Nora Webster

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Having never struggled for money, Kavanagh doesn’t understand Nora’s problems. Nora thinks Kavanagh is spoiled and privileged. In the meantime, Fiona needs money to finish her teacher training, and Aine doesn’t know how she’ll graduate university without money to pay tuition fees. Nora knows that, however much she despises Kavanagh, she needs this job to keep her family afloat. When we are told, en passant, about “Catholics marching for civil rights”, another character remarks: “That’s one scrap I wouldn’t like to be in. There will be no easy way out of that one.” But, as every historical novelist knows, lines loaded with history will always be at odds with the quest for “truth in the simplest detail”. Later, after another reference to “baton-charges”, we hear about the young Charles Haughey and his gun running. Then, towards the end, comes news of Bloody Sunday.

Slowly, his name ceased to be mentioned in the house. CS Lewis has a description of the same silence after his wife's death: "I cannot talk to the children about her. The moment I try, there appears on their faces neither grief, nor love, nor fear, nor pity, but the most fatal of non-conductors, embarrassment. They look as if I were committing an indecency. They are longing for me to stop. I felt just the same after my mother's death when my father mentioned her. I can't blame them. It's the way boys are."

I had read a good deal of her work by the time I saw her. Some of her stories meant nothing to me. The scenes of upper middle-class life in County Meath, north of Dublin, were too rarefied. But the ones that dealt with the life of a widow were almost too close to the space between how we lived then in our house and what was unmentionable – the business of silence around grief, the life of a woman alone, the palpable absence of a man, a husband, a father, our father, my father, the idea of conversation as a way of concealing loss rather than revealing anything, least of all feeling – for me not to have read her with full recognition. The recognition was so clear, in fact, that I do not remember recognising anything. I was reading with too much rawness. Meanwhile, Nora can’t stop thinking about Maurice and how much she needs him. Unable to imagine her life improving, she feels her best days are behind her. Seeing how much she’s struggling, Maurice’s family offers her money. They pay for Fiona’s training and they help Aine with her fees. Nora thinks she is a bad mother because she can’t look after her own children. The novelists have become characters in their own books. By the urgency of the tone, they make clear, however, that, in the aftermath of loss, nothing they can invent compares to it. And that, since they are writers, what happened needs to be written down so that it can be known and shared and understood, so that it can lose its incoherence. And so that they, in their powerlessness and helplessness, can at least still do this, can at least write down what it was like.

From one of contemporary literature's bestselling, critically acclaimed and beloved authors, a magnificent new novel set in Ireland, about a fiercely compelling young widow and mother of four, navigating grief and fear, struggling for hope. Kirkus called Nora Webster "[a] novel of mourning, healing and awakening," noting that "its plainspoken eloquence never succumbs to the sentimentality its heroine would reject." [1] Colm Tóibín is the author of ten novels, including The Magician, his most recent novel; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster, as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. Three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York.BEA 2015: Shortlist for the Carnegie Medals". PublishersWeekly.com. 27 May 2015 . Retrieved 7 January 2022. I noticed that there was very little fiction written from the point of view of a widow. I found two short stories about being a widow – “Happiness” and “In the Middle of the Fields” – by the Irish writer Mary Lavin, whom I had known when I was a student in Dublin, helpful, enabling. I found something also in the last section of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks that interested me – the use of music as a way to inhabit loss, or to allow loss to have its full weight. I remembered my mother, who had very little money, getting a stereo and gradually buying classical LPs. There was one record that she played over and over – a recording of Beethoven’s Archduke Trio with Jacqueline du Pré, Daniel Barenboim and Pinchas Zukerman. I remember the sleeve of the album with a photograph of all three players. I found a recording of it and began to play it. Starred Review. A novel of mourning, healing and awakening; its plainspoken eloquence never succumbs to the sentimentality its heroine would reject." - Kirkus Although Nora loves her children, she’s consumed by her grief and doesn’t give them the attention they need. The children all miss their father, but they miss Nora just as much because she shuts them out. Everyone in the family craves some normality and emotional stability, but unfortunately, things are about to get worse for the Websters. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{

Morales, Macey (8 April 2015). "ALA unveils shortlist for 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction". American Library Association . Retrieved 7 January 2022. Sussler, Betsy (3 November 2014). "Awards: Irish Book; Banff Mountain". Shelf Awareness . Retrieved 7 January 2022.This idea of the personality as suddenly protean under the pressure of loss belongs fundamentally to the literature of grief because, of course, it belongs to the experience. Starred Review. The Ireland of four decades ago is beautifully evoked… Completely absorbing [and] remarkably heart-affecting." - Booklist All this is so cleverly braided into the widowhood of Nora Webster and her two boys, Conor and the stuttering, damaged Donal, that Tóibín’s considerable narrative gifts successfully navigate the bumpy intersection of the private and the public. Through the slow personal reawakening of Webster, he finds a subtle way to reflect on Ireland’s need to put its own grief into a larger context. I thought at first of writing the book from my own perspective, rather than my mother's, but when I tried to set some of that down, I found there was nothing, or not enough for a novel. It was as though the experience had hollowed me out and was, from my perspective, too filled with silence and distance for me to be able to harness it for a novel's purposes. Nora Webster, Tóibín's new novel, draws on his memories of his father's death – in doing so, it joins a rich tradition of writing about loss, from Sophocles to Joan Didion