Colm Tóibín: The Testament of Mary

[Liam]

A highly original and provocative imagining of the life of the Christian and cultural icon Mary--from one of today's most "immensely gifted and accomplished" novelists.

Provocative, haunting, and indelible, Colm Tóibín's portrait of Mary presents her as a solitary older woman still seeking to understand the events that become the narrative of the New Testament and the foundation of Christianity.

In the ancient town of Ephesus, Mary lives alone, years after her son's crucifixion. She has no interest in collaborating with the authors of the Gospel--her keepers, who provide her with food and shelter and visit her regularly.

She does not agree that her son is the Son of God; nor that his death was "worth it;" nor that the "group of misfits he gathered around him, men who could not look a woman in the eye," were holy disciples. Mary judges herself ruthlessly (she did not stay at the foot of the Cross until her son died--she fled, to save herself), and is equally harsh on her judgment of others.

This woman who we know from centuries of paintings and scripture as the docile, loving, silent, long-suffering, obedient, worshipful mother of Christ becomes, in Tóibín's searing evocation, a tragic heroine with the relentless eloquence of Electra or Medea or Antigone.

This tour de force of imagination and language is a portrait so vivid and convincing that our image of Mary will be forever transformed.

[pesahson]

Sounds fascinating. I've read Toibin's The Master some time ago. After that I've been flirting with the idea of reading other of his books. That one sounds the most interesting of them all.

[Liam]

This is going to be a 95-pp. novella, and given Tóibín's usual tastefulness (compare the reservation of Henry James's sexual longings in The Master, for instance, to Alan Hollinghurst's unbridled romp in The Line of Beauty) I doubt this book will be in any way analogous to Saramago's Gospel According to Jesus Christ, which quickly descended into scatological baseness and was the least spiritual book I've ever read. You have Joseph pissing outside his hovel, in the wind, on the very first page: a wonderful start!

Tóibín's more reserved, and more respectful toward his characters--as human beings. I am also very hopeful about this short book because, being a Catholic, I am something of a Marian-cultist myself.

[Daniel del Real]

When is this book going to be available? It looks as a very way to start reading Toibin.

[Liam]

November, I think, although maybe they'll release it earlier in Britain--check the UK Amazon?

[leyla]

Lapsed Catholic Colm Toibin's new novella is a telling of one of the oldest stories in our culture, that of Mary and Jesus, but as narrayed by a bereaved Mary who can recognise her late son's faults. The story is painfully moving whether the reader is a Christian or not, and can be read on several different levels.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...n-8280366.html

[leyla]

Sorry, Liam, I didn't see that you already had a thread for this book. I'll be interested to hear what you think of the book as a Catholic. My feeling is that it manages to be moving and powerful without using shock tactics, and I think believers will not be offended. Lovely novella, though I have to say, my heart sank when I initially saw its subject matter. I just tried to look for the blurb to see when it is or was published in Britain, but I don't think it came with one. I'd guess it's available in the UK now.

[Liam]

No problem, L!

I actually pre-ordered the book already; it gets released in the States sometime this month, so I'll get back to you shortly!

For other riveting short works on religious themes, may I also recommend Par Lagerkvist's novella Barabbas, which is amazing?

[Stiffelio]

Then I'd also recommend Jim Crace's Quarantine, a thoughtful questioning of Christ's divinity in a novel that fictionalizes his time spent in the desert with other characters.

[Cleanthess]

Lapsed Catholic Colm Toibin's new novella is a telling of one of the oldest stories in our culture, that of Mary and Jesus, but as narrayed by a bereaved Mary who can recognise her late son's faults. The story is painfully moving whether the reader is a Christian or not, and can be read on several different levels.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...n-8280366.html

Okay this seems to be more than just a coincidence. Yesterday Andrew Sullivan's site paralleled Hamlet's 'Why do we read' thread, and today he parallels both this thread :

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast....=Google+Reader

And this morning's reference to Salinger by Remora and me:

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast....=Google+Reader

Ah! The blessings of having a paranoid mind!

[leyla]

Thanks for the tip on Barabbas, Liam.

[leyla]

And for the Jim Crace tip, Stiffelio. Religion in fiction usually makes people very sensitive, so I was v pleased to see that when Toibin's play Testament was performed in Dublin a year ago, the theatre was packed every night and there were no protests.

[leyla]

Cleanthess, only one thing for it...write a review of a non-existent book and see if it turns up in the blog...;-)

[Cleanthess]

Cleanthess, only one thing for it...write a review of a non-existent book and see if it turns up in the blog...;-)

Good idea, it could be something like this:

Mephistopheles by Arthur Galca Radacanu.

This almost unknown early 20th. Century masterpiece is one of the great works of Romanian literature.

It shows in four highly different sections how Mephistopheles gains the souls of four complicated historical characters:

William Blake, Holderlin, Gogol and Galca Radacanu himself. In each section the prose is highly mimetic of the styles of the different protagonists' works (Radacanu's own prose style is most close to say Bulgakov's Master and Margarita or Andreyev's Satan's diary)

Written before Broch wrote his own Death of Virgil and Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando or Joyce wrote Ulysses, it shares with them the mimetic writing that parodies literary periods.

However, the most interesting part of this novel is how it explains nervous breakdowns as religious experiences to which those undergoing them have not yet reached enough enlightenment to understand what's going on. In the four cases covered Radacanu explores different ways to react to the possibility of the devil touching you. Blake embraces it; Holderlin goes crazy; Gogol fears it and tries to get God to protect him by abandoning all of his sinful past; and Radacanu tries to exorcise it by writing this book and failing, finally commits suicide.
/Spoof.

By the way, I'm halfway through Crace's Quarantine, and I gotta say that it is not written in a plodding or predictable way like The Last Temptation was, let's hope that the ending packs as good a wallop as that Greek book did.

[pesahson]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audi...t-mary-podcast

An interview with Colm Tóibín about the Testament of Mary on the Guardian Books podcast. He also reads from the book.