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Summary
Summary
2014 Audie Award Finalist for Audiobook of the Year, Literary Fiction, and Solo Narration--Female
"T ib n is at his lyrical best in this beautiful and daring work" ( The New York Times Book Review ) that portrays Mary as a solitary older woman still seeking to understand the events that become the narrative of the New Testament and the foundation of Christianity--shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize.
In the ancient town of Ephesus, Mary lives alone, years after her son's crucifixion. She has no interest in collaborating with the authors of the Gospel, who are her keepers. She does not agree that her son is the Son of God; nor that his death was "worth it"; nor that the "group of misfits he gathered around him, men who could not look a woman in the eye," were holy disciples.
Mary judges herself ruthlessly (she did not stay at the foot of the cross until her son died--she fled, to save herself), and her judgment of others is equally harsh. This woman whom we know from centuries of paintings and scripture as the docile, loving, silent, long-suffering, obedient, worshipful mother of Christ becomes a tragic heroine with the relentless eloquence of Electra or Medea or Antigone. T ib n's tour de force of imagination and language is a portrait so vivid and convincing that our image of Mary will be forever transformed.
Author Notes
Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Ireland in 1955. He studied history and English at University College Dublin, earning his B.A. in 1975. After graduating he moved to Barcelona for three years and taught at the Dublin School of English.
In 1978 he returned to Dublin and began working on an M.A. in Modern English and American Literature. He wrote for In Dublin, Hibernia, and The Sunday Tribune. He became the Features Editor of In Dublin in 1981, and then a year later accepted the position of Editor for the Irish current affairs magazine Magill.
His first book, Walking Along the Border, was published in 1987 and his first novel, The South, was published in 1990. He wrote for The Sunday Independent as a drama or television critic and political commentator. He writes regularly for The London Review of Books.
He has written several other novels including The Story of the Night, The Blackwater Lightship, Brooklyn, The Testament of Mary, and Nora Webster. The Heather Blazing received the 1993 Encore Award and The Master received the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Stonewall Book Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. He was short listed for the 2015 Folio Prize for his title Nora Webster.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Meryl Streep takes on one of her biggest roles to date, voicing the mother of Jesus Christ in this audio edition of Toibin's novel. As Mary, Streep's voice reflects the tragedy that befell Jesus at the hands of the Romans. Her tone is one of regret and loss, but her performance also captures Mary's loyalty, steadfastness, and dedication. Though Mary wants nothing to do with the disciples who pen Christ's story, she cannot help but reminisce about the past. Streep is the perfect choice to bring Mary to life, and the result is an engaging listening experience. A Scribner hardcover. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Acclaimed Irish novelist Toibin (The Master, 2004, among others), in an audacious move, submits a novelization of the later years of a figure less historical than symbolic that is readable in one sitting, which brings its brilliance into even finer focus.Mary, the mother of Jesus, sits in uncooperative silence in the ancient biblical town of Ephesus as she is hounded by her son's apostles, who are desperate for memories she can share with them to aid in their intention to write about Jesus' life (in what, of course, will become the four Gospels of the New Testament). Mary insists that she remembers nothing. The truth is, she is flooded by memories, and with great articulation and introspection, she supplies us with a first-person narrative that will surprise and fascinate readers used to a more traditionally kind and gentle Virgin Mary. Of the apostles, Mary recalls a group of misfits. Her impression of her son's ministry is that it was not simply boring but also artificial. He was radiant and powerful in human interaction, yes, but she scoffs at the notion of him being the son of God. She does understand that her son's agony and death on the cross were the denouement of a planned program for the sake of the future, and she admits that she did not wait at the foot of the cross for him to die but instead fled the scene out of fear for her safety. But of his gruesome end, she proposes to the apostles, When you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it. A stunning interpretation that is as beautiful in its presentation as it is provocative in its intention. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Toibin has become a literary star of the first order, twice shortlisted for the Mann Booker Prize.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
MARY, the mother of Jesus, has given Christianity a good name. None of the negatives that have made Christianity a byword for tyranny, cruelty and licensed hatred have attached to her. She has been free for centuries of the "blame Mom" syndrome, representing endless patience, loving kindness, mercy, succor, recourse. The problem with all this is that it has led to centuries of sentimentality - blue and white Madonnas with folded hands and upturned eyes, a stick with which to beat independent women. In my youth, stores sold items called "Mary-like gowns," which meant you could go to your senior prom looking as undesirable as possible in the name of the Virgin. Colm Toibin's novella "The Testament of Mary" never even approaches the swampy terrain of sentimentality. Consider, for example, the elderly Mary's wish in relation to the Evangelists who persecute her with their insistent visits: "When I look back at them