Readers of Colm Tóibín will recognize the style of his forthcoming novella, The Catalan Girls, which was published in August – in Catalan – as Una casa al Pallars.[1] Author of eleven novels –including Long Island, the recently-released sequel to Brooklyn – Tóibín is known not only for moving psychological portraits, but also for his spare and haunting prose, engagement with trauma, and powerful use of understatement. The Catalan Girls carries these canonical fingerprints through like a watermark, while also exploring its own themes of connection, independence, and redemption.

The novella examines the history of three sisters – Núria, Conxita, and Montse (short for Montserrat) – whose mother moved them from their home in Catalonia to Argentina when they were 15, 12, and 10, respectively, after the death of their father. Told from the youngest sister, Montse’s perspective, the story alternates between tracing the girls’ initial adjustment to Buenos Aires (and their subsequent lives in Argentina over the ensuing fifty years) and relaying current events pertaining to the death of their Aunt Julia, who still lived in Burg and who bequeaths them her house in Spain.

In keeping with Tóibín’s considerable strengths as a portraitist, we have here a family haunted by loss. Although the death of the father is kept largely in the background, the impact of his absence on the children and their mother arises as grief often can – suddenly and searingly – throughout the narrative. Thus, when their mother dies, the sisters quarrel bitterly over Núria’s claim that their mother made “a rash decision coming to Argentina” because she “was in such a state of shock and panic…[and] she was traumatized”, or that Núria’s monopolizing of their mother’s time was for her sake, rather than Núria’s convenience. Upon returning to Burg in Spain, Montse realizes with a pang that she had misinterpreted an old memory: “If her mother was not the one driving, she thought, then her father must have been at the wheel […]. Since she was four years old when he died, she had always believed that she had no memory of him at all”. Such moments powerfully remind the reader that the family’s loss was both a watershed moment and a formative turn that shadows the text and their lives.

Like earlier works such as The Blackwater Lightship and Nora Webster, The Catalan Girls also engages with family dysfunction, which is variably related to the girls’ loss, uprooting, and efforts to integrate into a new society. The oldest sister, Núria, seems a ruthless monster of a relative. She throws herself into their new circumstances, lying about her father’s fate and employment; aspiring to (and ultimately attaining) a higher social circle; and controlling or even ignoring her mother and sisters, as situations require, to meet those aspirations. Nonetheless, she does not see herself this way, feeling hurt by the sisters’ view of her and claiming (despite their decades-long estrangements), “We were always close, the three of us”. Their mother, required to work to support the family in their straitened circumstances, invests her hopes mostly in her oldest child and effectively abandons Conxita and Montse; as a result, the younger girls feel that Núria “stole [their] mother and […] should be ashamed of herself”. Conxita leaves as soon as she can to take work as a kind of lady’s aid to a wealthy family’s daughter, working there for the next 45 years. Lastly, in a move evocative of Eilis Lacey’s original powerlessness in Brooklyn, Montse is forced to take over her mother’s job at 16 – and Núria’s identity, as she is not yet old enough to work – and she is driven by her mother’s desertion from their apartment into a boarding house. These inauspicious bodings suggest that only Núria will be a “success”.

When the novella moves to the present, however, many canonical parallels – or any simplistic readings of fate – end. Now widowed, we see that Núria’s is a wealthy but somewhat loveless existence (neighbors in Burg refer to her as “the rude one”). We learn that Conxita has likely been not only employed by, but also in a loving relationship with, her employer, Maria Louisa – a liaison that has given her financial stability, a warm and joyful life, and a free spirit (such that she is found “cavorting” in Spain). Having essentially drifted through unsatisfying employment, two affairs with married men, and fifty years, Montse seems the least financially stable or emotionally grounded sister; yet, she ultimately proves to be perhaps the canniest survivor in Tóibín’s canon. Indeed, Montse in the present is far more like the Eilis Fiorello of Long Island than the Eilis Lacey of Brooklyn. She uses her knowledge of her sisters, and a determined focus on the future, both to reject the temptations of regret and to seize the opportunities of the present, particularly in an ironic twist through which she reclaims her identity and independence.

The Catalan Girls shares with Tóibín’s most recent novel, Long Island, a tantalizing engagement with the notion of second chances: both texts refuse to craft such opportunities solely in terms of regret or redemption, although they admit these factors as relevant. At the same time, both texts interrogate what “belonging” means and challenge the defeatist notion that, in returning, those who left “would now be like a faded photograph or an old dance tune[:] they belonged to the past”. For its part, The Catalan Girls goes further, to reject any simplistic representation of family. The novella shows that family can be large enough to accommodate love and hurt, and that individuals – like Montse in her embrace of Catalan – can hold both past and present at the same time and employ that tension in order to navigate the future. The Catalan Girls is a powerful yet quiet novella, and a reminder of why Colm Tóibín is considered to be among the best Irish writers of his generation.

Notes

[1] This review is based on an unpublished English-language translation provided to me by the author. I am grateful for his generosity in sharing this work!