The South: A Novel - Softcover

Toibin, Colm

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1476704481 ISBN 13: 9781476704487

Publisher: Scribner, 2012

Synopsis

The first highly acclaimed novel from an “immensely gifted and accomplished writer” (The Washington Post), about an Irishwoman who creates a new life in post-war Spain.

In 1950, Katherine Proctor leaves Ireland for Barcelona, determined to escape her family and become a painter. There she meets Miguel, an anarchist veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and begins to build a life with him. But Katherine cannot escape her past, as Michael Graves, a fellow Irish émigré in Spain, forces her to reexamine all her relationships: to her lover, her art, and the homeland she only thought she knew.

The South is a novel of classic themes—of art and exile, and of the seemingly irreconcilable yearnings for love and freedom—to which Colm Tóibín brings a new, passionate sensitivity.

About this title

About the Author:

Colm Tóibín is the author of nine novels, including The Blackwater Lightship; 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 Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know, a look at three nineteenth-century Irish authors. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. Three times shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A married Irishwoman leaves her family and finds fulfillment with a painter in Spain: no fireworks in this muted first novel from Irish journalist Toibin, though he does avoid rebirth-in-the- sun clich‚s. The year is 1950. What causes 32-year-old Katherine Proctor to bolt from husband Tom, son Richard, and their southern Irish farm is Tom's dragging their poor neighbors into court when they infringe on his land; it's her land too, and Tom's arrogance gives the deathblow to a loveless marriage. In London, Katherine gets encouragement from her mother (who had left her husband during the Troubles of 1920) and moves on to Barcelona (where her mother's checks will sustain her). Through the common interest of painting, she soon meets Michael Graves, a working-class man from her hometown who will become a supportive friend, and Miguel, who will become her lover. Miguel sells enough paintings for the two to move to the Pyrenees, to a village that feels like ``the quiet top of the world.'' An anarchist fighter against Franco, Miguel had retreated here during the Civil War; slowly Katherine realizes that neither their ``ravenous'' love nor the birth of a daughter, Isona, will heal the wounds of a war that for Miguel still continues. Ominously, he starts to see Katherine as the class enemy; after police harassment and the death of his ``leader,'' Carlos Puig, he goes to pieces, killing Isona and himself. The book's final third skims the years rapidly, as Katherine returns to Ireland, makes peace with her grown son Richard and his wife (Tom has died), and devotes herself to her painting. Toibin's spare prose (not mannered or fake Hemingway) and partial glimpses into Katherine's consciousness and background (Protestant gentry) work well enough at first, but as the years pile up, so do the questions; eventually, Toibin's withholding technique looks like a simple inability to deliver. Still, a promising debut. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1476704481
• ISBN 13: 9781476704487
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240