I hope they see contempt." Traveling by ship after the death of her son, she realizes that she longs for a wreck, a drowning. "I had developed a hunger for catastrophe." Contempt. A hunger for catastrophe. She's a lot closer to Medea than to June Cleaver. The writer who assumes the task of making a fictional character of someone whose life took place in history faces particular challenges. When the character's life is a part of "The Greatest Story Ever Told," the ante goes way up. His awareness of these complications leads Toibin to make a deft strategic move at the very beginning of his book by weaving the creation of a text into the structure of his tale. It is, after all, entitled "The Testament of Mary," and the word "testament," which we might be tempted to slide over in our association with its biblical meaning, in fact suggests both the act of witnessing and the preparation of a legacy - usually composed near death. Throughout the novella, Mary is involved in questions of writing. She sees herself as a victim, trapped by men determined to make a story of what she knows is not a story but her life. The making of the Gospels is portrayed not as an act of sacred remembrance but as an invasion and a theft. The Evangelists - which are they? . . . Luke, perhaps, or John? - are portrayed as menacing intruders, with the lurking shadowy presence of Stalin's secret police. They have an agenda: They know what they want to write and, almost faute de mieux, they have to interview the mother. They need to lay down the foundation for a future understanding of Jesus, and this must include the conviction that he is the Son of God, and that his death saved the world. But Mary will have none of it. "I stood up from the chair and moved away from them, assaulted by their words. "'He died to redeem the world. . . . His death has freed mankind from darkness and from sin. . . . His suffering was necessary. . . . It was how mankind would be saved.' "'Saved?' I asked and raised my voice. 'Who has been saved?' "'Those who came before him and those who live now and those who are not yet born. . . .' "'Saved from death?' I asked. "'Saved for eternal life,' he said. 'Everyone in the world will know eternal life.' "'Oh, eternal life!' I replied. 'Oh, everyone in the world.'" The use and repetition of the word "oh" is masterly. Its casual diminishment of the larger words "eternal" and "everyone" is a perfect marker of the enormous gap between the mother and the writers. And Toibin the writer is at work to blast to smithereens some of the most treasured icons of the West. In his telling, Mary did not ask Jesus to turn water into wine at the wedding at Cana; she was, in fact, there only to urge him to come home, to keep himself from danger. Most important: she fled the site of the crucifixion before her son was actually dead. She was frightened, she tells us; she wanted to protect herself from the violence she knew would be unleashed. Her fear and desire for self-protection drowned her grief and sympathy for her son's fate. 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So much for the Pietà. So much for the "Stabat Mater." Unlike other writers who, in rendering the historical past, leave their poetic and image-making gifts at the door, Toibin is at his lyrical best in "The Testament of Mary." When she is remembering the crucifixion, at the insistence of her inquisitional Evangelists, what she wants to talk about is a man with a hawk in a cage and rabbits in a sack. The cage is too small for the hawk; the bird is angry and frustrated, and the man keeps feeding it rabbits, although "the bird did not seem to be hungry. . . . The cage became full of half-dead wholly uneaten rabbits. . . . Twitching with old bursts of life." Atmosphere is powerfully created; we share the bodily realities of events that, through repetition, have become almost generic and so, abstract. Fleeing the violence she fears, Mary sees stars as "leftover things confined to their place, their shining nothing more than a sort of pleading." As the guests wait for Jesus' appearance at the wedding at Cana there is "a hushed holding in of things." The tension preceding the crucifixion is chillingly evoked: "I knew that I was facing into something ferocious and exact." WE learn the psychological implications of events through the precise evocation of their physical manifestations: "There was a dark vacancy in the faces of some, and they wanted this vacancy filled with cruelty, with pain and with the sound of someone crying out." "Everybody's blood was filled with venom, a venom which came in the guise of energy, activity, shouting, laughing, roaring instructions as they paved the way for a grim procession to a hill beyond." With a poet's gift for imagery, Toibin describes the scene of the crucifixion: "It was like a marketplace, but more intense somehow, the act that was about to take place was going to make a profit for both seller and buyer." Very occasionally, an anachronistic slip-up can distract. Mary complains twice about ill-fitting "shoes" and speaks of someone seeing to her "bills." Now, it's certainly possible that people wore shoes and paid bills in first-century Roman Palestine, but it almost doesn't matter. This is a place where our associations - sandals and piles of coins versus shoes and bills - create doubts that hang in the air, like an annoying buzz. Or like a tiny pimple on an otherwise beautiful face. For "The Testament of Mary" is a beautiful and daring work. Originally performed as a one-woman show in Dublin, it takes its power from the surprises of its language, its almost shocking characterization, its austere refusal of consolation. The source of this mother's grief is as much the nature of humankind as the cruel fate of her own son. Her prayers are directed not to Yahweh but to Artemis, Greek not Jewish, chaste goddess of the hunt and of fertility, but no one's mother. Mary's final word on her son's life and death is the bleak declaration: "It was not worth it." Mary Gordon's most recent novel is "The Love of My Youth."
