Saturday at Zenda. Saturday of contemporary classics. This time we devote the Saturday to The Master. Portrait of the Adult Novelist, one of the great works by the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín (Enniscorthy, County Wexford, 1955), originally published in 2004 and reissued to the catalog, with a Spanish translation by Mª Isabel Butler de Foley, under the DeBolsillo label. In its pages, Tóibín immerses himself in the biography, the body of work, and the personality of one of his foremost masters: the American writer Henry James, a grand storyteller of the turn of the century on the East Coast, but also in a Europe undergoing transformation.
The publisher itself states about the book: “We can imagine him wandering the streets of London, seeking consolation for the failure of his play. Later we see him walking through Venice, crossing bridges to attend a sumptuous and tedious reception, or rummaging in the lagoon waters to recover the garments of a friend who chose to bid farewell to life. Then we find him in the study of his country house in Rye, pacing up and down the room in search of the right word, letting the letters coil across the page until the entire paragraph gallops.
Henry James lives on and is ours thanks to Colm Tóibín’s talent: here unfolds and breathes the portrait of a man who was born in the United States but made Europe his own, and there he faced his fears, his doubts before embracing happiness, and the obsessive search for a writing that is clean and deep. Henry James and Colm Tóibín: two geniuses together in a single novel, beyond the time and place fate allotted them”.
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Author: Colm Tóibín. Translation: Mª Isabel Butler de Foley. Title: The Master. Portrait of the Adult Novelist. Publisher: DeBolsillo. Available at: Todos tus libros.