i was. not proud and i will not succeed in dividing us about not succeed in taking the people off the streets because we're tired of this dictatorship. taking a stand global news that matters d. double made for minds. if you don't talk often about things that really matter to people often just go quiet about it and just just and that's what a book that deals with that becomes a way of breaking a silence. that

. 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 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 alias 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 new jersey.

there she settles in the boring 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 tourney in new york. and who she meets in ireland on a trip. to be 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 of 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 the man could see me very grumpy your 3 man talk about some sport i was not if you're a 5 year old is nothing there's nothing. in this earth that women upstairs with no matter what they say it would be yours for us. it is 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 irish tradition has invented an island that's what you said in an interview what is your island i come from a sphere a few streets in a small town in the southeast called. that's my wild. and small stretch of the wexford coast about 10 miles away so i. i'm not sure the word is home but it's

certainly a territory and out of that terra truck 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 and i can walk from the. tobin isn't the only one who has been inspired by the skies of violent this country of 5000000 has given birth to it just proportionately 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 were awarded the nobel prize for literature why. that's an impressive place and 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 winter he said you know one person in the family has to start thinking i could write one of those but 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 or marriage were very very good there's been happening especially the last say 5 years and you go sure enough 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 injured in software or you know go to work for facebook or something but now they're writing novels and stories. and write is one example there's also the mccann. and. then there's sally rooney whose novel normal people 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 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 the thing is when you're writing when you're working if you start thinking over what literary tradition you are come out of you with then write a terrible sentence which would be filled with self-importance of sorts of me or my literature edition 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 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. nervous system before the reader start to interpret her youth or 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 easy emotion it'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 inwards it's all in word and it's all silent no music no fear mostly 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 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 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. i 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 you should going to ruin your own every evening and you know you might be reading the last month or learning science and i was writing porn 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 toby reads to us tells of unexplained absence a recurring motif in his words. the time we were left by our mother you know. 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 good 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 we never asked her if you've ever wondered how we were or how we felt during those months. what you described in this book and ignore bob so that's what you experienced yourself that's 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 events things that happened as a way of sort of sickening 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 are 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 to have a subject that i had not fully worked. you know psychoanalysis or any other way that was like a not that needs to be untied and so it became a pressing matter to write this down and to find a form for her to find

a way off communicating it without sounding self pitying or sentimental. to be a citizen. but he remains drawn to the landscapes of his childhood. and to the atmosphere in the country for so many centuries by the rigid codes of the catholic church. conservative catholic nationalistic that what's that was 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 if 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 particular less interested in being been made feel small and out of

that group other movements about how to treat children about gay people or people for example who didn't feel great 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 a couple of scandals in the catholic church also in the or in all over the world but became public but including the irish county where you are from but always garage 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 where that happened and how it happened but at the time i missed it. 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 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 what i was 2975. boston i was wild i thought time. there were no gay bars which meant that the street certain streets were just filled up not with gay men wandering about and it might have seemed there was

repression but it didn't feel like that in spain felt much more open people were much more ready to enjoy their lives and arlin there was always a guilt or. to be described as skilled very well. honors his characters in their struggles many of which are universal. in this for instance fled poverty and suffered emotional turmoil as did millions of immigrants. to being thinks it's important to get the setting right he simply depicts the times in which his characters are living. and i almost think he you know in a painting or portrays 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'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 tried to keep it out it will come in somewhere other doesn't meet the foreground us which have to know us if you know what year because it matters enormously. to 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. books and. you get a sense that a book a novel a new novel isn't it is some sort of intervention imagine a sort of imaginatively 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 out of the book and up meaning a lot to them that this book was there in a way i think is a saga 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 an after death people often just go quiet about it just just so a book that deals with that becomes a way of breaking aside. nicholas tobin's most successful novel to teens 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 but 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 group of people telling you on oh we don't want her to go you know we want her to go to not go home or you know go to brooklyn much earlier 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 it for the book or strong pay. i was ready i'd probably have just written a novel so i was sort of free on 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 or no not to listen to this he said no no no you're actually right this right this to try this and i was just kind of that for hours and people were stranded. people were staying with me saying she could do kaiser's maddie's because they're 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 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 heard watching rand'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 to get. that nothing about him is fully clear from his sexuality to his relationship to his family to his political beliefs to his response to various public things that occurred to the great difference between his life in the 1st world war and the life of 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 so it's a very interesting story a lot of it centers on the right here dr faustus. so the show. you know about having a rich time really trying to invoke him not as a power for much but prior to him fully as

a character and off. to being was hardly able to write for almost 2 years he was diagnosed with cancer in 20 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 it 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 do it and also no one asked me to do it there is no demand for this and then one day i just a 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 all start and then once i wrote that i just for a month or so just what had to it regularly. other things that happened. 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 all protests put to a vote that you've writing about balls. the experience was grotesque and i thought if i published this whole sort of. free me in some way that would be really over and it didn't work so i said to the lugger of yours remember that no just say i'm not sure this is any use. and then they they said that 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 have like a normal i was really sick we had like a normal person i was doing all my work and i was coming to be mean but i mean i've no reason. so the policy in the piece was sort of funny you know i

also 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 the doesn't sleep everything close about 9930 up there really has sleeping 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. to do an undergraduate 7 are on the interstate 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 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 be is a man who can forever lose himself in literature even if he never forgets his irish roots. 66. 6 pts.

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each still tells my story. of the people who climbed to me built me dedicated to. it i'm not too dumb to. listen closely and i will tell you about those who blew to me on. me down. i am not too dumb to publish. i have mocked my city days for centuries and accompanied my country through its finest. until the day i mean a funny. i'm still not too dumb to post. april any.

black. plague. this is do w. news live from berlin european governments take drastic measures just stop the spread of coronavirus france and spain follow italy in ordering and nationwide shutdown of public life only food shops and pharmacies are to stay open many countries in europe are closing their borders as a number of infections rises. well here in germany by contrast shops remain open and many people are still out in a bound but there is plenty of evidence of panic buying.