Com Toibin's beautiful prose is the standout feature of this collection. He writes with precision and delicacy and evokes emotion with patience and restraint. However the plotting, characterisation and themes are somewhat inconsistent. The settings are very Irish, all dead mothers and villages where everybody knows your business, which I struggle to relate to unless there are more universal themes addressed.

The first two stories, "The Use of Reason" and "A Song" left me cold, as they described situations that were neither familiar nor interesting to me. I decided to persist and was glad I did when the subtle realism of "The Name of the Game" was up next. I wavered again in "Famous Blue Raincoat", but from there the stories alternated between wonderful and disappointing.

One of my great frustrations with short stories, and one of the reasons I don't often read them, is that by the time I've decided if a story is any good, it's almost over. There's rarely the chance to settle into a story knowing that the next pages will be worth savouring. Obviously this collection doesn't do anything to change that reservation, but the rewards - in the form of moving, emotionally true stories - are worth the frustrations, in my view.
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Por primera vez en castellano, los mejores cuentos del autor de Brooklyn, ganador de los premiosImpac yForster. Cólm Tóibín se ha consolidado como uno de los grandes narradores contemporáneos de la literatura anglosajona. Comparado a menudo con Henry James, uno de sus grandes referentes, en nuestro país empieza a obtener el reconocimiento que ya tiene en Europa y en Estados Unidos. En este volumen, que recopila sus mejores cuentos, Tóibín aborda los grandes asuntos de su universo literario: las relaciones entre madres e hijos, la sociedad de Dublín, la imagen del hogar, el exilio y la inmigración e incluso nos ofrece un retrato espléndido y en absoluto convencional de Barcelona, una ciudad que conoce muy bien porque vivió en ella durante los años de la transición. Dueño de una prosa precisa y armónica y de una gran capacidad de penetración psicológica, Colm Tóibín es ya, gracias tanto a sus novelas como a sus relatos, un nuevo maestro.

Some works by the Irish author Colm Tóibín are great, particularly those set in Barcelona where the Tóibín lived in his young years. These short stories did not seem very inspired. ( )

Colm Tóibín's writing never fails to move me in its quietly powerful simplicity and these wonderful short stories are every bit as satisfying as his novels. The exploration of relationships between mothers and sons is full of insightful reflections and the quality of the writing is, at times. quite breathtaking. This is a collection of stories which needs to be savoured and I know that I will be returning to them in order to enjoy the beauty of the prose. ( )

The stories collected here are muted, almost stripped of emotion despite some highly charged events occurring. It is as though Colm Tóibín wants the reader to take a step back and view these events calmly, dispassionately, perhaps forensically. And for some stories that works great. I like it especially in “The Use of Reason” and “A Priest in the Family”. Perhaps not so much in “Famous Blue Raincoat” or “A Summer Job”.

Most of these stories are straight-ahead short stories, narrow in scope and character, limited to a short time period, realistic both in terms of psychology and locale. In short, however much they mine the thematic connections between mothers and sons (which they all do), they do not breathe new life into the short form itself. I suspect that is probably a sign that Tóibín is more comfortable in the longer, novel form.

Inevitably different readers will prefer one or another of the stories here (they are all worthy), but for me it was “The Name of the Game” that stood out. Not unusually, a death initiates the action, which again not unusually, involves a life struggle, or, perhaps better, a struggle for survival. Class difference, which is not a major issue in most of these stories, is front and centre here, and because the action takes place at a distance from Dublin, Dublin can stand as an ideal, however misplaced, for the female protagonist, Nancy. Nancy’s struggle to transform the economic mess she has been left in by the untimely death of her husband reveals hidden strength in her, and no small amount of cunning. That I would gladly have seen the story expanded into a novel may just reveal my own preference for Tóibín’s longer, leisurely paced, novels. Well, to each their own, I guess. Gently recommended. ( )