Saluting her compatriot, the great lady of Irish letters Edna O’Brien (1930-2024), who died in the middle of summer (The World (July 28), the writer Colm Toibin noted in the daily TheIrish Times : “I like the intimate tone of his novels, his art of the underlying, of the whispered, his attention to nuance.” So many rare and subtle characteristics that apply perfectly to the work that the author of the Maître (ed. Robert Laffont, 2005) and the Magician (Grasset, 2022) himself built.
In thirty-five years of writing, Toibin, born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, in the county of Westford, has built up a rich corpus of a dozen novels (translated by the very faithful and very precise Anna Gibson), short stories, essays, articles and even a film script (Back to Montaukby German director Volker Schlöndorff, 2017) which make him one of the great prose writers of his generation. The publication of his new novel, Long Islanda story that he confided to “Le Monde des livres”, he put “fourteen years of thinking”, is an opportunity to return to some of his chosen themes.
Silence
Would Colm Toibin go so far as to say, with Vigny, that “only silence is great” ? The fact is that this one occupies, in the background, a considerable place in the Toibini universe. The main characters “save their words”often not having “nothing to say”at least “nothing that is easy and simple” to state. Some forbid themselves to speak – like Jim, the unfortunate lover of Brooklyn (ed. Robert Laffont, 2010), found in Long Island : “He began to count the seconds, up to one hundred, then up to two hundred. (…). He felt that his question was still hanging in the air. And then it became clear to him that[Eilis] would not answer.” Others weaponize non-dialogue – like Eilis’ husband Tony: « [Il] had guessed his intention and, without doing anything, remaining silent, his gaze fixed on the road, he made the task impossible for him. (…) There was nothing in his expression or the way he breathed or drove. Yet he created an aura of vulnerability, even innocence, around himself that was designed to prevent him from uttering a single irrevocable word – a threat that, once uttered, could never be taken back.
In Colm Toibin’s toolbox, secrecy, silent hesitation, blankness, omission, restraint and of course the unsaid form a panoply of privileged instruments. In counterpoint to his crystalline sentences, they allow him to create, in the literal sense of the term, the“in-hear” or the “misunderstanding” which frames his entire narrative. So much so that his raw material is not really the word, but rather its cruel absence, this great void of speech, painful and ambiguous, in which he imprisons his characters.
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