|
Brooklyn: A Novel |  | Author: Colm Toibin
Publisher: Scribner
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
Buy Used: $3.76
as of 7/29/2010 22:29 CDT details
You Save: $21.24 (85%)
Seller: briansdiscountstore
Rating:  reviews
Sales Rank: 22935
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 262
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.7 x 1.1
ISBN: 1439138311
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9781439138311
ASIN: 1439138311
Publication Date: May 5, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9781439138311 | | • | Condition: New | | • | Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed |
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
interesting
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, May 2009: Committed to a quiet life in little Enniscorthy, Ireland, the industrious young Eilis Lacey reluctantly finds herself swept up in an unplanned adventure to America, engineered by the family priest and her glamorous, "ready for life" sister, Rose. Eilis's determination to embrace the spirit of the journey despite her trepidation--especially on behalf of Rose, who has sacrificed her own chance of leaving--makes a bittersweet center for Brooklyn. Colm Tóibín's spare portrayal of this contemplative girl is achingly lovely, and every sentence rings with truth. Readers will find themselves swept across the Atlantic with Eilis to a boarding house in Brooklyn where she painstakingly adapts to a new life, reinventing herself and her surroundings in the letters she writes home. Just as she begins to settle in with the help of a new love, tragedy calls her home to Enniscorthy, and her separate lives suddenly and painfully merge into one. Tóibín's haunted heroine glows on the page, unforgettably and lovingly rendered, and her story reflects the lives of so many others exiled from home. --Daphne Durham
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Great story July 14, 2010
Varga Richárd (Budapest, Hungary)
I really loved reading this book. It caught my attention by winning the Costa best book of 2009 award, and I have to say, rightfully so.
It begins a little slowly, with the young Irish girl's coming to America, but from the middle on, it gets all the more interesting. From that part, it's pretty difficult to put it down, as you are eager to find out how the story ends. I really liked the ending, did not see it coming.
All in all, it was an excellent read.
 The Times They Weren't a-Changin'.... July 3, 2010
Marjorie Meyerle (Colorado)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Maybe the Old Days Simply Weren't that Great!
It would be tempting to describe Toibin's "Brooklyn" as merely an immigrant experience novel, depicting the familiar homesickness and struggle inherent in the lives of young Irish women in 1950's Brooklyn. However, much more animates this novel than the obvious story of cultural adjustment. The fate of Eilis Lacy, a seemingly simple, somewhat passive young woman, exemplifies the narrow possibilities of the female sex in post World War II America. Courageous in her endeavors to find a suitable job and comport herself with modesty and respect, she is nonetheless limited in both social and professional opportunity. Thus, predictably, she longs for the comfort and security of her former life in Ireland before a priest, encouraged by her older sister, found her suitable lodging and a job in America. Since presumably she is not capable of being as adventuresome as her charismatic, lively sister, Eilis relies on everyone's advice and reluctantly leaves behind her provincial Irish lifestyle and family to improve her station across the ocean.
The novel proceeds quite prosaically as Eilis' motivations become evident. She is a young woman who has a great deal of self-respect and who has been brought up to be righteous in all professional and social dealings. Quiet, conscientious and inwardly resourceful, she impresses the priest, the landlady and her employer. One glimpses from her long internal descriptions of the boarding house environment and her decision making processes, that she is deliberate in most experiences, if not calculating. She is careful to watch out for her own needs and scrupulously tenacious in presenting her best side to all with whom she comes in contact. She possesses a quiet, eager conscientiousness that is endearing although a little bovine in its effect on others. Quietly attentive and self-controlled as well as steady, she impresses a young Italian plumber she meets at an Irish neighborhood dance. It is through this relationship that the reader sees in Eilis a compliant, passive instrument, an almost dull presence. Nevertheless, Tony, who admires her for some inexplicable reason, is immediately smitten. As time passes, while she is not sure she wants to be married or assume the role of maternity just yet, she acquiesces to his wishes and spends all her free time with him while at the same time pursuing a bookkeeping certificate in hopes of attaining a better paying job and keeping her homesickness at bay. Soon she is swallowed up in American life and her romance until an urgent request arrives from home, and she departs for Ireland.
Once back in Ireland with her aging mother, she is drawn to a local man from her past whom she allows to court her. She considers resuming her old life in the village where she grew up. It is evident through her neglect of Tony by not answering his letters or calling to reserve her passage home, that she is clearly ambivalent about Tony and her life in America. She keeps the relationship with Tony secret until the very last. Because of these actions she comes across as manipulative, somewhat duplicitous and insincere and yet her introspective yearnings and insights are universal. Her clearly enumerated ambivalence is evidence of the conflict experienced by most young women of her times.