Guardian Review
Close to the house of my cousin Miriam was the house of Lazarus. I had known him since he was a baby. Of all the children that any of us had, he was, from the day he appeared in the world, the most beautiful and giving. He seemed to smile before he did anything else. When we visited Ramira, his mother, she would put her fingers to her lips and take us across the room to where his cot lay and when we looked in he seemed to be already smiling. It made Ramira at times almost embarrassed because when we came to visit we would discover that we were not alone in feeling that we had come to visit the boy as he learned to walk and talk as much we had come to see his parents or his sisters. Instantly, as soon as other children saw him, they wanted him in their game; whatever they did once he was there became peaceful and harmonious. I now know that he was alone among us in possessing something strange - he had not been visited by darkness or by fear, by what comes into our spirits in the deepest part of the night or the end of the Sabbath and lurks there. There were years when I did not see him, the years when the family moved to Bethany before they returned to live in Cana, but I always heard the news and it always included something about him - how he was growing up golden and graceful, serious and kind, and how worried they were because they knew they would not be able to keep him, that something would happen to him, that a great city would call to him, that the charm he exuded and his beauty, grown manly now, would need another realm in which to flourish. But no one realised that it would be the realm of death he was destined for, that all the grace and beauty, all of his aura of specialness, like a gift from the gods to his parents and his sisters, that all of it was a grim joke, like being teased by a smell of delicious food or the possibility of plenty, when it was really only something passing by, destined for elsewhere. I know that he moaned in pain for a day or two and then he was better and then the pains came again, and they came in his head and they often lasted through the night and that he cried out, he cried out that he would promise to be good. But there was nothing to be done, there was poison growing in his head, he began to weaken and he could not bear light, even a chink of light. If the door opened as someone came into the room, it would be enough for him, he would cry out. I do not know for how long this went on; I know that they cared for him and I know too that it was as though a golden harvest had been mowed down by a night's dark wind, or a pestilence had come into the trees, and it was unlucky even to mention his name or ask for news of him. So I did not ask for news of him but I often thought of him, especially as I prepared to come to Cana. I wondered if I should visit him or his sisters. As I set out, I did not know that he had already died. When I arrived in Cana there was a strange emptiness in the streets. I heard afterwards that for two hours or more some days earlier the birds had withdrawn from the air as though it were night or there were some cataclysm in progress that meant danger to them and made them retreat into their nests. And there was a hushed holding-in of things, no wind, no rustling in the leaves of trees, no animal sounds. Cats moved out of sight, and shadows - even the very shadows - stayed as they were. Lazarus had died a week earlier, and then when he was four days in his grave my son and his followers had reached Cana with their high-flown talk. And when my son told them to dig Lazarus up, remove him from his tomb, no one wanted to do this. In the days before he died Lazarus had become peaceful and beautiful. No one wanted to touch him now, disturb him in the ground, but so great was the frenzy at the arriving horde that his sisters had no choice. The crowd had arrived with news of a blind man who could see and of a gathering where there was no food and which had, as though by a miracle, been filled with plenty. The talk was of nothing except power and miracles. It was as if the crowd was roaming the countryside like a swarm of locusts in search of want and affliction. But no one among them thought that anyone could raise the dead. It had occurred to no one. Most of them believed, or so I learned, that it should not even be tried, that it would represent a mockery of the sky itself. They felt, as I felt, as I still feel, that no one should tamper with the fullness that is death. Death needs time and silence. The dead must be left alone with their new gift or their new freedom from affliction. I know, because Marcus told me, that Mary and Martha, the two sisters of the dead boy, began to follow my son once they had heard the news of the lame walking and the blind seeing. And I understand that they would have done anything in those last silent days. They watched helplessly as their brother grew easily towards death in the same way as a source for a river, hidden under the earth, begins flowing and carries water across a plain to the sea. They would have done anything to divert the stream, make it meander