if you don't talk often about things that really matter to people often disco quiet about just because. a book that deals with that becomes a way of breaking a saga. i don't care if. we met the irish writer colum tobin while he was in berlin the world renowned author is extremely versatile he writes novels short stories essays place and poetry we spoke with him about his books and his life as well as

about ireland and how it's changing. tobin is particularly known for his skill at writing compelling female characters. his bestselling novel brooklyn was adapted for the screen it tells the story of elisha a young woman who cannot find work in ireland and so makes the difficult decision to emigrate. like so many before and after her ailing boards a ship in the hope of finding a better future. she heads to leaders. there she settles in the borough of brooklyn which is home to a large community of irish immigrants. at 1st inches torn between the 2 cultures and then between to meet in new york. and. she

meets in ireland on a trip. to get compassionate depiction of her heartache for torment and her agonizing decision consolidated his reputation as a writer of. where does his understanding of women come from. a woman i would say maybe could you just stop that making those exaggerated figures women you know there are gay versions of it was i think of a very powerful i was brought up by women and other words that they were my mother had sisters were in the house a lot i had to nurse siblings of a girl so were always well women talk and i was always very interesting what they were saying whereas the man could sort of be very grumpy your 3 man talk about some sport i was not if you're a 5 year old has nothing there's nothing in it for you in this or that women

upstairs with no matter what they say it would be yours for us. at least for me. to be has written 2 books much of his work is autobiographical and ireland plays a major role. each artist in the great i was tradition has invented an island that's what you said in an interview what is your island i come from a few streets in a small town in the southeast called out of scores that's my wild. and small stretch of the wexford coast about 10 miles away so i'm not sure the world is home but it's certainly a territory and out of that got a great deal of emotional resonance so because i know those streets and i know that stretch of coast so that's mine in this place with long winters long memories and a lot of gray sky. i can walk. tobin isn't the only one to have

been inspired by the skies of violent this country of 5000000 has given birth to a disproportionately high number of writers james joyce is arguably the most famous . but so much the playwright george bernard shaw. oscar wilde. samuel beckett. as well as the poet seamus heaney. beckett and he me were awarded the nobel prize for literature why does f. sutton empress of place and what led to its size the only way out of poverty was education the only way into education was literacy so literacy became a sort of fetish almost in poor families books reading and writing and in the long winter he said you know one person in the family has to start thinking i could write one of those i could do that. many of ireland's great writers were born

in the capital dublin. and the city has a number of museums devoted to the country's literary heritage. one is the writers museum which celebrates centuries of irish literature. what about the new generation of writers in ireland. but at the moment it's every season. 2 or 3 young writers have buyers who are very very good there's been happening especially the last say 5 years and you go surely not another if you read the book you think this is very good at the moment it's an extraordinary thing and you thought maybe it won't happen again people become into the software or you know go to work for facebook or something now they're writing novels and stories. and write is one example there's also called

mccann. and. then there. was novel normal people it was a runaway success all over the world i familiar with you know reading it because it's fascinating to see you know the ones who are more experimental and the ones who are writing for women's lives and the ones who write about the city of the country obviously it's an absolute fascinating thing you know you want to be a fool not to readers and what literary tradition do this in itself. oh i'm sort of melancholy you know i come out of something that's melancholy. so but it things when you're writing when you're working if you start thinking literary tradition you are come out of you with them rather terrible sentence should be filled with self-importance of some of the medium i literature titian so you job is not to think like that to say that the sentences do the work and to make the sentences true meaning that if one sentence is like this as

a rhythm like this the next sentence has to be a variation on that rhythmically and you work almost as though you're a composer working and. therefore the less you think the better your job is to sort of feel truthfully and for the melody for that is it like music but it's like music in that it's based on melody it's based on rhythm and that is it's the nervous system sometimes or it should hit the reader. nervous system before the reader start to interpret or use their intelligence some other system is happening that causes the reader to turn the page not merely to know what's happening next but to actually follow the rhythm. tobin is passionate about music. chamber music especially baroque he divides his time between ireland the united states and spain but he says home is where his records are do you listen

to music while you have right now i know i know i think that would be a mistake it would bring in so the a lot of music has an easier motion that's very satisfying but when you're working you need something much more austere such a silence and also i think you need to face in words you're having a big view out the window with a structure you just look in or it's all in words and it's all silent no music no fear mostly just no comfortable just just right you know just work along. wonderful books of the purged from the self-imposed austerity the blackwater lightship tells of 3 generations of women discussing homosexuality hiv aids and changes an irish society. the master is a fictional account of the life of the us writer henry jane's.

