Thought that. 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 plays and poetry we spoke with him about his book and 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 london. 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 tony in new york. And jim. 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. Weirdness his understanding of women time from. A woman i would say maybe could you just stop that making those exaggerated figures women you know their 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 sit me very grumpy your 3 man talk about some sport i was not if youre a 5 year old is nothing theres nothing in it for you in this or that women upstairs would matter what they say it would be always fascinating. For me. To be has 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 called underscore see thats my wild and small stretch of the wexford coast about 10 miles away so im not sure the world is home but its 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 thats mine in this place with long winters long memories have a lot of gray sky. I can walk from the. Tobin isnt 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 is the playwright George Bernard shaw. Oscar wildes. Samuel beckett. As well as the poet seamus heaney. Shot beckett and he were awarded the nobel prize for literature why does a half such an impressive place and what that would lead to 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 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 irelands great writers were born in the capital douglas. The city has a number of museums 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. Up there at the moment its every season. 2 or 3 young writers of marriage were very very good its been happening especially the last 35 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 into the software or you know go to work for facebook or something but now theyre writing novels and stories. And write. Theres also called mccann. And. Then theres sally rooney whose novel normal people was a runaway success all over the world i familiar with 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 absolutely fascinating thing you know you want to be a fool not to readers and what literary tradition do this in itself. 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 over what literary tradition do i come out of you with then write a terrible sentence which would be filled with selfimportance of some of the media my literature titian so your 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 as a rhythm like this the next sentences to be a variation on that rhythmically 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 for the melody for that is it like music but its like music in that its based on melody its based on rhythm and that hits 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 to actually follow the rhythm. Tobin is passionate about music. Or 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 easy a 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 would distract you just look in or its all in word and its all silent no music no vision post austerity the blackwater lightship tells of 3 generations of women discussing homosexuality hiv aids and changes an Irish Society 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 over shows his compassion and intelligence yes he wasnt always an avid reader he struggled at school as a boy when he was 12 his father died in tobin began to start or. You could start reading at the age of 9 and you started writing poems its the age of 12. A was the death of your father the trigger to write or something ah ah. 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 had to 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. Left look for the literary world the extra. Which to be read to us tells of unexplained doubt since a recurring motif in his works. The time we were left by our mother you know on strasse has no drama attached to it it was all grain this 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 robsons we never asked her if shed ever wondered how we were or how we felt during those months. What you describe in this book and in orbit so thats what you experienced yourself when your father was dying of 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 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 sickening the plot or or anchoring everything in in what you might call fact or at least in things that i remember as a 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 feel as 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 have a subject that i had not fully worked out you know in psychoanalysis or in any other way that it was like a knot 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. These days to be in is a citizen of the world but he remains drawn to the landscapes of his childhood to the sea and to the atmosphere in the country shaped for so many centuries by the rigid codes of the Catholic Church. The conservative catholic nationalist of their words that was your family background today what youre. Opposite what happened ireland changed everyone in every family slowly changed themselves i mean it wasnt you know if 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 became less interested in being being made feel small and out of the other movements about how to treat children about gay people or about people for example who didnt feel racial or religious feeling so the 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 populations catholic. A series of sex abuse scandals has tarnished the churchs reputation. But the priests and nuns to be detained unlikable. In the last 2 decades are a couple of scandals in the Catholic Church also india in all over the world but became public but including the irish county where you are from what all this girl raj 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 their knowledge and youre looking at high think i know when that happened and how it happened but at the time i missed it 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 the country which doesnt didnt recognize gay rights. It was it was being gay was seen as a form of perversion and suffering when did you decide 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 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 that there was repression but it didnt feel like that in spain felt much more open people were much more ready to enjoy their lives arlin there was always guilt or. To be described as skilled very well. Honors his characters in the struggles many of which our universe. Alex for instance fled poverty and suffered Emotional Turmoil as did millions of immigrants. To bin thinks its important to get the setting right he need to put the times in which is characters are living. 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 youre writing a novel set in time no matter what you do what going on in that in the either background or the 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 doesnt mean at the foreground this project to know it if you know what year because it matters enormously. The characters in tobins 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 its become a good audience. They books and. You get a sense that a book a novel or a new novel isnt it is some sort of intervention. Imagine this or imagine really in the society that somehow or other book clubs or women who for example havent had a great chances or education will could take a book over devour the book and 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 its its if you dont talk often about things that really matter to you. So that for example if theres 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 a side. Brooklyn with tobins most successful novel to teens it was adapted to a screenplay too though he didnt write it he did however write the screenplay for return to montauk together with german jew rector focus 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 its if youve written a novel but you dont 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 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 it for a book or stronger or. 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 to talk and know not listen to this he said no no no youre actually rock this right just try this and i was just good at that for hours and people were saying that where people were staying with me saying she was mad is to trust their how youre not even listen to each other. So far returned to montauk has been tobins only foray into the world of show 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 you werent watching brands 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 ninetys seventys and hes 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 of to his brother to his mother to his sons to his daughters as theres nothing stable in all that theres nothing everything has to be investigated and dramatize so its so its a very interesting story a lot of it centers on the writing of dr faustus. So. Looking out show burka you know but having a rich time really. Trying to invoke him not as a power for a minute but prior to him fully as a character you know. To be was hardly able to write for almost 2 years he was diagnosed with cancer in 20 underwent chemotherapy with 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 you know i hate people writing about their illnesses and i just its 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 its like the sentence you know all of a ball of war 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 ive actually almost got rid of some of the anguish around you know some of it was just off. Task for just about you variety involved balls. Of 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 didnt work so i said to the lugger of yours remember that no just 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 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 ive no reason. 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 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 over here has a sleep at the place. Its you know it looks like a University Village you know and i teach on monday and tuesday and give us the graduate seminar on oscar wilde and to do an undergraduate 7 are on the year the sales 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 had actually found as in the booklet that lit a fire in her or in him and i see that when 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 being is a man who can forever lose himself in literature even if he never forgets his irish roots. 6. O. T. Politics. Keep learning. Wait a 2nd we want the whole picture our facts instead of make ideas shift to live us. From other reality to cryptocurrency to your topics for live in an ever changing Digital World lets start with to devise a certain shift. For 15 minutes now and total. By less than hundreds of millions of years into the constant back to the pound guy a supercontinent. The highest concentration of fossils including me im 50 pounds on reptiles even the relatives of to run a saurus rex is located in eastern germany. Allium tonnages continue to uncover sensational finds. In 30 minutes w. We speak different languages we fight for Different Things thats fine but we all stick up for Freedom Freedom of speech and freedom of press. Giving freedom of Choice Global news that matters w. Made for mines. Toast it is for me. Beethoven is for. Her. And beethoven is for platos it is for everyone playing the beethoven 2020 vision of the 50th anniversary on d w. Is the schumann race destroying itself. We are ruining the basic elements of our existence were using too much water and were colluding with her lifes going to. Go lower supplies will last for ever but they wont play when the rain stops starts march 20th on w. Played. This is the news live from berlin in the u. S. Tightens its Coronavirus Travel ban chaos at u. S. Airports americans rushing home from europe before flights from britain and ireland are grounded and washington could soon start restricting travel within the u. S. As well also coming up paris bars serve their final drinks as france