Nora Webster

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Brown, Mark (18 November 2014). "Costa 2014 book awards shortlist includes first novel by ex-Mormon". the Guardian . 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. Starred Review. A novel of mourning, healing and awakening; its plainspoken eloquence never succumbs to the sentimentality its heroine would reject." - Kirkus The novelists have become characters in their own books. By the urgency of the tone, they make clear, however, that, in the aftermath of loss, nothing they can invent compares to it. And that, since they are writers, what happened needs to be written down so that it can be known and shared and understood, so that it can lose its incoherence. And so that they, in their powerlessness and helplessness, can at least still do this, can at least write down what it was like. 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. I noticed that there was very little fiction written from the point of view of a widow. I found two short stories about being a widow – “Happiness” and “In the Middle of the Fields” – by the Irish writer Mary Lavin, whom I had known when I was a student in Dublin, helpful, enabling. I found something also in the last section of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks that interested me – the use of music as a way to inhabit loss, or to allow loss to have its full weight. I remembered my mother, who had very little money, getting a stereo and gradually buying classical LPs. There was one record that she played over and over – a recording of Beethoven’s Archduke Trio with Jacqueline du Pré, Daniel Barenboim and Pinchas Zukerman. I remember the sleeve of the album with a photograph of all three players. I found a recording of it and began to play it.

Nora Webster

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." verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ 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.

Sussler, Betsy (3 November 2014). "Awards: Irish Book; Banff Mountain". Shelf Awareness . Retrieved 7 January 2022. Like Brooklyn, Tóibín’s great novel of an Irishwoman’s exile, Nora Webster is animated by a death in the family. But where Eilis Lacey becomes reaffirmed by her loss, Nora Webster, who is also a strong and intelligent woman, must find a new strength through a more painful, private colloquy with herself. Death, Tóibín seems to be saying, is a bigger bereavement than exile. Ron Rash is renowned for his writing about Appalachia, but his latest book, The Caretaker, begins ... 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. Kirkus called Nora Webster "[a] novel of mourning, healing and awakening," noting that "its plainspoken eloquence never succumbs to the sentimentality its heroine would reject." [1]In Joyce Carol Oates's A Widow's Story, written after the death of her husband, she describes the efforts of her friend C. to throw an enormous dinner party for her, inviting many of her friends, to help ease the pain. "I envision," Oates writes, "a thirty-foot dining room table and at the farther end the widow placed like a leper, as far from the lovely C. as possible." Despite Oates's asking for a smaller event, C. persists, only to find of course that the friends are not free on any of the suggested nights. Oates writes: "I am beginning to realise that though C. has said that she and her husband are 'eager' to see me they are in fact dreading to see me." In Ireland, there is only one Nora – Nora Barnacle, James Joyce’s wife and muse. From its title outwards, Colm Tóibín’s new novel is all about Ireland and, in a larger sense, about an important contemporary Irish writer’s relationship with Joyce, whose work still throws such a long shadow across every angle of Irish literary life. 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 All this is so cleverly braided into the widowhood of Nora Webster and her two boys, Conor and the stuttering, damaged Donal, that Tóibín’s considerable narrative gifts successfully navigate the bumpy intersection of the private and the public. Through the slow personal reawakening of Webster, he finds a subtle way to reflect on Ireland’s need to put its own grief into a larger context.