The Virginians A Tale Of The Last Century Book

It's not a very promising start, I know, when a reviewer's lead sentence begs your indulgence. In this case, it's to allow my personal reading history with the talented Mr. Tóibín. The first book of his I read was the much-loved Brooklyn in 2010. In fact, I would have purchased the movie rights then and there if I'd had the spare millions lying around. Then I read The Master, his well-written deep-dive into the character of Henry James. That one didn't strike me as cinematic, but it was engaging all the same. At that point, Tóibín was a big blip on my bodar* screen. That's why, when my lovely half-Irish wife and I were on our magical tour of Dublin, I could often be found in the T section of its bookstores. I happened upon this collection at one of them. When I told the sales clerk that I'd enjoyed several Tóibín books in the past, she graciously corrected my pronunciation. I'd said TOY-bin (like Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein, expressing a prurient interest in Madeline Kahn and her "turban"). She told me it was actually CALL-um Toe-BEAN. So now we all know.

I'm lazy when it comes to reviewing short stories. There's no way I'm going to do even capsule summaries when it's more than a handful in the collection. The best you'll get from me is a few loosely related themes, an overall tone, and maybe a mention of an outlier or two. With that in mind:

Common themes - love, displacement, lust, despair, gay life, loneliness, and as The Observer aptly noted, "the unvarying dilemmas of the human heart."

Overall tone - refined in its writing, raw in its emotion, powerful in its impact, and shifting in its people, places, and times.

Outliers - actually, there was just one, and it was bad. First, let me establish the baseline apart from which this one story stood. In general, the characters seemed like real human beings. Their concerns many not have always been our concerns exactly, but you were caught up in their situations and cared about how they fared. The emotions were honest and the writing was superb. Of these other stories in the majority, each, for me, was in 4 and 5 star territory. Then there was "Barcelona, 1975." I'd be willing to give Tóibín the benefit of the doubt if I had a clue which doubt it might be. Did I simply not understand the point? Was it to shock an audience with graphic gay sex? I don't think so since readers who'd be spooked by that would not have made it that far anyway. Was it to show the perils of the libertine bathhouse culture at that time? Somehow that didn't seem right either, since there was no hint that it was a cautionary tale. Nor was it sold as the most liberated and satisfying lifestyle a man of that persuasion could hope for. In fact, there was no emotion whatsoever. The closest equivalent I can think of is a set of instructions for assembling a bookshelf from IKEA. One part is inserted into another, and the parts may be different sizes, but that's about all you get in the way of plot. That's all the character development you get, too. Sorry, Colm, but that one stuck out like a sore thumb. Actually, I take that back. A sore thumb would have been the most interesting plot point in that story.

Rating without the outlier: 4.5

Rating with the outlier: 3.5 rounded down to 3 because the exception was audaciously poor.

*Bodar = (bo)ok (d)etection (a)nd (r)eading