New ways to kill your mother
Subtitle: writers and their families
By: Colm Tóibín
Publisher: Viking
Published: 2012
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 346
ISBN-13: 9780670918164; 9780670920358
Subjects: Schriftsteller; Mothers in literature; Abwesenheit; Familienbeziehung; Families in literature; Literatur; Mutter
Description: In his essay on the "Notebooks of Tennessee Williams", Colm Toibin reveals an artist 'alone and deeply fearful and unusually selfish' and one profoundly tormented by his sister's mental illness. Through the relationship between W.B. Yeats and his father or Thomas Mann and his children or J.M. Synge and his mother, Toibin examines a world of family relations, richly comic or savage in its implications. In Roddy Doyle's writing on his parents we see an Ireland reinvented. From the dreams and nightmares of John Cheever's journals Toibin makes flesh this darkly comic misanthrope and his relationship to his wife and his children. 'Educating an intellectual woman', Cheever remarked, 'is like letting a rattlesnake into the house'. In pieces that range from the importance of aunts (and the death of parents) in the English nineteenth-century novel to the relationship between fathers and sons in the writing of James Baldwin and Barack Obama, Colm Toibin illuminates not only the intimate connections between writers and their families but also articulates, with a rare tenderness and wit, the great joy of reading their work.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 329-330) and index.
Table of contents: title: Jame Austen, Henry James and the death of the mother; title: Part one: Ireland: W.B. Yeats : new ways to kill your father ; Willie and George ; New ways to kill your mother : Synge and his family ; Beckett meets his afflicted mother ; Brian Moore : out of Ireland have I come, great hatred, little room ; Sebastian Barry's fatherland ; Roddy Doyle and Hugo Hamilton : the dialect of the tribe; title: Part two: Elsewhere: Thomas Mann : new ways to spoil your children ; Borges : a father in his shadow ; Hart Crane : escape from home ; Tennessee Williams and the ghost of Rose ; John Cheever : new ways to make your family's life a misery ; Baldwin and ' the American confusion' ; Baldwin and Obama : men without fathers.