#8 - Mothers and Sons

Colm Tóibín's new short story collection, Mothers and Sons, took me completely by surprise. I must confess that I don't read a lot of short stories with the exception of Alice Munro and the ones in Taddle Creek. Like so many aspiring writers, I have drawers of unfinished short stories that I'll cull one day for ideas and sharp sentences, but that doesn't mean I seek out the art form. It's a shame because when they're done well, like here, they really are exceptional in the way they convey so much in so few pages. Anyway, like I said the other day, I have tickets to see him read at Harbourfront on February 7th, and I wanted to at least have read one of his books.

And wow.

The stories are magnificent. Each one so utterly and entirely complete, and even though Tóibín's narrative style is somewhat removed, even emotionally distant, you still get to the heart of the characters as quickly as if you were hit by lightning. The first story, "The Use of Reason," reminded me so much of Flannery O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge," and even though there's no Southern grotesque in Tóibín's writing, there is an element of human desperation that finds its way into each of the stories defining a relationship on some level between a mother and a son. And I think the first one, of all of them, remains my favourite. I don't want to give anything away so I won't go into the plots of any of the stories except to say that reading this book was a true pleasure. So much so that it spurned me into my next Around the World in 52 Books read, which is Tóibín's The Master.