mothers and sons is a collection of short stories in which each story explores an aspect of the mother son relationship. nora websters unforgettable protagonist struggles with grief and finds her way to emancipation in 1906 ireland. house of means is a retelling of a classic greek tragedy. tobin's over shows his compassion and intelligence yet he wasn't always an avid reader he struggled at school as a boy. when he was 12 his father died and toby began to start or. you did start reading at the age of 9 and you started writing poems it's the age of 12. was the death of your father's a trick or 2 right or something ha i imagine so because it came very soon afterwards but it was also that in my family study was very important and that when you went to secondary school you should going to ruin your own every evening and

you know you might be reading the law and then learning science and i was writing porn so you know and so just being left alone in a room like that with paper was the 1st thing i did instead of studying. what to look for the literary world the extraction mothers and sons which to be reads to us tells of unexplained absence of returning motifs in his words. the time we were left by our mother you know on strauss has no drama attached to it it was all grayness strangeness. dealt with us in her own distracted way her husband was mild distant almost crude you murdered and all i know is that our mother did not get in touch with us once not once during this time there were no letter was no letter or phone call or visit our father was in hospital we did not know how long

we were going to be left there in the years that followed our mother never explained her absence and we never asked her if she's ever wondered how we were or how we felt during those months. what you describe in this book and ignore bob so that's what you experienced yourself when your father was dying your muslim left you alone with relatives i mean how did that influence you your. life your writing. all that was more or less what happened it doesn't mean it's autobiography because you change things and the way you remember changes things anyway so it's not a sort of slice of memory as much as a sort of literary form that uses memory events things that happened as a way of sort of cleaning the plot or or anchoring everything in what you might call fact or at least in things that i remember as a happy that i think were true i think it had enormous influence and you learn

to look after yourself and you get the notion that nothing is ever certain or secure after as you learn not to trust people. i'm not sure any of this is useful to being a writer but it certainly has helped me in some books to have a subject that i had not fully worked. you know in psychoanalysis or in any other way that it was like a novel that needs to be untied and so it became a pressing matter to write this down and to find a form for him to find a way of communicating it without sounding self pitying or sentimental. these days to mean he's a citizen. but he remains drawn to the landscapes of his child to the. and to the atmosphere in the country for so many centuries by the rigid codes of

the catholic church. the conservative catholic nationalist of their words fit with your family background today what you're present is just the opposite what happened ireland changed everyone in every family slowly change themselves i mean it wasn't you know it began perhaps with the women's movement but i mean women who weren't part of the women's movement just slowly in their own houses became more powerful became you know became more powerful or became less interested in being being made feel small and out of that group other movements about how to treat children about gay people or about people for example who didn't feel racial or religious feeling so their society became slowly sometimes imperceptibly and then quickly. very liberal place to live

and in easy place to live. yet for a long time the catholic church did have a strong influence in ireland around 80 percent of the irish population is catholic . a series of sex abuse scandals has tarnished the church's reputation but the priests and nuns toby depicts are likeable. in the last 2 decades and a couple of scandals in the catholic church also india and in all over the world but became public but including the irish county where you are from what i was. looking back to you see your own experience in a different light i do because i was in a boarding school where a good number of the priests ended up in jail and so i think if you're a novelist but if you're anybody but just said novelist and you're looking at think i know when that happened and how it happened but at the time i missed. you know i

didn't realize what was going on right in front of me and i think for a novelist it's a tremendously interesting idea that all the time perhaps in all of our lives in our characters lives there's something going on that's maybe obvious except that they don't notice. in a landmark referendum of 2015 a majority of irish citizens voted in favor of recognizing same sex marriage calling to be openly gay and played an important role in the campaign and is proud of ireland's development. you were brought up in a kind of dark time certainly saw homosexuality had no name in the country which doesn't didn't recognize gay rights. it was it was being gay was seen as a form of perversion and suffering when did you realize you were gay and when did you decide to go public. probably realize that early

on and it's that i think it was a very common thing in our lives or you would tell one or 2 people one or 2 people would guess and then no one else would know so he would compartmentalize everything so that you know he lived it felt easy it felt natural but when i went to live in spraying when i was 2975. boston i was a wild time. there were no gay bars which meant that the streets certain streets were just filled up not with gay men wandering about. it might have seemed there was repression but it didn't feel like that in spain much more open people were much more ready to enjoy their lives and arlen there was always a guilt or. to be described as guilt very well the honors his

characters in the struggles many of which are universal. alias for instance fled poverty and suffered emotional turmoil as did millions of immigrants. to be in thinks it's important to get the setting right he cutely depicts the times in which his characters are living. i almost think he you know in a painting portrait the work done behind the brush work just to make a color behind often does a great deal of work even though it seems like background i think if you're writing a novel set in time no matter what you do what's going on in that in the either background or deep background of the society has to make its way into the novel even if you try to keep it out it will come in somewhere other doesn't mean at the

