Book Sketch: Nicholson Baker reads Colm Tóibín
Book Sketch: Nicholson Baker reads Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn and The Master, has a book of essays out. He writes about Venice, the Catholic Church, and his youth, among other things. There's an unforgettable account of his experience with cancer.
As I drew Tóibín, after a photograph by Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, I thought over passages in A Guest at the Feast that had struck me.
On jokes:
I can’t really tell jokes. I just don’t know how. I can try to tell them, but they come out skewed and flat and somewhat sad.
On his Aunt Maeve reciting poetry
She is sitting up and staring out to sea and her voice has the same stilted, serious and incantatory tone she uses when she is giving out the rosary. All of the others have grown serious, each in different poses, one lying back, one resting on an elbow, one sitting up. My auntie Maeve has tears in her eyes. The poem is long and it rhymes. I wish I could remember what it was.
On why some gay men joined the priesthood:
That you were gay was something you managed to know about yourself and not know at the same time. This is almost an aspect of the Catholic religion itself, this business of knowing and not knowing something all at the same time, keeping an illusion separate from the truth.
On visiting a certain Venetian street:
I had a coffee and looked out over the misty water. I came to this very spot first in 1977, which is forty-three years ago. If I have the chance to come and sit here in forty-three years’ time, I will be 108. I realize that this is a most banal and useless subject for contemplation. But what else is there to think about?
During chemotherapy:
On one of the first nights, something started to bang and clash in my head. It was not made up of words, but it was like words, or like sentences; it possessed the shape of a sentence or two that were violently seeking an outlet. Every so often, there would be a break and a single word that had nothing to do with anything would suddenly emerge.
After testicular cancer:
They used to complete each other’s sentences, those balls, they were so close, but now the surviving testicle has to get used to the change. It has to realize that the time of two balls has passed.
Colm Tóibín by Nicholson Baker, after a photograph by Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert
Nicholson Baker’s most recent book is Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art. See his drawings for Book Post at the tag “N Baker Drawing.”
Coming soon! Middlemarch read-along with Mona Simpson. Tell your friends and stay tuned!
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