![]() (In fact, on her first trip from Brooklyn into Manhattan, she “could see no difference” between the two boroughs, which seems hard to believe one questions, in fact, whether her Gaelic first name, which an American would pronounce as “eyeless”, is entirely a matter of happenstance.)Īnd as she pursues her accountancy career, she also allows herself to be pursued by a blond, blue-eyed Italian-American plumber named Tony who loves her and lusts for her far more than she does for him, creating a sense of sublimated frustration in the reader that is probably even greater than the frustration that Tony himself must feel.īut I was very glad I kept on reading this fine novel. When Eilis arrives in Brooklyn after a vomitous sea voyage, she might as well be in Brooklyn, Iowa, so little interested is she in the strangeness and tumult of her surroundings. Eilis is a young Irish shop girl and bookkeeper who emigrates to Brooklyn in the ’50s not out of passion or ambition or desperation, but merely because she is urged to by her kind and glamorous sister Rose and an Irish-American priest, Father Flood, who is back in Eilis’ small town of Enniscorthy for a holiday. ![]() ![]() ![]() Eilis Lacey, the protagonist of Colm Toibin’s new novel, Brooklyn, is, to put it bluntly, a bit of a drip. ![]()
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