Product Description

Each of the nine stories in this beautifully written, intensely intimate collection centers on a transformative moment that alters the delicate balance of power between mother and son, or changes the way they perceive one another. With exquisite grace and eloquence, Tóibín writes of men and women bound by convention, by unspoken emotions, by the stronghold of the past. Many are trapped in lives they would not choose again, if they ever chose at all.

A man buries his mother and converts his grief to desire in one night. A famous singer captivates an audience, yet cannot beguile her own estranged son. And in "A Long Winter," Colm Tóibín's finest piece of cction to date, a young man searches for his mother in the snow-covered mountains where she has sought escape from the husband who controls and confines her.

Winner of numerous awards for his fifth novel, The Master -- including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award -- Tóibín brings to this stunning first collection an acute understanding of human frailty and longing. These are haunting, profoundly moving stories by a writer who is himself a master.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #168709 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Amazon.com Review
The nine stories in Mothers and Sons examine in depth some of the ways that the bond that is forged--or not--between mothers and their sons is altered, re-formed, or broken forever. In The Master, his fictionalized life of Henry James, Toíbín made the reader see and understand the writer more fully than ever before. Similarly, these new stories look at relationships between fully formed adults and, with a few deft strokes, make clear what their mutual history has brought them to. In most cases, they must deal with loss, while trying to grasp the complexities of that sometimes precarious balance between a mother and her son.

In the first story, "The Use of Reason," a lifelong burglar is nearly brought down by his mother, who talks too much when she drinks in her local pub. In "A Song," Noel, on the town with a group of his musician friends, ends up in the same bar as his estranged mother, who is asked to sing. She sings an Irish ballad about love and treachery and he is convinced that she is singing directly to him. In "A Priest in the Family," Molly's son Frank is accused of abuse, but no one has the courage to tell her until it is almost time for the trial. Her reaction is not entirely predictable. "Three Friends" takes place after a young man attends his mother's funeral. He joins his friends for a night of carousing and drugs ending with a late-night swim, where he is emboldened to make an overt sexual pass at one of his buddies, with interesting results. The final story, "A Long Winter," is set in Spain in a remote village. Miquel's mother drinks. Everyone knows it but Miquel. His father pours out her supply of booze and she leaves the house. So far it's a simple story. It doesn't stay that way. Each of these stories has its own gravitas, its own sadness, and that laser-beam of insight that is Toíbín's trademark. --Valerie Ryan

From Publishers Weekly
Nine stories from the author of The Master, The Blackwater Lightship and three other novels explore what happens when mothers and sons confront one another as adults. The sons include a middle-aged petty criminal, a young alienated pub musician and a regular guy whose drug-fueled mourning takes him into new sexual territory. The mothers include a widow who married above her class, a woman whose son's depression hangs over her and her husband's lives and a woman whose son is a priest being charged with abuse. In "The Name of the Game," the widowed Nancy Sheridan finds herself saddled with three children and a debt-ridden supermarket. In "Famous Blue Raincoat," former–folk-rock sensation-turned-smalltime-photographer Lisa is distressed by her son Luke's interest in her band, but refuses to tread on his curiousity, which forces her to reconfront the band's painful end. Longing, frustrated expectations and an offhandedly gorgeous Ireland run steadily throughout—except in the concluding, near-novella-length "A Long Winter," set in a Spanish village, and featuring Miguel, his younger brother, Jordi, and their mother, whose drinking may not be the only secret Miguel discovers during preparations for Jordi's departure for his military service. Wistful, touching and complex, these stories form a panoramic portrait of loss. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Being Irish, the writer Colm Tóibín must forever defend himself against accusations of an inborn, uncontrollable sentimentalism. He certainly hasn't made his struggle any easier by writing a collection of short stories all about the relationship between mothers and their sons -- in the wrong hands, a recipe for mawkishness that can end only with the pipes calling Danny boy from glen to glen while his beloved Ma waits patiently for him in sunshine or in shadow.

