this time europe's expansion will go. in our series for slate. with different languages we fight for different things that's fine but we all speak up for freedom freedom of speech and freedom of press. giving freedom of choice global news that matters. made for minds. if you don't talk often about things that really matter to people often just go quiet about it and just because that's what a book that deals with that becomes a way of breaking

a silence. i don't care if. we met the irish writer colm tóibín while he was in berlin the world renowned author is extremely versatile she writes novels short stories essays planes and poetry we spoke with him about his book in 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. age boards

a ship in the hope of finding a better future. she heads to new jersey. there she settles in the borough of brooklyn which is home to a large community of irish immigrants. at 1st and she's torn between the 2 cultures and then between teammate tourney in new york. and who she meets in ireland on a trip back. compassionate depiction of her heartache her 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

of women you know there are versions of it was i think of a very careful 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 where's the man could say i'm a very grumpy your tree 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 no matter what they say it would be yours for us and. for me. to be his written twins 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. part of the south is called

a score 3 that's my world and a 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 the carriage and 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 have a lot of grey sky and i can walk from the. beam isn't the only one to have been inspired by the skies of violent this country of 5000000 has given birth to a just proportionately high number of writers james joyce is arguably the most famous. but so is the playwright george bernard shaw. oscar wilde. samuel beckett. as well as the poet seamus heaney. beckett and he were awarded the nobel prize for literature why

does have such an empress of place in what led to its size the only way out of poverty was education and 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 winters 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. 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. up there at the moment it's every season. 2 or 3 young writers or march are very very

good there's been happening especially in the last a 5 years 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 but will become injured software or either go to work for facebook or sony but now they're writing novels and stories. and is one example there's also called macand. and. then there's whose novel normal people was a runaway success all over the world. when you you know i'm 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 absolutely fascinating thing you know you want to be a fool not to read and what literary tradition do you see yourself. oh i'm sort of

melancholy you know i come out of something that's melancholy. so but the thing is when you're writing when you're working if you start thinking oh what literary tradition do i come out of you with then write a terrible sentence which would be filled with self-importance of sorts of nearby literature titian so your job is not to think like that to get the sentences to the work and to make the sentences true meaning that if one sentences like this has 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 that 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's

nervous system before the reader starts to interpret it 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. if you divide his time between ireland the united states and spain but he says home is where his records are due. listen to music while you have right now i know i know that i think that would be a mistake it would bring in so the a lot of music has it 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 the structure you just look looking in or it's all in word and it's all silent no music no fear just no comfortable

just just right you know just work a long. wonderful books of emerged from the self-imposed austerity the blackwater lightship tells of 3 generations of women discussing homosexuality hiv aids and changes in irish society. the master is a fictional account of the life of the us writer henry james. mothers and sons is a collection of short stories in which each story explores an aspect of the mother son relationship. nora webster's unforgettable protagonist struggles with grief and finds a 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 could start reading at the age of 9 and you started writing poems it's the age of 12. a was the death of your father the trigger to write or something ah 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. going to ruin your own every evening and you know you might be reading the last month or learning sides 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 extra month. which to be read to us tells of unexplained absence a recurring motif in his works. the time we were left by our mother you know our

onse haas has no drama attached to it it was all grayness strangeness aren't dealt with us in her own destructive way her husband was mild distant almost could you myrt 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 options and we never asked her if she ever wondered how we were or how we felt during those months. what you describe in this book and in orbit so that's what you experienced yourself when your father was dying a muslim left you alone with relatives i mean how did that influence you you know you know life you know 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 of bad things that happened as a way of sort of thickening the plot or or anchoring everything in in what you might call fact or at least in things that i remember as a happy that i think are true i think that had enormous influence and you learn to look after yourself and you get the notion that nothing is ever certain or secure i suppose 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 i'm not 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 set around. to be a citizen. but he remains drawn to the landscapes of his childhood to the. and to the atmosphere in the country for so many centuries by the rigid codes of the catholic church. conservative catholic nationalistic there what's that was your family background today what you're. 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 great religious feeling so the society became slowly sometimes imperceptibly and then quickly a very liberal place to live and in easy place to move. 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 tobie depicts unlikable. 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 in the irish county where you are from what oldest burglarize you're looking back do 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 it. 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 this 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 you 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. barcelona was wild i thought time and there were no gay bars which meant that the streets certain streets were

just filled up not with gay men wandering about and it might have seemed that 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 guilt or. to be described as skilled very well. he 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 each of the depicts the times in which is characters are living.