foreground us to know it if you know what year because it matters enormously. the characters in tobin's novels tend to be ordinary men and women teachers accountants merchants all from rural ireland are the heroes and heroines of his novels also his readers yes how did this become a good it's become a good audience. and you get a sense that a book a novel a new novel isn't it is some sort of intervention. i imagine a sort of imagine her early in the society that somehow or other book clubs or women who for example haven't had a greater chances or education will could take a book open to the book and up meaning a lot to them that this book was there in a way i think the society is so filled with still i think with silences with things are just not mentioned much that it's it's if you don't talk often about things

that really matter to you so that for example if there's if you lose somebody even after death people often just go quiet just just so a book that deals with that becomes a way of breaking aside. brooklyn was tobin's most successful novel to do. it was adapted to a screenplay too though he didn't write it he did however write the screenplay for return to montauk together with german jew rector fucka she learned the screenplay of brooklyn was written by minnie kong the after that german director for castle and of asked you to to help him to be the cove writer for the screenplay of return to montauk. how did that happen and can you imagine today. writing the screenplay for one of your own novels no i think it's if you've written a novel what you don't want to do that is go back and make changes in it that you

would never have made when you were writing it and find with a producer or a new producer or a group of people telling you oh no we don't want her to go you know we want her to grow to not go home or you know go to brooklyn much earlier so we had said and you're suddenly actually you know. destroying your own work so i didn't want to do that i liked what nick did but i didn't want to do one for the book or strong came . i was ready i probably i've just written a movie a novel so i was sort of free. and the idea of working with him and learning something and actually looking at the form of screenplay and thinking about actors and we had a very good time both of us doing this a lot of the time we wrote together i mean literally together i mean we would be opposite one another to talk and know not to listen to this he said no no you know you actually write this right just try this and i was just kind of at that for hours and people were standing where people were staying with me saying she was

just mad as to pass how you're not even listening to each other. so far returned to montauk has been tobin's only foray into the world of film he's currently working on a new novel got one of the 1st also if you've read when you were young once too much money and now he told me that you're writing a novel about too much money can you tell me a little bit more about it you know when i was a teenager you were nobody in my world if you know you weren't watching grant's films and reading the magic mountain and you know that they were the sort of necessary things part of that world of being you know an art student or literature student. in the early 19th seventies and he's been on my mind as a figure of great time together. but nothing about him is fully clear from his sexuality to his relation of to his family to his political beliefs and to his response to

various public things that occurred to the great difference between his life in the 1st world war and life in the 2nd world war his relation to his brother to his mother to his sons to his daughters as there's nothing stable in all that there's nothing everything has to be investigated and dramatize so it's oh it's a very interesting story a lot of it centers on the writing of dr faustus. so. looking show. you know having a rich time really trying to invoke him not as a barber for a minute but prior to what happened him fully as a character you know. to be in was hardly able to write for almost 2 years he was diagnosed with cancer in 20 and underwent chemotherapy with prolonged stays in the hospital it left him exhausted. in an essay for the london

review of books you wrote about it dealing with the diagnosis and the treatment of cancer why did you feel the need to write about it look i promised i wouldn't write it you know i hate people writing about their illnesses and i just it's awful i really thought i wouldn't do at all so no one asked me to do it there is no demand for this and then one day i just sentence came into my head and the sentence was it all started with my balls i dislike the sentence you know all a ball of war start and then once i wrote that i just for a month or so just what i had to it regularly other things that happened. and that i had you know but a 1000 words and i thought well you know i read it over again and i just laughed at it and thought i've actually almost got rid of some of the anguish around you know some of it was just all protests protest about you for writing both balls yeah it

was the experience was grotesque and i thought if i published this sort of. free me in some way that would be really over and it didn't work so i said to the lugger of us remember that no just say i'm not sure this is any use. and then they they said it publishes and then of course everybody you know because i hadn't told people i went back to teach without telling anybody and i was trying to behave like a normal i was really sick you have like a normal person i was during all my work and i was coming to be meetings but i mean i had no i propose. so the policy in the piece was sort of funny you know i also thought i was trying not to feel sorry for myself. even during his cancer treatment tobin continued to shuttle between ireland and the u.s. he continued teaching at new york's columbia university. i love columbia university i love having

a big library i love the upper west side of new york where nothing ever happens people talk about the city that doesn't sleep everything close about 9930 up there i mean it really has a sleep at the place. it's you know it looks like a university village you know and i teach on monday and tuesday and give a graduate seminar on oscar wilde and to do an undergraduate 7 are on the to say that people talk about things changing and young people not being like they were on the internet that's all just rubbish is all just rubbish that someone 18 year old reading a book can actually find that in the booklet that lit a fire in her or in him and i see that one eyewitness of. books continue to light a fire in to be and he brings that passion to his work as a writer and as a teacher. call him to bean is a man who can forever lose himself in literature even if he never forgets his irish

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is for the. beethoven is for us. beethoven is for m. on. beethoven 2020 the 250th anniversary year on w. . legless such. lists are on these creatures coming up on the show.