International Dublin Literary Award 2011— Shortlisted
Man Booker Prize 2009 — Longlisted
BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Film
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4
Film screening: 5 pm
Discussion (and refreshments): 7 pm
Call to register & reserve a copy of the book &/or dvd
203-488-8702
About the book
“America is peopled, for the most part, by the descendants of immigrants who had the resolve, the daring and the detachment to leave behind the places and people they had formerly known. But Eilis isn’t such a person; detachment isn’t part of her makeup. It has been thrust on her by women who are as attached to home and family as she is … In tracking the experience, at the remove of half a century, of a girl as unsophisticated and simple as Eilis — a girl who permits herself no extremes of temperament, who accords herself no right to self-assertion — Tóibín exercises sustained subtlety and touching respect. He shows no condescension for Eilis’s passivity but records her cautious adventures matter-of-factly, as if she were writing them herself in her journal.”—The New York Review of Books
About the film
“Many American families cherish faded memories of the Old Neighborhood and the Old Country, places that help supply both a sense of identity and a story of progress — complementary answers to the question “Where do we come from?”
“Brooklyn,” a lovely film based on the even lovelier novel by Colm Toibin, feels like an answer to that question. Set in its titular borough and in a small Irish town in the early 1950s, it is both sharply observed and gently nostalgic.” —The New York Times
