- Hardcover: 288 pages
- Publisher: Picador (22 Mar 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0330491377
- ISBN-13: 978-0330491372
- Product Dimensions: 23.2 x 16.7 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,261,493 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
| ||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
Ranging from figures such as Thomas Mann and Oscar Wilde to Francis Bacon and Pedro Almodovar, this is an illuminating study of the personalities behind the work and the effect of their sexuality upon their lives.
Product Description
Colm Toibin looks at the life and work of some of the greatest and most influential artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, figures in the main whose homosexuality remained hidden or oblique for much of their lives. Either by choice or necessity, being gay seemed to come second for many of these writers. Yet in their privates lives, and also in the spirit of their work, the laws of desire changed everything for them and made all the difference. Ranging from figures such as Oscar Wilde, born in the 1850s, to Pedro Almodovar, born a hundred years later, this book studies how a changing world altered lives in ways both subtle and serious. Colm Toibin interweaves close reading of the work with detailed analysis of the personality behind the work to illuminating effect.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Promise Not Fulfilled,
By
This review is from: Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar (Paperback)
Unless you read the word "lives" in the subtitle as "biographies" (as few will do) this book is not what it promises to be. What you get instead of biographical essays is mostly a collection of reviews of biographies of famous homosexual people of the late 19th and the 20th century, originally published in the "London Review of Books". There are three exceptions to this rule but only as much as in two essays the books reviewed were not biographies and one is a recollection of a meeting with Almodovar. As a result there is little of what I might call "a story line" here, apart of chronology, and the selection emerges as quite random. Toibin makes it all quite clear in his Introduction so it is not a spoiler in any way - still you will not find this information on the cover or in the Amazon product description.
The selection of artists is quite interesting and moderately international yet the value of specific reviews is greatly varied. I would say that on the one hand it depends on the quality of the reviewed biographies (quite comprehensibly, it is rather difficult to approach a dull subject with much enthusiasm, although none of the reviews made me reach for the book under review...) while on the other on Toibin's personal attitudes to their subjects and here the Irish apparently win hands down. Some of the essays justly deserve attention - I would single out Wilde and Gunn - some seem wasted effort and the essay on Elisabeth Bishop sadly stands out among them. Some of them have an agenda (e.g. essay on Casement concentrates on the issue of his infamous, and quite probably forged, "Black Diary", offering very little of Casement's life), some only seem to ramble (e.g. Mann and Baldwin). Probably the most interesting is the final essay which is purportedly a review of two books on the demise of the power of the Roman Catholic Church in modern Ireland but, actually, offers a lot of Toibin's personal recollections of the process. I am not trying to suggest that you should not buy this book (especially if you are a Toibin's fan!) but if you choose to do so buy for it for what it actually is and not for what the publisher attempts to sell. Otherwise you may be just as disappointed as I was.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Evocative, revealing and rewarding.,
By
This review is from: Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar (Paperback)
For years, Colm Toibin tels us, he resisted doing a book like this: a gay writer writing about other gay writers or artists. Happily for us, his resistance has crumbled. This is not a book that purports to tell us facts about Wilde, Mann, Bacon, Baldwin, Casement etc which are not already out there. What Toibin does is see into the characters and personalities of his subjects and reveal to us new facets of their character. In some cases, as with Thom Gunn and Pedro Almodovar, where Toibin has met his subjects, he gives us subtle but bright portraits. In the case of Wilde, Bacon and Casement, Toibin is especially acute on the interplay of their Irishness in an English environment. Wilde's tragedy is poignantly portrayed, especially the desperate quality of the love betwen Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas: in the end, Wilde could not live with him or without him. How far was the art of these geniuses a product of their homosexuality? Toibin's conclusion seems to be that while repression is central to all Mann's work and liberation changes the explicitness of Gunn's poetry, it is hard to disentangle sexuality from other aspects of their creative gift.
This is a book of real perception and insights and a rewarding treasure-trove.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.3 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews) 14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Colm Tóibín, May His Tribe Increase!,
By Grady Harp - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Love in A Dark Time (Hardcover)
Once captured by the liquid, informed prose of Colm Tóibín it is difficult to ignore anything this brilliant writer has written. Still under the spell of 'The Master' and having just sadly finished 'The Story of the Night' (that novel could have been extended another 300 pages!), it seemed only appropriate to read an investigative work, just to see how this man's mind absorbs and dissects the world of reality instead the one of fiction.
