I dont care if. We met the irish writer colm toibin 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 books in his life as well as about ireland and how its 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 new jersey. There she settles in the boring old brooklyn which is home to a Large Community of irish immigrants. At 1st and shes torn between the 2 cultures and then between to meet tony in new york. And who she meets in ireland on a trip. 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 or girls so were always well women talk and i was always very interested what they were saying where is the man could say im a very grumpy your 3 man talk about some sport i was not if youre a 5 year old has nothing theres nothing in it for you in this or that women upstairs would matter what they say it would be all for us. Just for me. To be his written 2 books much of his work is autobiographical and ireland place a major role. Each artist in the great irish tradition has invented an island thats what you said in an interview what is your island i come from a few streets in a small town in the southeast. Thats my wild and small stretch of the wexford coast. 10 miles away so im not sure the world is home but its certainly a territory and out of that territory i got a great deal of emotional resonance so because i know those streets and i know that stretch of coast so thats mine in this place with long winters long memories have a lot of grey sky and i could walk from the. Beam isnt the only one to have been inspired by the skies of violent this country and 5000000 has given birth to it just proportionately high number of writers james joyce is arguably the most famous. But the playwright George Bernard shaw. Oscar wildes. Samuel becketts. As well as the poet seamus heaney. Beckett and he were awarded the nobel prize for literature while. 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 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 irelands great writers were born in the capital dhaka. The city has a number of these eons devoted to the countrys 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 its every season. 2 or 3 young writers in march were very very good theres been happening especially in 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 its an extraordinary thing and you thought maybe it wont happen again people become injured software or you know go to work for facebook or something but now theyre writing novels and stories. And write is one example theres also. And. Then theres. This novel normal people was a runaway success all over the world. You know reading it because its fascinating to see you know the ones who are more experimental and the ones who are writing for womens lives and the ones who write about the city of the country obviously its an absolute fascinating thing you know you want you to be a fool not to read and what literary tradition to see herself. Oh im sort of melancholy you know i come out of something thats melancholy. So but the thing is when youre writing when youre working if you start thinking oh what a literary tradition do i come out of you with that rather terrible satins which would be filled with selfimportance of sorts of me and my 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 sentences like this has a rhythm like this the next set aside to be a variation on that reason make play and you work almost as though youre a composer working and. Therefore the less you think the better your job is to sort of deal truthfully and find the melody for that isnt like music but its like music in that its based on melody its based on rhythm and that is its the nervous system sometimes or it should hit the reader. Nervous system before the reader start to interpret her use her intelligence some other system is happening that causes the reader to turn the page not merely to know whats happening next but actually for the follow the rhythm. Tobin is passionate about music. Illust 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 eat a lot of music easier motion thats very satisfying but when youre working you need something much more austere such a silence and also i think you need to face in words youre having a big view out the window with the structure you just look in or its all in word and its all silent no music no fear just no comfortable just just right you know just were all. Wonderful books of emerged from the selfimposed 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. Tobins shows his compassion and intelligence yet he wasnt 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 its the age of 12. I was the death of your father was a 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 law and 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 extra sons 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 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 good humored 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 ever wondered how we were or how we felt during those months. What you describe in this book and ignore but so thats 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 life you know writing. All that was more or less what happened it doesnt mean its autobiography because you change things and the way you remember changes things anyway so its 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 thickening the plot or or anchoring everything in what you might call fact or at least in things that i remember as a hobby 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. Im 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 it was but i like to 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 of communicating it without sounding self pitying or sentimental. These days to being as 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. Conservative catholic nationalistic there whats that was your family background today what youre present is just the opposite what happened ireland changed everyone in every family slowly change themselves i mean it wasnt you know it began perhaps with the Womens Movement but i mean women who werent part of the Womens Movement just slowly in their own houses became more powerful became you know became more powerful or less interested in being being made feel small and out of that group other movements about how to treat children about gay people or people for example who didnt feel racial or religious feeling so the society became slowly sometimes imperceptibly and then quickly a 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 churchs reputation but the priests and nuns to be diplomats are likeable. In the last 2 decades a couple of scandals in the Catholic Church also in the in all over the world but became public but including in the irish county where you are from what all this garage 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 youre a novelist but if youre anybody but just there novelist and youre looking at i think i know when that happened and how it happened but at the time i missed. I didnt realize what was going on right in front of me and i think for a novelist its a tremendously interesting idea that all the time perhaps in all of our lives in our characters lives theres something going on thats maybe obvious except that they dont 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 irelands development. You were brought up in a kind of dark time certainly saw homosexuality