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The South - Reviews
Don DeLillo
A strong and moving work of fiction about the hard truths of changing one's
life. A grand achievement.
Sunday Independent
The South is surely the finest first novel by an Irish writer since John
Banville's career began.
Library Journal
This exceptional first novel has the unusual quality of taking Irish material,
allegedly unique, and making it European, a matter of some significance on the
brink of the 1992 European Community. Here, in 1950, Katherine Proctor flees
husband, child, and County Wexford for Spain. She, a Catalan lover, and another
Irish emigre, painters all, fashion new worlds in their work while fighting past
worlds in their lives. Toibin sketches this predicament with restrained vignettes
concentrated on Katherine's general discontents and momentary satisfactions over
a number of years evoking the Irish Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, Ulster
violence, and Catalonian nationalism. Thus, The South raises personal neuroses
to the power of collective politics. It comes with praise from Don DeLillo and
John Banville, among whose works it fits very well.-- John P. Harrington, Cooper
Union, New York
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New York Times
A first novel is always a treacherous undertaking, but Colm Toibin, an Irish j
ournalist, is young, brave and, more unusual, never self-indulgent. In
'The South,' he seeks to explore change in its many guises. His approach is
straightforward, his prose clean and unmannered. The result is always interesting,
but strained by the weight of its symbolic structure and by the hazards of
adopting a woman's point of view, not the most comfortable vantage point even
for an experienced male novelist. (Ann Cornelisen - Book Review )
London Review of Books
The story is told with spare, simple elegance, from Katherine's point of
view. She certainly has a painter's eye, but she is not one to discuss
motivation or to make connections--between Ireland and Spain, for instance,
with their civil wars: the reader must do that. We may be reminded of Pinter's
'no-explanation' characters, not the jaunty Goldberg, but the morose McCann.
(D.A.N. Jones )
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