.The journey is sometimes painful; there are moments when you fear she may lapse into self-pity and solipsism. In Nora Webster, it is as if Colm Tóibín has set to the task of resolving Yeats’ caveats and perfecting this ‘new literature’. There are so many rich moments that show a woman coming into her own: the book’s opening scenes when Nora decides to sell the family’s modest summer home; the simple acts of having her hair done in a new style, purchasing a hi-fi, or deciding to update the “back room” where the family spends most of its time. In Tóibín, the reality of this socio-religious contract is not employed as a denigration or cancellation of faith’s possibilities. It is so interesting and engrossing that one finishes it wanting to know what happens to the characters – and this society – next.

She thought traditional treatment of plot and character either no longer interesting, for her anyway. Robert Lowell’s remark on poetry is transferable here to Tóibín’s prose: ‘A poem is an event,’ Lowell wrote, ‘not the record of an event.Her older one — based on the author’s 12-year-old self — has grown withdrawn and developed a stammer. From one of contemporary literature's most acclaimed and beloved authors comes this magnificent new novel set in a small town in Ireland in the 1960s, where a fiercely compelling, too-young widow and mother of four moves from grief, fear, and longing to unexpected discovery. In Joyce Carol Oates's A Widow's Story, written after the death of her husband, she describes the efforts of her friend C.

Feeling lost without her daughters Nora wonders if she is responsible for letting her family fall apart. Even though I wrote other books over the next thirteen and a half years, I added to Nora Webster every year, or deleted something from it. When Nora gets her "fashionable cut" from Bernie, her enthusiasm turns to dismay, and she thinks that "anyone who saw her on the way home would think that she had lost her mind" (p. Through the patronage of his aunt and uncle, Margaret and Jim, Donal is encouraged in his interest in photography.

As Nora steps across the stones near the river and onto the strand, she also remembers the shocking pain Maurice experienced in the days before he died: his moans could be heard through the hospital. We are not only led to worry about what will happen to them in those intervening hours; crucially, we intuit how formative these days and weeks may eventually become. Tom Jones, Waverley, Emma, David Copperfield: it used to be common for novelists to name their book after the principal character. Apparently, Colm Tóibín wrote the first chapter of 'Nora Webster' in the spring of 2000, but didn't get to complete it fully until September 2013.