had no name in a country which doesnt didnt 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 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. Boston i was wild at that time. There were no gay bars which meant that the streets certain streets were just filled up not with gay man wandering about and it might have seemed there was repression but it didnt 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 describes this guilt very well he honors his characters in the struggles many of which are universal. Even if for instance fled poverty and suffered Emotional Turmoil as did millions of immigrants. To be in thinks its important to get the setting right. It depicts the times in which his 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 a color behind often does a great deal of work even though it seems like background i think if youre 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 into the novel even if you try to keep it out it will come in somewhere other doesnt mean at the foreground this project to know if you know what year because it matters enormously. The characters until beans 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 yes how did this become a good its become a good audience. And you get a sense that a book a novel a new novel isnt it is some sort of intervention. Imagine this with imagine the early in the society that somehow or other book clubs or women who for example havent 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 its its if you dont talk often about things that really matter to you so that for example if theres if you lose somebody im not their death people often just go quiet just just so a book that deals with that becomes a way of breaking assad. Looking with tobins most successful novel to teens it was adapted to a screenplay too though he didnt write it she did however write the screenplay for return to montauk together with german director fucka she learned. The screenplay of brooklyn was written by minnie kong the after that german director focus lyndall 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. Of writing the screenplay for one of your own novels no i think its if youve written a novel what you dont want to do then is go back and make changes in it that you would never have made when you were writing and find with a producer for a new producer or a group of people telling you on oh we dont want her to go you know we want her to go to not go home or you know go to brooklyn much earlier so we had said and youre suddenly actually you know. Destroying your own work so i didnt want to do that i liked what nick did but i didnt want to do one for the book or strong came. I was ready id probably ive just written a novel so i was sort of free. He 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 or no not listen to this he said no you know you actually write this right just try this and i was just kind of at that for hours and people were stranded. People were staying with me saying she just matters because there how youre not even listening to each other. So far we turn to montauk has been tobins only foray into the world of film hes currently working on a new novel cut one of the 1st also if youve read when you were young was thomas mann and now he told me that youre 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 youve heard watching grants 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 hes been on my mind as a figure of great time to get. But nothing about him is fairly 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 the great difference between his life of the 1st world war the life of the 2nd world war his race there to his brother to his mother to his son 3 daughters as is nothing stable in all that is nothing everything has to be investigated and dramatize so its a very interesting story a lot of it centers on the right here dr faustus. So. Looking out show. You know that having a rich time really trying to invoke him not as a power for much but prior to what happened him fully as a character and. To be was hardly able to write for almost 2 years he was diagnosed with cancer in 20 underwent chemotherapy prolonged stays in the hospital it left him exhausted. In an essay for the london review of books youve 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 wouldnt write it you know i hate people writing about their illnesses and i just its awful and i really thought i would and also no one asked me to do it there was 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 its like 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. That i had you know but a 1000 words and i thought well you know i read it over again and i just laughed a bit and thought ive actually almost got rid of some of the anguish around you know some of all protests. About you for writing about balls. Of 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 didnt work so i sent it to the london review i remember the note to say im not sure this is any use. And then they they said that publishers and then of course everybody you know because i hadnt 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 doing all my work and i was coming to the meetings but i mean i had no i propose. So the policy of the piece was sort of father 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 yorks 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 doesnt sleep everything close about 9930 up there i mean a really asleep at the place. Its 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 recess people talk about things changing and young people not being like they were on the internet thats all just rubbish its 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 and i witness a. 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 roots. 6 feet. S. O. S. Europe the european idea is in crisis. If its to have a future economy champions young champions meet for activists for a country. They are fighting for the dream. They stand a chance and they saved the european idea. In 15 minutes on t. W. Being a good shape. Are drugs the right way to manage. The cost and make a time asks what is the medication indicate nothing to. What are the risks of side effects. And other alternative treatments. In good shape. In 90 minutes on d w. Every journey begins with the 1st step and every language with the 1st word published in the. Rico is in germany to learn german why not come with them simple online on your mobile and free to some d w z e learning course nikos fake. Sherman made it easy. Each step comes my story. Of the people who climbed me built me. To go and i am not too dumb to. Listen closely and i will tell you about the moon those who are good to me on the calendar good to me down the book i am not too dumb to publish. I am on to my city days for centuries and accompanied my country through its finest. Until the day i mean a gun in the back. Im still not to dumb to. April and. Cut. The bag. The bag. Business d. W. News live from build it its closing time in the city of los terrace boss says they last drinks most frocks of what is going to say to businesses clothes spying goes a step further tells president s to remain inside their homes as europe moves to control the spread of the run of books. In the us President Donald Trump broadcast test results out in the end the negative but what about the tastes of the rest of the country. Germany from those guides to no good