on the plain and dry up under the weight of the sun. They would have done anything to keep their brother alive. They sent word to my son and they asked him to come but he did not. It was something I learned when I saw him myself, that, if the time was not right, he would not be disturbed by a merely human voice, or the pleadings of anyone he knew. Thus he paid no attention to what he heard from Martha and Mary and they stayed with their brother so they would be with him when he took his last breath, when he was fully part of the waves of the sea, an invisible aspect of their rhythm. And during those days then, as river water slowly took on the taste of salt and they buried him and he lay fresh in the earth, many people who had loved Lazarus and who had known his sisters came to the house to comfort them. There was talk and lamentation. And then when they heard that the crowd had arrived, like a carnival with every malcontent and half-crazed soothsayer following in its wake, Martha went out into the streets to announce her brother's death to my son. She confronted him and won silence from him and those around him and she cried out "If you had been here he would not have died." And she was ready to go further, but stopped for a moment when she saw how sorry he was, when she saw how he knew, or seemed to know, that the suffering and death of Lazarus was a sadness almost too great for anyone to bear. And now it was a weight that could not be lifted. Having let the silence linger for some moments, Martha spoke again as the crowd listened. She spoke very quietly, but what she said was heard. She was so desperate in her grief that her pleading sounded like a challenge. "I know," she said, "that even now that he is four days in the earth, that you have the power to raise him." "He will rise," my son replied, "as all mankind will rise, when time relents, when the sea itself becomes a glassy stillness." "No," Martha said, "you have the power to do it now." And she told my son then what the others had told him, that he was not a mortal as we are mortal, but she believed that he was God's son, that he had been sent to us in mortal guise, but he was not mortal and he had powers, that he was the one we had been waiting for, who would be king on earth and in the skies, and that she and her sister had been among those blessed enough to recognise him, as they recognised him now. For the sake of her brother, she told him in plain loud words, with her arms spread out wide, that he was the son of God. When Martha found Mary, who had returned to the grave to weep there, she too went to my son and told him that he had the power. As she wept, so did he, because he had known Lazarus all of his life and had loved him as all of us did, and he came with her to the grave, freshly covered with earth, and there was a murmuring from the crowd that had followed, people shouting that if he could heal the sick and make the crippled walk and the blind see, then he could raise the dead. He stood there silently for a time and then in a voice like a whisper he ordered the grave to be dug up while Martha, screaming now, afraid that what she had asked for was being granted, cried that they had suffered enough and the body would be stinking and rotting after its time in the earth, but my son insisted and the crowd stood by as the grave was opened and the soft earth lifted from where it lay over Lazarus's body. Once the body could be seen, most of the onlookers had moved away in horror and fright, all except Martha and Mary and my son, who called out the words: "Lazarus come forth." And gradually the crowd came close again to the grave, and this was the time when the birdsong ceased and the birds withdrew from the air. Martha believed too that time was then suspended, that in those two hours nothing grew, nothing was born or came into being, nothing died or withered in any way. Slowly, the figure dirtied with clay and covered in graveclothes wound around him began with great uncertainty to move in the place they had made for him. It was as though the earth beneath him was pushing him and then letting him be still in his great forgetfulness and nudging him again like some strange new creature jerking and wriggling towards life. He was bound with the sheets and his face was covered with a napkin and now he turned as a child in the freshness of the womb who turns knowing that his time there is up and he must wrestle his way into the world. "Loose him and let him go," my son said, and two men came, two neighbours, and they stood in the grave as those around watched in hushed amazement and fright as they lifted Lazarus and then unbound him. He stood up with merely a cloth around his waist. He had been unchanged by death. Once his eyes opened, he stared at the sun with a deep unearthly puzzlement and then at the sky around the sun. He seemed not to see the crowd; some sounds came from him, not words exactly, something closer to whispered cries, or whimpers, and then the crowd stood back as Lazarus moved through them, past them, looking at no one, being led by his sisters back to their house, the world around