“Long Island” by Colm Toibin, a great novel of double uprooting

Published on September 28, 2024 at 09:27.

The return to the land of Irish emigrants, with all that this entails of expectations and internal conflicts, is almost a novel genre in its own right. Colm Toibin’s new book, Long Islanddeals with the second return of Eilis Lacey, some twenty years after the one recounted in Brooklynpublished in 2009 and translated into French in 2011. It is not at all necessary to have read the first to appreciate the second.

Long Island is a novel of double uprooting. The young girl, pushed by her family in the 1950s to look for work in New York, is now – we are in the 1970s – a woman who has gained autonomy. She has a comfortable situation, a husband and children, a job. However, she realizes that she is completely alone. Impossible to have a frank discussion with her husband Tony, borrowed and prudish. If only about the woman he got pregnant, and the baby that the deceived and furious husband threatens to bring home when it is born. The family environment is oppressive, the spouses’ pavilion adjoining those of Tony’s parents and brothers. In this clan of Italian-Americans, around the big table of the Sunday meal from which we cannot escape, no one really cares to know who the Irish girl is and what she feels.

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