i almost think he you know in a painting a portrait of the work done behind the brush work just to make it 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 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 this project 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 the author 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. imagine a survey imaginatively in the society that somehow or other book clubs or women who for example haven't had a great chances or education will take a book open to fall out of the book end up meaning a lot to them that this book was there in a way i think this is obvious so filled with still i think with silences 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 for a book that deals with that becomes a way of breaking a side. with 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 better focus she learned. the screenplay of brooklyn was written by minnie kong the after that german director fuck us little asked you to to help him to be the cove writer for the screenplay of return to montel. 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 then is go back and make changes in it that you would never have made when you were writing it and find with the producer or a new producer or a group of people telling you on oh we don't want her to grow you know we want her to go 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 had just written

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 at a volcano not listen to this he said no no no you actually write this right just try this and i was kind of at that for hours or people were stranded. people were staying with me saying she could do kaiser's matters because there how you're not even listening to each other. so far we turn to montauk has been only foray into the world he's currently working on a new novel that. one of the 1st also if you've read when you were young was thomas mann 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've read watching grant's

films and reading the magic mountain and then 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 to get here but nothing about him is fully clear from his sexuality to his relation of to his family to his political beliefs to his response to various public things that occurred to that great difference between his life in the 1st world war and life in the 2nd world war his race there to his brother to his mother to his sons to his daughters as there's nothing stable that in all that there's nothing everything has to be investigated and privatized so it's a very interesting story a lot of it centers on the writing of dr faustus. so when looking at us and

show birth you know of having a rich time really trying to invoke him not as a power for a minute but prior to him fully as a character in a novel. to be was hardly able to write for almost 2 years he was diagnosed with cancer in 2018 and underwent chemotherapy prolonged stays in the hospital it left him exhausted. in an essay for the london review of books you've wrote about you dealing with the diagnosis and the treatment of cancer why did you feel the need to write about it look i promised i would drive you know i hate people writing about their illnesses and i just it's awful and i really thought i would also no one asked me to do it was 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 it's like the sentence you know all of ball and all start and then once i

wrote that i just for a month or so just add to it regularly. other things that happened. that i had you know about 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 protests of all that you've writing about balls. the experience was grotesque and i thought if i published this sort of. free me in some way that it would be really over and it didn't work so i said to the lugger of yours i remember the note to say i'm not sure this is any use. and then they they said publishers and then of course everybody you know because i hadn't told people i went back to teach without telling everybody i was trying to behave like a normal i was really sick they have like

a normal person i was doing all my work and i was coming to be i mean i know i brought them. 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 or everything close about 9930 up there i mean a really asleep 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 it's all just rubbish that someone 18 year old reading a book can actually find that the book has left that lit a fire in her or in him and i see that and i witness a. book's continue to light a fire in to be and he brings that passion to his work as a writer and as a teacher. colin tobin is a man who can forever lose himself in literature even if he never forgets his irish roots. he's.

6660. 8. after. they were mutating into a nameless mass. their bodies mere tools of the history of the slave trade of africans who stray adduced stripes of the green from our intrepid plummeted an entire continent into mom's this time europe's expansion for all the gold in the

world in our series of slavery around. the. earth. home. of species. a home worth saving. given those are big changes and most start with small steps but global ideas tell stories of creative people and innovative projects around the world. use the term limits to stop images solutions and reforestation. current interactive content teaching the next generation about environmental protection. law using all channels available to people to take action and more determined to do something here for the next generation the idea is

for the environment series of global 3000. on t.w. and on mine. each stone tells my story. of the people who planned to meet builds me dedicated to the body and not too dumb to. listen closely and i will tell you about who knows whom good to me up. to me down. i am not too dumb to come. to my city days for centuries and accompanied my country through its finest. until the day i mean a funny place. i

still not too dumb to post. april 8th. place. the bag. this is d w news live from berlin president trump announces a major change in u.s. policy on be coronavirus to unleash the full power of the federal government that the surfer today i am officially declaring a national emergency that announcement will free up billions to pay for measures to slow the viruses spread meanwhile.