remaining stilled and silent, and my son too, I am told, stilled and silent, as Lazarus began to weep. At first they noticed just the tears, but then his crying came in howls as his two sisters led him gently towards the house, followed all the way by the silent crowd as the howling grew louder and more fierce. By the time they reached their door he could barely walk. They disappeared inside and closed the shutters from the burning sun and did not appear again that day, despite the waiting crowd who lingered hour after hour, even as night fell, and some indeed through the night itself and even as the morning came. There was in the first day a strange atmosphere in Cana. I noticed the stalls and the stallholders had more things for sale than ever before, not merely food and clothes, but also cooking utensils and locks for doors. And there were animals for sale - monkeys, birds, like jungle birds, gorgeous creatures coloured red and yellow and blue, of a brightness I had never seen before, causing a crowd to gather around them in wonder. And there was a levity about the stallholders and those who walked the streets, as though some burden had been lifted, and there was much calling and yelling and figures on street corners guffawing. Even in Jerusalem on market days when I went to that place before I was married there had always been a gravity, a sense of people doing business who meant business, or preparing themselves with due decorum for the Sabbath. But Cana was full of raised voices and raised dust, sly laughter, young men laughing without restraint, the air full of whistling and cat-calls. As soon as we had done our business, my cousin Miriam and I removed ourselves indoors where she told me the story of what had happened to Lazarus, and how no one now would even pass the house near by where he and his sisters lived, but would cross the street instead, and how she believed that he was inside in bed in a darkened room, that she had heard that he could barely swallow water and barely hold down soft bread which had been soaked in water. The hordes had moved on, she said, followed by an even larger caravan of hucksters, salesmen, water-carriers, fire-eaters and purveyors of cheap food. All were being watched with a ferocious zeal by the authorities, some of whom were in disguise, but others of whom were following openly and then quickly departing for Jerusalem to be the first to arrive with word of some new outrage, some new miracle, some new breach in the great order that was maintained to keep the Romans pleased. In the kitchen the next morning news came that Martha, Mary and Lazarus were going to come to Miriam's house first, and then accompany us to the feast. Lazarus was still weak, we were told, and his sisters had become aware of how afraid people were of him. "He lives with the secret that none of us knows," Miriam said. "His spirit had time to take root in the other world, and people are afraid of what he could say, the knowledge he could impart. His sisters do not want to go alone with him to the wedding." I dressed carefully. The day was hot and the interior of the house was kept dark. We moved slowly in the dense and humid air. Miriam and I found ourselves several times in the main room of the house alone together, uneasy with each other, but not stirring from our chairs and not speaking. We were both waiting for the visitors to come. A few times when we heard sounds we looked at each other ominously, fearfully. Neither of us knew what would happen when Martha and Mary led their brother into this room. And, as time went by, our wondering became more tense. Finally, in the stillness and the heat and the silence, I fell asleep and when I woke Miriam was standing over me, whispering "They are here. They have finally arrived." The sisters looked more beautiful than I had ever seen them. In their solemnity as they entered the closeness of the room and approached me, they were figures of substance, grandeur, immense dignity. It was as though they had been marked and separated from others by what they had been through, it came across in their poise, a depth in the expression on their faces when they smiled. As they both came towards me I realised that I was associated in their minds with what had occurred and that they wished to touch me, embrace me, thank me, as if I had something to do with the fact that their brother was alive. Their brother stood in the doorway and then moved quietly into the room. When he sighed all of us moved towards him and it was then, just then, that the opportunity came and it was the only one I had, and I think it may have been the only opportunity anyone had, to ask him. It was the semi-darkness of the room, the stillness of the air and the fact that all of us, us four women, would know to keep silent about what we should not speak of. There were a few seconds in which any one of us could have asked him about the cave full of souls where he had been. Was it a place of massive, obliterating darkness, or was there light? Of wakefulness, or of dreams, or of deep sleep, oblivion? Were there voices there, or was there pure stillness, or some