Title : Brooklyn - Colm Tóibín - book
Summary : After The Master (2005), Best Foreign Book Award, Colm Tóibín offers us Brooklyn, Costa Prize (formerly the Whitbread Prize) for the best British novel.
Enniscorthy, southeast Ireland, 1950s. Like many young people of her generation, Eilis Lacey, with an accounting degree in hand, is unable to find work. Through a priest, her sister Rose obtains a job for her in the United States. By pushing her younger sister to leave, Rose sacrifices herself: she will now be alone to care for their widowed mother and will have little chance of marrying. Terrified of leaving the family cocoon, but forced to comply with Rose's decision, Eilis leaves Ireland. In Brooklyn, she rents a room in an Irish boarding house and begins her American life under the watchful eye of the landlady and other tenants. At first, homesickness overwhelms her, leaving her sad and lonely. Then, little by little, she becomes attached to the newness of her existence. To her job as a saleswoman in a department store where the first Black customers make a timid appearance that scandalizes right-thinking souls—except Eilis, who, in her small hometown, has never known racism. To the Friday dance at the local parish church. To the evening classes through which she perfects her accounting skills. In this rhythm between reassuring monotony and exciting new things, Eilis finds a kind of freedom not unlike happiness. And when Tony, a tender, serious, and very much in love Italian, enters her life, she is convinced that her future is mapped out: she will become American. But a family tragedy forces her to cross the Atlantic again for a few weeks in Ireland. Back home, Eilis has become a fashionable, desirable woman, adorned with the charm of an exile. Brooklyn, Tony, American life is veiled in the unreality of dreams. A new future awaits her in the small town of her childhood: a man ready to marry her, a job. Two countries, two jobs, two loves. Irreconcilable possibilities flood Eilis, inflicting on her the small death that the imperative of choices implies.
EAN : 9782221113493
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