Before the pill, young women were supposed to remain chaste. They were to observe rules of social propriety, even though she does violate these with Tony. She meets his family, and the various brothers emerge as respectful except for Frank, for whom she seems to feel an attraction that is implied but not developed. His parents' modest living quarters and their sleeping arrangements illustrate the hardships of immigrant families, while the family ambitions suggest the gumption that drove America to excel in the fifties.
The book proceeds with Eilis' moment by moment impressions of a series of trivial, amorphous and seemingly unrelated events through which she proceeds carefully and deliberately until small actions add up to a fairly complete portrait of Eilis Lacy and her ordinary life. In this manner, characterization is achieved through simple, linear narration of mundane events. A problem with characterization might be that everyone seems to step up to the plate to assist Eilis: Rose, Father Flood, her fellow passenger on the boat, Mrs. Kehoe, Mrs. Fiorino, Tony, Jim, and other townspeople in Ireland and Brooklyn. Her passivity and neediness compel others' assistance. While this is believable in that Eilis is a prototype of fifties femininity, she does little to arouse the imagination of a self-reliant and imaginative contemporary American female reader.
In the end Eilis is denied ample opportunity to make the most important choice of her lifetime and instead must allow circumstances to make it for her. Her honesty as well as her genuine practicality propel her back to America and Brooklyn, where in all probability she will live with Tony in a house his family built on Long Island while the couple pursues the American dream of family and upward mobility, goals she could not have achieved in Ireland.
The book is simple with fluid, poetic prose, and it does manage to move through a storyline, but it is often slow and unimaginative, a record of a simple, uninformed life of little intellectual stimulation or imagination but laden with earnest endeavor and a dogged pursuit of stability and happiness, reflecting the judicious plans of most young working women of the fifties. The book suggests a subtle conspiracy on the part of society to hold a woman to conventional objectives and prior commitments. It would be anathema to divorce, for example, or to openly defy convention by entertaining a man in one's room. The alternatives were limited for the female sex which is ostensibly why the more lively and imaginative older sister Rose refrains from the stultifying conventions of provincial marriage, instead remaining single and earning her own keep. Most concerning is the fact that at the climax either Eilis submits to Miss Kelly's terms of extortion or she admits to herself, her mother and her Irish suitor her own doubts about her future in America. In the face of a decision that would require mental strength rather than compliance, she capitulates to convention and chooses the path of least resistance, the one most women of her generation fell back on. Thus, in this sense, Toibin illustrates the restrictive conventions and limited opportunity that held women in their place and narrowed their choices. Consequently, one senses that Eilis' marriage will lack fulfillment even though Tony will do his best to be a good provider. The fault will lie in herself that she cannot extract from matrimony the satisfaction she yearns for. Part of this is because she doesn't really know who she is; in those days, women weren't encouraged to understand what they wanted or to pursue their dreams. It is made clear she isn't certain she's ready for children, but the demands of the times will squelch her fears and reservations because the moral conduct, the expectations of fifties society will demand her compliance, and alas, Eilis Lacy is no rebel. She lacks the imagination to buck convention or the assertiveness to confront other people. Like her associates of the times, she seeks to please and thereby fulfill her role of a dutifully "feminine" post war woman. An automaton, for sure.
Women, aren't we glad, the roles have expanded and society has become more complicated? Eilis' life with its sweet, plodding, simple pleasures and predictable nuances reads like an "I Remember Mama" episode. Please spare me the fifties. No wonder many women resorted to valium! Bridge or canasta anyone? How about a coffee klatch in suburban Long Island?
Nevertheless, there is in "Brooklyn" a compelling, quiet tone even if it is almost somnambulant in parts. There are beautiful descriptions of the city and Coney Island and meditations on Eilis' part that spring vividly to life through the haze of robotic activity. There is also a sweetness to the book, a sense of our collective loss of innocence as Americans and women. The book is well worth reading, if a little ponderous and disjointed at times. Read it for a sense of the post-War immigrant experience and of an earnest period in American history, now gone with the wind. Read it for the elegant, subtle prose.
Marjorie Meyerle
Colorado Writer
Author of "Bread of Shame"
|
|
|
CERTAIN CONTENT THAT APPEARS ON THIS SITE COMES FROM AMAZON SERVICES LLC. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’ AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME.
| |
