By Beatrix "Marginalia" Vellum
Twenty years ago Colm Tóibín sent a woman walking out into the Catalan snow and never brought her back. That novella, A Long Winter, left her son Miquel waiting through the thaw for a body that never surfaced — grief rendered in prose so restrained it barely let itself grieve.
Now, in The Bridge, a single year has passed in Miquel's life. He is still on the isolated high farm, still under the thumb of an unyielding father, the family's sheep still grazing the summer pastures. A little smuggling on the side brings in cash the farm can't otherwise find. It is a hard, bare existence — and according to a review in The Guardian, it is in that bareness that Tóibín locates his real subject: the things people smuggle in besides contraband.
The emotional center of the book, per the review, is the quiet, forbidden tenderness that grows between Miquel and Manolo, his father's mistreated servant. Two young men, worn down by isolation and labor, find a kind of relief in each other that the world around them has no place for. Love between men, doubly illicit in this setting, becomes its own kind of contraband — passed in the dark, in a few words, a touch, nothing more than the farm itself will allow.
What makes the novella land, by this account, is Tóibín's refusal to soften the terrain to fit the tenderness, or the tenderness to fit the terrain. The suppleness of youth against the fixity of a hard place is the whole tension of the book, and it's a tension the author has been sitting with, patiently, for two decades.
Worth your evening, or worth skipping — I finished it so you'd know.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."