A great short story collection from one of my favorite novelists. These stories are evocative of some of the same emotions portrayed in Brooklyn and other works by Colm Toibin. ( )

Book club book. Everything you never wanted to know about men having sex with each other.
Short stories. Just when 1 or 2 got interesting, it was over.
Honestly, I felt dirty after reading this book. ( )

Well-written but uneven. I wanted to love it, but I barely liked it. I am in a real reading slump lately! It feels like it's been weeks since I really liked anything! ( )

Well-written but uneven. I wanted to love it, but I barely liked it. I am in a real reading slump lately! It feels like it's been weeks since I really liked anything! ( )

I confess I miss the appeal of Colm Toibin. A large number of literary luminaries helped with this collection of short stories but I found many unfinished, a few like Barcelona seemed artless. Credit must be given to Toibin for his fearlessness since a few stories give us fairly graphic gay sex scenes, but the emotional stories are often misplaced. In Color of Shadows ,the storyteller doesn't provide much more than the character who lives in a narrow emotional field. His aunt is dying and yet there is the mystery of his mother who apparently tried to kill both herself and him and who is not even aware lives in the same town as his dying aunt. We learn nothing about his reaction to this. In another story, we follow the evolution of a relationship between two Pakistani men working in Spain who fall in love. Again the emotional world, except for the one man's thoughts of tenderness towards the other, are wafer thin. In the title story a man has come back to a house and is haunted by his memory of his lover but we are given , and I have to say deliberately, no details. Perhaps the allure of the work is that Toibin is open about gay love and longing in a way that has not been seen before. Thematically, all the stories feature a journey in which the main character finds themselves a stranger, even if they are returning to their own home. Estrangement and living as an outsider, either because one is gay, is hiding something, is foreign are seen throughout and one senses that Toibin is drawing, sometimes on the expatriot's return, which is in part his story. However, with a few exceptions I just didn't understand all the excitement. ( )