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    The Empty Family: Stories
    The Empty Family: Stories
    The Empty Family: Stories
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Empty Family: Stories

    Written by Colm Tóibín

    Narrated by Colm Tóibín, Terry Donnelly, John Keating and

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    About this audiobook

    The bestselling and award-winning author of Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín, returns with a stunning collection of stories—“a book that’s both a perfect introduction to Tóibín and, for longtime fans, a bracing pleasure” (The Seattle Times).

    Critics praised Brooklyn as a “beautifully rendered portrait of Brooklyn and provincial Ireland in the 1950s.” In The Empty Family, Tóibín has extended his imagination further, offering an incredible range of periods and characters—people linked by love, loneliness, desire—“the unvarying dilemmas of the human heart” ( The Observer, UK).

    In the breathtaking long story “The Street,” Tóibín imagines a relationship between Pakistani workers in Barcelona—a taboo affair in a community ruled by obedience and silence. In “Two Women,” an eminent and taciturn Irish set designer takes a job in her homeland and must confront emotions she has long repressed. “Silence” is a brilliant historical set piece about Lady Gregory, who tells the writer Henry James a confessional story at a dinner party.

    The Empty Family will further cement Tóibín’s status as “his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power” ( Los Angeles Times ).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateJan 4, 2011
    ISBN9781442337282
    Author

    Colm Tóibín

    Colm Tóibín was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of eleven novels, including The Master, Brooklyn, and The Magician, and two collections of stories. He has been three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2021, he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature. Tóibín was appointed the Laureate for Irish Fiction 2022-2024.

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    Reviews for The Empty Family

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      The nine stories by Colm Tóibín published under the title of “The Empty Family” are, as would be expected from a writer of Tóibín’s talents, exquisitely crafted. They are rhythmic. Together, they explore the themes of solitude, exile, apartness, grief, death and loss. They range in time from the late XIX Century to the early XXI Century; across two continents and several countries and peoples. Ireland and the Irish figure predominately. But we encounter Americans, Spaniards and Pakistani as well.

      Toibin does probe the souls of his narrators. The accounts are often intimate, secretive. Reading them it is easy to feel like an intruder viewing stealthily and from the shadows a private drama—looking into private worlds. And they lay exposed the contradictions, struggles and ambiguities of the human family.

      The pieces are all heavily reflective. They are enveloped in somber tones. People return to earlier homes or places, with histories of broken or exhausted loves. Critical life situations, in other cases, resurrect memories of alienations or of past, now unproductive, connections. In ”The Street”, two Pakistani immigrants in Barcelona forge a new family structure in the midst of an exploitive sub-culture. But for all the somber tones of the stories, the endings are almost all universally brighter. The narrators come to peaceful and, in the case of Carme in “New Spain” and of the narrator in “The Pearl Fishers”, contented ends.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      If the stories in this collection have one thing in common, it is solitude. Many on the protagonists are alone, perhaps they were once in a relationship, perhaps they just prefer it that way, yet there is an air of melancholy that seems to pervade each story.Many of the stories feature a central gay male character, and a few of the stories are explicit. The final story and the longest centres on a young Pakistani immigrant in Spain living in a closed community of fellow immigrants. It differs from the majority of the stories in this collection in that here we follow a developing relationship as Malik, the younger man, develops an attachment to the older Abdul. It is a story fraught with difficulties, not helped by Abdul's reticence, yet it is a beautiful and touching account.The Empty Family is a fine collection of short stories, very perceptive, involving and moving, above all the they are beautifully written, drawing the reader into the private worlds of the participants, and as such they are deeply affecting.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Toibin presents nine moving stories about love, loss, and longing that span decades, eras, countries, and lifestyles. The effect of such diversity is the recognition of the emotions we all share. In the opening story, Lady Gregory, young wife of an older and no longer terribly interested husband, falls into a dangerous and short-lived affair with a married poet. Two of the stories deal with young men handling the deaths of the mother figures in their lives. In "One Minus One," a young Irish man, now living in Texas, recalls his earlier return to Dublin for his mother's funeral and the loss of his gay lover. In "The Colour of Shadows," Paul, a young gay Irishman, must take responsibility for the last days of the aunt who raised him as she falls deeper into Alzheimer's and ill health. Aunt Josie tends to forget who he is, and when she remembers, she expresses rigid disapproval of his lifestyle. "Two Women" features an elderly, cantankerous but renowned set designer who returns to Dublin to work on what may be her last film. Along the way, she finds herself reminiscing about an early love. The longest and perhaps most touching story in the collection, "The Street" focuses on two Pakistani men who fall in love while working under exploitive conditions in post-Franco Barcelona.Toibin's gentle, poetic prose hits just the right notes for each of these stories. He reminds us that, even though we inevitably realize that love is not necessarily forever, it's part of the human condition to yearn for it, seek for it, bring it back to life within our hearts and minds, if only as the shadow of a memory.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      The Empty Family is Toibin’s second volume of short stories. The previous series (Mothers and Sons) focussed on one specific aspect of family relationships. The Mother-Son relationship features in this volume as well - however, most of these stories focu...s on broader aspects of what it means to exist in a family, or to exist without one. Toibin writes beautifully, and his books repay careful reading. He is reflective, and often somewhat downbeat. Small observations have great significance, and sometimes what is omitted or unseen is as important as what is written. A number of these stories include strong elements of his own experience, discernible from knowledge of his previous biographical writings. Many, but not all, reflect on being a gay man, and this writing may be uncomfortably explicit for some readers. However, Toibin’s writing continues to accumulate admirers and his reputation to rise, and this book will only add to that process.
    • 4/5
      I really liked this book. Toibin writes in a sparse, quiet fashion but it hits home. The last story, "The Street" was absolutely beautiful. Toibin's portrayal of Pakistani immigrant men living in Madrid was spot on. Reading it was so authentic that I would have mistaken Toibin for being a South Asian writer. This is a gentle book, beautifully written. Savor it.
    • 3/5
      I thought this collection was good but uneven. To me, the stories were all over the map, some bland, some brave and frank, some so-so, some good. The explicit sex in two stories may not be to everyone's taste. On the other hand, those were also two of the better stories in my opinion. It's nice to read work from Toibin that features contemporary settings, and in some cases characters who are out gay men. That's a nice change of pace from his wonderful fiction set in the past. I just wish I liked more of the stories here.
    • 5/5
      In the nine riveting stories that make up The Empty Family, Colm Toibin creates people that are exiles, expatriates, and those that are uncomfortable wherever they are. Some are returning to Ireland, or Spain, only to find their countries or families almost unrecognizable. Some are gay and unable to publicly acknowledge their love. Toibin’s characters all display a vulnerability belied by an underlying strength.The Street is an intricate, nuanced story of two homesick and lonely Pakistani laborers in Barcelona who strain against the taboos of their community to express their love in a country where they are all viewed with suspicion. In The New Spain a former communist that fled to London under Franco’s government returns to Spain a decade later to find her family has fully embraced the financial freedoms of democracy.