In ‘Late Francis Bacon: Spirit and Substance‘ Colm Tóibín writes: It would be easy to imagine…that Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice was written toward the end of his life. In fact, it was written in 1911, when Mann was thirty-six. It is a young man’s book; its images of desire, decay, and death could not be soContinue reading “Late Work And Shying Away From Decay And Death”
Tag Archives: Colm Tóibín
Henry James on the ‘Fatal Cheapness’ of the Historical Novel
Reviewing Colm Tóibín‘s The Master, a ‘novelistic portrait’ of Henry James, Daniel Mendelsohn writes: ”The Master” is not, of course, a novel about just any man, but rather a novel about a figure from the past about whom we know an extraordinarily great deal, through both his own and others’ memoirs, books and letters. As Toibin wellContinue reading “Henry James on the ‘Fatal Cheapness’ of the Historical Novel”
Colm Tóibín on the ‘Real’ and the ‘Imagined’
Colm Tóibín writes of the intimate relationship between facts and fiction (‘What Is Real Is Imagined’, New York Times, July 14 2012), about how the story-teller’s primary responsibility is to the story, about how the novelist may, in creating fiction, embroider the facts, embellishing and enhancing, for being stuck just with the facts is not aContinue reading “Colm Tóibín on the ‘Real’ and the ‘Imagined’”
Samir Chopra 