Book of the Week: The Empty Family
Every Monday, we'll be letting you know about new releases the
editors at O and Oprah.com couldn't stop reading. This week, we're obsessed with a paperback, the new edition of:
How do you
keep a memory alive? How do you erase it? These two conflicting questions form
the cornerstone of The Empty Family, Colm Tóibín's masterful collection of short stories. In
Silence, Lady Gregory (a character based on a real-life friend of Henry
James) publishes thinly-veiled retellings of her love affair. In Two
Women, a woman known only Frances cuts off any human connection and
possibility of emotion, so that memories of her dead unfaithful lover can't
intrude, only to emerge into the real world for a business trip and find herself
confronted at every turn by reminders of him. But for Tóibín himself, both
these approaches to memory seem flawed. Nowhere is this demonstrated more
thoroughly than in the title story The Empty Family in which a nameless,
genderless character mixes vague recollections of a former lover with the
discovery of a stone on the beach, which he notes has been battered by time yet
is “all the more alive for that, as though the battle between colour and water
had offered it a mute strength." Reading the account of the stone, which is
tucked between enigmatic yet still painful details of a bygone relationship,
it’s hard to not be convinced that memory's great power is its "mute strength”
which endures no matter our warping or distortions, no matter how hard we try to cling
to it or run away.
Read More:
9 books that will help you change your life
Find a (sort of) sequel to your favorite recent read
Read More:
9 books that will help you change your life
Find a (sort of) sequel to your favorite recent read
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