What is a “private self” and how does it manifest itself in the novel? Is the author’s moral judgments interesting to the reader? How are stories about figures such as Clytemnestra “humanized”? And when is time our ally?

The author spoke about these and many other topics on Thursday Colm Toybinin conversation with a Greek poet Dionysius Kapsalis in the National Library of Greece, in its context Arts Festival Rolex. And, as it turned out, the Irishman, beloved for such novels as The House with Names, Brooklyn, Mary’s Testament (Icarus Publishing House), combined a wide knowledge of European culture with a deep sensitivity to the human.

Thus, besides Tintoretto, Bach or Freud, Colm Teubin also spoke about literature, noting that the novel, in particular, “is connected with the idea that there is a distance between itself, its internal processes, which are almost secrets, and personality.” person when he is in a certain situation. This distance is perfectly dramatized in the novel, “because you can show what someone is thinking and then show what they are saying or not saying,” emphasized the author, who used this special quality of literature in his writings on Henry James (“ The Master”) and Thomas Mann (“The Magician”).

“When you come up with a character, you’re trying to capture the full presence in the world of someone who isn’t you.”

Regarding Mann in particular, Dionysis Kapsalis noted that in The Wizard, Toibin does not criticize Mann for his shortcomings, and the Irishman replied that moral judgments are the business of the church. “If you have opinions, there are newspapers,” Toibin said earlier, explaining that especially “when you come up with a character, you are trying to capture the general presence in the world of someone who is not you.”

In The House of Names, he tried to present Clytemnestra as having a will of her own, as if the gods had other things to do. “Roman loves money, he loves people who are looking for something but do not get it, he loves disappointment, not lightning and the appearance of the gods,” he said. Something similar, he added, he did in Mary’s Testament, where he wondered what the Virgin Mary would be like if she were the elderly heroine of the novel, with memories and desires.

As for his own life, it is summarized in the autobiographical Guest at the Feast. At one point in the book, Toybin returns to his hometown of Enniscorthy and finds that instead of a hodgepodge of memories, he can finally experience something there that “seems already formed from all the time that has passed.” Toybin told about another such place, Blackwater, where he went on vacation with his family and which he remembers everything. “I wanted to buy a house there years later. I used to be told: “Why go there?”. But I had every reason to do so.”