But Tóibín -- whose previous novel The Master won acclaim for its nuanced depiction of Henry James -- isn't that kind of writer. Though he's not above gently tugging at heartstrings, he seems more interested in mapping the silent, awkward distance between his characters than in celebrating any sort of mystical connection. Like moons, the sons in this collection are caught in the powerful orbits of the women who birthed them; they spin and shine with what looks like self-determination, but they know they can never travel too far without being pulled back in.

The desperate mother in "The Name of the Game," one of the strongest stories here, puts everything she has into rebuilding her life after the sudden death of her husband, who has left her with three children and a failing business. Using her last pennies, she converts her moribund grocery store into a fish-and-chips shop and dreams of making enough money to escape her tiny village and start again in the anonymous suburbs of Dublin. Gerard, her adolescent son, doesn't want to leave -- he's at the age when his obligation to obey his mother's directives is just about to be replaced by his right to do as he pleases. The tantalizing nearness of adult autonomy brings tears to his eyes; he can see the life he has imagined for himself right there in front of him, but his mother stands in the way.

In "The Use of Reason," a hardened Dublin gangster must work his way around a different kind of obstacle: his alcoholic mother's penchant for bragging to anyone who'll listen about her boy's toughness and loyalty, not to mention his cleverness at evading the authorities. But that same fiercely prideful love comes as a comfort to the disgraced son in "A Priest in the Family." Facing charges of clerical sexual abuse, he encourages his elderly mother to take a long vacation, away from the sordid headlines and scandalous details. Her simple, reflexive refusal to leave her son in his moment of despair and ignominy is the most poignant moment in a book filled with many.

Ending Mothers and Sons is "A Long Winter," which, uniquely among these stories, takes place in Catalonia rather than in Ireland. As a young man searches for his missing mother -- she has walked into the snowy mountains after an argument with his father -- he slowly girds himself for the near certainty of her death. In his sadness and confusion, he takes comfort in the arms of the houseboy his father has hired to perform those chores the mother once handled. Freudian critics will be parsing this one for years to come, but Tóibín isn't trying to be perverse. Strange fires burn where love and grief collide. Here, as in all the wise, tender and illuminating stories to be found in this collection, he aims simply to show how, for better or for worse, the bond between mother and son is as inexplicable as it is unbreakable.

-- Jeff Turrentine, a critic whose work has appeared in Book World, the New York Times and Slate.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Moments of severence
Often I had to search for the mother-son relationship in these stories, because I was looking for a more traditional, warm bond between mothers and their sons, until I found that in these stories it is all about moments at which this bond is disturbed, often even severed. Beautiful prose. What annoyed me was the abrupt ending of several stories, which left me feeling that I missed something. Or can it be that Toibin just wants to focus on those moments of severence?

Irrisistible and delicious
The characters created by Toibin are memorable, sometimes startling, sometimes chilling, and sometimes wryly humorous. My favorite is an art thief, from a blue collar background, who burns masterpieces to avoid being arrested by the police, who were notified of his crime by his alcoholic mother who got drunk and ran her mouth...

Each story is tightly crafted - some about a worshipful relationship, some about co-dependence, some about total distance. There's reality and exploration of the dark corners of our familiar relationships.

Memorable stories
The thread that ties the beautifully written nine stories in this book together is that in each one there is a complex relationship between a mother and a son. I don't think that all of them `focus' on this relationship, as the blurb on the back has it, for only in four of the nine stories is it central. Rather, each one seems to me to focus on either the mother or the son; but whichever it is, we are let deeply into that person's thoughts and see the world through that person's eyes, and mostly it is a sad or even tragic world. A death figures in several of the stories. Some are most evocatively set in various very Irish communities: a criminal one in the first story, an Irish pub in the second, a small village where everyone knows everyone else in others. The long last story is set in the mountains of Spain. All are memorable in their deceptively simple style and in their psychological content.