Happily LOVE IN A DARK TIME is as fascinating a read as his novels. Tóibín searches the lives of many writers and artists asking how did/does their sexuality inform what they create. After a few historic references regarding the gay aspects of Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Melville, Joyce, Lorca, Yeats, Kafka, Proust, Gide et at, he analyses biographies (example: Lionel Trilling's bio of EM Forster) that appear unaware of the subject's sexual proclivities! That thrusts us into the exploration of history before the term 'homosexual' was created, regards the aspects of 'the gay being', and proceeds to introduce postulates as to how the works created by nine particular people were deeply influenced by their sexuality, occult or accepted. What then follows is a richly detailed and elegant series of essays on Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Roger Casement (of The Black Diaries), Thomas Mann, Francis Bacon (the painter), Elizabeth Bishop, James Baldwin, Thom Gunn, Pedro Almodovar, and Mark Doty. In each essay Tóibín takes a new stance of investigation, finding incidents or traits in the lives of those discussed that allow 'stories' to develop naturally. For those who have read 'The Master' (Tóibín's own "biography" of Henry James) this series of highly researched essays will come as no surprise. Tóibín's mind is rich with a plethora of books read and a penetrating mind that examines art from a vantage peculiar to a man that has arrived at the top of the heap in the field of literature. For enjoyable and informative reading, LOVE IN DARK TIME is a pearl. And reading Tóibín's older works only serves to whet the appetite for his next opus. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, June 05 12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
I'm Left Somewhat in the Dark,
By H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Love in A Dark Time (Hardcover)
This is my first nonfiction read by Toibin. I've read three of his novels and think he gets better with each one. THE BLACKWATER LIGHTSHIP was an altogether fine book and deserved the Booker Prize I think. So I couldn't wait to start this one. I confess that I'm not sure what is going on here. In the introduction Mr. Toibin presents some of his favorite artists. He says that he writes about "gay figures for whom, in the main, being gay seemed to come second in their public lives" writers who write in code, whose works are not published during their lifetime, who use vague pronouns in their poetry. (Certainly I wouldn't have wanted to miss a novel like "DEATH IN VENICE," for instance.) Toibin goes on further to say that writing this book helped him come to terms with his "own interest in secret, erotic energy," his interest in both Catholicism and Irish Protestants, his admiration for "figures who lived in a dark time and were not afraid," and his fascination with sadness and tragedy. Herein lives Mr. Toibin's problem. He takes on too much in too little space. Additionally his treatment of these artists he admires is wildly uneven, both in depth and space. For example, the chapter on Oscar Wilde covers almost 50 pages; the chapter on Mark Doty-- one of my favorite writers-- covers only 7. And for the life of me I'm not sure what Mr. Toibin is trying to say in the concluding chapter entitled "Good-bye to Catholic Ireland," a chapter I read twice. Like many Catholics who attempt to say what is wrong with their church, Mr. Toibin is too "tentative," a word he uses elsewhere in this book, in his taking on the church. Certainly he is not alone in his dilemma, however. It's easy for me to make that criticism, never having walked in a Catholic altar boy's shoes either. In Toibin's chapter on Elizabeth Bishop, we are told that "like all orphans, Bishop was clever at making friends and inventing a family for herself." I suspect that that statement is true for many people but for "all orphans"? I'm not sure that that is a true statement.There is a lot to like about this book, however. Mr. Toibin is never dull and is best when doing a narrative, something we would expect from a fine novelist. For example, when he describes a party that both he and Almodovar attended in Madrid, I wanted to be there. When I finished this book, I wanted to reread James Baldwin and read for the first time both Elizabeth Bishop and Thom Gunn. Toibin is also good at giving us delicious trivia about people. For example, we learn that Francis Bacon slept with a dog the night before being examined for military service in order to exacerbate his asthma and flunk his physical. I'm certainly glad I read this book and would read anything by this writer. I just don't think this book is as good as Mr. Toibin's fiction. 6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
LOVE THAT ILLUMINATES,
By John Stahle - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Love in A Dark Time (Hardcover)
Colm Toibin's "Love in a Dark Time" is a superior group of essays by one gay writer about other gay writers. What distinguishes this 2001 collection is how effectively Toibin sells the work of each figure essayed. I was never interested in James Baldwin before, but after reading Toibin's take, I ran out and enjoyed two Baldwin books. In the piece on Thomas Mann, we see how many of his male infatuations Mann turned into art--which infatuations into which stories--a subject being studied in detail only now by his biographers. And in the profile of Pedro Almodovar, we meet the Spanish torch singer Chavela Vargas, whom Almodovar rescued from obscurity because her confessional art mirrored so closely the values of his own cinema of women. A wonderful collection of essays that illuminate, indeed sell, each subject.
|
|
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
