PDF Ebook Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature, by Colm Toibin

PDF Ebook Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature, by Colm Toibin

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Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature, by Colm Toibin

PDF Ebook Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature, by Colm Toibin

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Review

John Banville Irish Times Is it permissible even to speak, as so many do nowadays, of a "gay community"? Tóibín treats [this] and many other questions with confidence and authority, both of which attributes are only strengthened by the moderation of his tone and the depth of his compassion. He writes with rare tenderness of figures as disparate as Elizabeth Bishop and Francis Bacon, Thomas Mann and Roger Casement, Thom Gunn and Pedro Almodóvar.John Gardner Times Literary Supplement It is Colm Tóibín's great strength that he is able to attune himself to nuances, and to the ways in which people "invent" themselves.Ruth Padel Financial Times Tóibín demonstrates wonderfully how a dedicated writer always thinks with other writers: their lives and sexuality, as well as their work. Tóibín can be engagingly mischievous and witty, but is deeply serious about books.Mark Levin Men's Journal Tóibín is a superb technician with a brave soul.Robert Sullivan Vogue Tóibín writes with high-voltage restraint; his sentences are masterfully devoid of trickery...He is tuned in to the silent language of families, the messages that are unspoken and slip past the rest of the world, landing deep into the hearts of those who understand.

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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.

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Product details

Paperback: 272 pages

Publisher: Scribner (June 2, 2004)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0743244672

ISBN-13: 978-0743244671

Product Dimensions:

5.5 x 0.8 x 8.4 inches

Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

3.0 out of 5 stars

11 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#1,305,407 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

This is my first nonfiction read by Toibin. I've read three of his novels and think he gets better with each one. THE BLACKWATER LIGHTSHIP was an altogether fine book and deserved the Booker Prize I think. So I couldn't wait to start this one. I confess that I'm not sure what is going on here. In the introduction Mr. Toibin presents some of his favorite artists. He says that he writes about "gay figures for whom, in the main, being gay seemed to come second in their public lives" writers who write in code, whose works are not published during their lifetime, who use vague pronouns in their poetry. (Certainly I wouldn't have wanted to miss a novel like "DEATH IN VENICE," for instance.) Toibin goes on further to say that writing this book helped him come to terms with his "own interest in secret, erotic energy," his interest in both Catholicism and Irish Protestants, his admiration for "figures who lived in a dark time and were not afraid," and his fascination with sadness and tragedy. Herein lives Mr. Toibin's problem. He takes on too much in too little space. Additionally his treatment of these artists he admires is wildly uneven, both in depth and space. For example, the chapter on Oscar Wilde covers almost 50 pages; the chapter on Mark Doty-- one of my favorite writers-- covers only 7. And for the life of me I'm not sure what Mr. Toibin is trying to say in the concluding chapter entitled "Good-bye to Catholic Ireland," a chapter I read twice. Like many Catholics who attempt to say what is wrong with their church, Mr. Toibin is too "tentative," a word he uses elsewhere in this book, in his taking on the church. Certainly he is not alone in his dilemma, however. It's easy for me to make that criticism, never having walked in a Catholic altar boy's shoes either. In Toibin's chapter on Elizabeth Bishop, we are told that "like all orphans, Bishop was clever at making friends and inventing a family for herself." I suspect that that statement is true for many people but for "all orphans"? I'm not sure that that is a true statement.There is a lot to like about this book, however. Mr. Toibin is never dull and is best when doing a narrative, something we would expect from a fine novelist. For example, when he describes a party that both he and Almodovar attended in Madrid, I wanted to be there. When I finished this book, I wanted to reread James Baldwin and read for the first time both Elizabeth Bishop and Thom Gunn. Toibin is also good at giving us delicious trivia about people. For example, we learn that Francis Bacon slept with a dog the night before being examined for military service in order to exacerbate his asthma and flunk his physical.I'm certainly glad I read this book and would read anything by this writer. I just don't think this book is as good as Mr. Toibin's fiction.

Toibin's books are always GOOD!

The title of this book is highly inaccurate and is no more than a bait. There is very little about love and lovers in the telling of these gay lives. Except for the piece on Oscar Wilde, they are mentioned either sparingly or not at all. For one of these characters, the author even forgot to tell us that he is gay. Instead, Colm prefers to undertake a critical review of their artistic work but that is not what a reader expects from the cover. The choice of gay lives is also highly idiosyncratic and offers no sense of a logical collection. This is a product of lazy research that hardly befits the prominence of the author and his obvious linguistic skills. No good enough!

Does the fact that Colm Toibin is a gay Irish writer mean he has greater insight into the works of gay Irish writers than those of us who are not gay or Irish? Based on this book, I would say the answer is an emphatic No.It is a collection of essays described as “Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature” even though its subjects include an artist and a filmmaker. Toibin rehashes old cases like Oscar Wilde, Roger Casement and Walt Whitman and writes about other homosexual artists like Francis Bacon and James Baldwin. He even throws a lesbian in for good measure – Elizabeth Bishop. Toibin generally mixes a bit of biography, autobiography and literary criticism as he tries to explain how the characters' “gayness” affected their work. I found it so dull and unconvincing that I kept skipping pages until I eventually gave up as James Baldwin appeared as the next item on the production line.I am not even sure of the accuracy at times. At one point he writes: “…many or most of the figures who re-created modern writing were gay, or Irish, or Jewish: Melville, Whitman, Hopkins, James, Yeats, Kafka, Woolf, Joyce, Stein, Beckett, Mann, Proust, Gide, Firbank, Lorca, Cocteau, Auden, Forster, Cavafy.” First of all, what is the link between being gay, Irish and Jewish and, secondly, were Joyce, Yeats, Hopkins and Mann really homosexual?I think Toibin was lucky to find a company willing to publish this unconvincing mish-mash.

Colm Toibín was approached by a London literary journal; with the prospective of producing brief lives of gay cultural figures in the twentieth century; though he was initially hesitant, they kept sending along to him books to review and he found himself writing the pieces anyway. We should be grateful he did so: he collected them in this anthology, and they're absolutely terrific. Toibin discovered from this he had a real flair for life writing (which he demonstrated later in his brief biography LADY GREGORY'S TOOTHBRUSH and his novel of Henry James's later ears, THE MASTER), and his writingh has just the right approach: he's amusing but never heavy-handed, and he is extraordinary at finding just the right anecdote to illuminate an entire life. The pieces on James Baldwin and Francis Bacon are the best on the book (and sent me out to read more on them), but all of the pieces are terrific... with the exception of a silly piece on Pedro Alomodovar he wrote for VANITY FAIR that just doesn't fit in with the rest of the anthology. (It's written in that contemptible and self-congratulatory VANITY FAIR profile style, and tells us little about Almodovar's actual life.)

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