A Long Winter by Colm Tóibín (2006): A Review
Author: Colm Tóibín
Publication Year: 2006
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Pages: 144
Source: audiobook @storytel.tr
Genre: literary fiction, historical fiction, novella
I picked up A Long Winter because I needed a short audiobook for a trip. The audiobook was short. The winter inside it was not. It felt endless.
This is one of those compact Irish novels/novellas where nothing is wasted and nothing lets you breathe. In a small village in the Catalan Pyrenees, Miquel’s mother disappears into the snow and never returns. Everyone more or less agrees she is dead, somewhere under the drifts, and life is simply expected to continue. Miquel and his father are left to endure a winter that feels more like a sentence than a season.
The language is stripped down, almost bare, but every line carries an impossible weight. Grief is not announced; it just seeps into everything. The poverty, the broken family, the silence between father and son, the isolation, the sense that nothing good is coming—none of it is dramatized, it just sits there, cold and immovable. Listening to it actually hurt, and yet I didn’t stop. It felt wrong to stop. I don’t know what it is about these Irish novellas, but they seem to specialize in giving you 150 pages (or a few hours of audio) that feel heavier than most sprawling epics. A Long Winter is brief, but it lingers like the season it describes: grey, airless, and far too long.
Comments
Post a Comment