In Love in a Dark Time, Colm Toibin looks at the life
and work of some of the greatest and most influential
artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His
subjects range from figures such as Oscar Wilde, born in
the 1850s, to Pedro Almodovar, born nearly a hundred
years later. Toibin studies how a changing world
impacted on the lives of people who, on the whole, kept
their homosexuality hidden, and reveals that the laws of
desire changed everything for them, both in their
private lives and in the spirit of their work. 'Toibin
treats his subject with confidence and authority, both
of which attributes are only strengthened by his
moderation of tone and the depth of his compassion.He
writes with rare tenderness of figures as disparate as
Elizabeth Bishop and Francis Bacon, Thomas Mann and
Roger Casement, Thom Gunn and Pedro Almodovar' John
Banville, Irish Times 'Such readings are crucial, for it
is only when homosexuality is removed from the margins
and placed at the very heart of the cultural canon that
the world predicted by Toibin in which ''being gay will
no longer involve difficulty and discrimination'' will
come to pass' Michael Arditti, The Times 'Toibin writes
with high-voltage restraint; his sentences are
masterfully devoid of trickery ...He is tuned in to the
silent language of families, the messages that are
unspoken and slip past the rest of the world, landing
deep into the hearts of those who understand' Robert
Sullivan, Vogue |
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