Since the St Paddy’s day parade is going on somewhere out there in Jackson, I think it’s only appropriate that I write about the book I just started because it’s by an Irish author! And so if you’re missing the parade and reading this blog instead, you’ll still get your dose…
Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin, came out last year – but it’s just come out this month in a nice little paperback. It generated some attention in January this year when he won the Costa ‘novel of the year’ prize. At the time I was reading a book by another Irish author, Patrick McCabe, and I made a mental note to read Brooklyn. I’d never read Colm Toibin and, as the above article points out, he’s been churning out books for a while. Apparently really good ones.
Brooklyn is 
about Eilis Lacey, who rather passively (she doesn’t have any better options, doesn’t know how to say no, is mostly fine with her small-town life) emigrates from Ireland to New York in the years following World War 2. She leaves her mum and her sister and begins work in a department store, eventually falling in love and effectively planting herself in America. When news from Ireland calls her back to her hometown, she experiences that strange lurching of place, where home feels foreign and in fact the idea of what ‘home’ means is called into question.
Newsweek wrote that this book ‘captures the essence of homesickness’, and maybe that’s what has drawn me to it so much. If I so much as go on a weekend trip somewhere, I wind up getting ‘homesick’ for it at some point – maybe everybody does this. I guess it’s a version of always wanting something you can’t have.
Not to say that this book is dismal; it’s not. Not so far, anyway. I’m not done with it yet, so I suppose I can’t well sum up how I feel about it. Even though I’d only heard great things about this book, I’m still surprised at just how much I like it. I’ll miss it when I’m done.
Susie
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