"The Empty Family: Stories"

Colm Toibin is becoming one of the greatest contemporary writers of fiction. I loved his novel based on Henry James' life, "The Master." I also loved, and wrote about here, coincidentally exactly a year ago on 1/28/11, his novel "Brooklyn." Now I have just finished reading his new short story collection, "The Empty Family" (Scribner, 2011). These beautiful, raw, touching, unique stories take place in Ireland, Spain, England, and the United States. I found something to admire and savor in every one of the stories. Many of them are about immigrants and temporary wayfarers in other countries than their own, and about the conflict between a person's being drawn to his roots in his home country, on the one hand, and on the other hand, his wanting or needing to live in other countries, either for work or out of a kind of desperate need to get away from home and explore new places. Toibin himself is Irish and now lives in both Dublin and New York. He is also one of the first and few leading mainstream literary writers to write about gay relationships and gay sex. He wrote in somewhat veiled terms in "The Master" about the possibility of Henry James' being gay but celibate; in this collection he writes much more explicitly about gay sex in a few of the stories. The longest story (68 pages), "The Street," is about two Pakistani men working in Barcelona, Malik and Abdul, who gradually become close and then lovers. The story is told with much sensitivity to the delicate position these men are in: they have to hide their relationship because their fellow countrymen would not understand and might ostracize them and even take away their livelihoods if they discover the affair. Malik and Abdul and their co-workers feel homesick for their country, and hardly ever go out of their Pakistani area of the city; they are under the thumb of the man who brought them over from Pakistan and who controls their jobs, housing, and freedom. So their love is a kind of beautiful if secret miracle that helps them endure everything else. This book is full of exact descriptions and piercing insights, as well as of tender understanding of the vulnerability of the characters.