other sound like the dripping of water, or sighs, or echoes? Did he know anyone? Did he meet his mother, who we all had loved? Did he remember us as he wandered in the place where he had been? Was there blood or pain? Was it a landscape of dull, washed colours, or a red vastness, with cliffs, or forests, or deserts, or encroaching mist? Was anyone afraid? Did he wish to return there? Lazarus stood in the darkened room and sighed again and something was broken, the great chance had escaped us, maybe never to return. The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin is published by Viking on 25 October (pounds 12.99). To order a copy for pounds xx.xx with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - Colm Toibin When I arrived in Cana there was a strange emptiness in the streets. I heard afterwards that for two hours or more some days earlier the birds had withdrawn from the air as though it were night or there were some cataclysm in progress that meant danger to them and made them retreat into their nests. And there was a hushed holding-in of things, no wind, no rustling in the leaves of trees, no animal sounds. Cats moved out of sight, and shadows - even the very shadows - stayed as they were. Lazarus had died a week earlier, and then when he was four days in his grave my son and his followers had reached Cana with their high-flown talk. And when my son told them to dig Lazarus up, remove him from his tomb, no one wanted to do this. In the days before he died Lazarus had become peaceful and beautiful. No one wanted to touch him now, disturb him in the ground, but so great was the frenzy at the arriving horde that his sisters had no choice. The crowd had arrived with news of a blind man who could see and of a gathering where there was no food and which had, as though by a miracle, been filled with plenty. The talk was of nothing except power and miracles. It was as if the crowd was roaming the countryside like a swarm of locusts in search of want and affliction. He stood there silently for a time and then in a voice like a whisper he ordered the grave to be dug up while [Martha], screaming now, afraid that what she had asked for was being granted, cried that they had suffered enough and the body would be stinking and rotting after its time in the earth, but my son insisted and the crowd stood by as the grave was opened and the soft earth lifted from where it lay over Lazarus's body. Once the body could be seen, most of the onlookers had moved away in horror and fright, all except Martha and [Mary] and my son, who called out the words: "Lazarus come forth." And gradually the crowd came close again to the grave, and this was the time when the birdsong ceased and the birds withdrew from the air. Martha believed too that time was then suspended, that in those two hours nothing grew, nothing was born or came into being, nothing died or withered in any way. In the kitchen the next morning news came that Martha, Mary and Lazarus were going to come to [Miriam]'s house first, and then accompany us to the feast. Lazarus was still weak, we were told, and his sisters had become aware of how afraid people were of him. "He lives with the secret that none of us knows," Miriam said. "His spirit had time to take root in the other world, and people are afraid of what he could say, the knowledge he could impart. His sisters do not want to go alone with him to the wedding." - Colm Toibin.
Kirkus Review
A novella that builds to a provocative climax, one that is as spiritually profound as its prose is plainspoken. At the outset, the latest from the esteemed Irish author (Brooklyn, 2009, etc.) seems like a "high concept" breather from his longer, more complex fiction. As the title suggests, the narrator is Mary, mother of Jesus, reflecting on her life and her son as she nears death. She is a religious woman but not willing to cooperate with those who want to establish a new religion on the death of her son, the self-proclaimed "Son of God," whose execution promises "a new life for the world." No, to her, it was the death of a son for whom nothing could provide recompense. "It was simply the end of something," she says, and the claims of divinity leading up to it came from a son she barely knew: "his voice all false, and his tone all stilted, and I could not bear to hear him." The miracle of Mary's testament is that what might initially seem like blasphemy ultimately becomes transcendent, redemptive, even as she continues to resist "efforts to make simple sense of things which are not simple." The testament encompasses the resurrection of Lazarus and the miracle of the wedding feast at Cana, both related in such a way that she neither denies what happened nor takes faith from them, and culminates in a crucifixion related in excruciating detail, from the perspective of a mother witnessing the execution of her earthly son. "I gasped when I saw the cross," she remembers and subsequently reflects, "He was the boy I had given birth to and he was more defenceless now than he had been then." What follows the crucifixion gives a whole new dimension to the testament, for Mary and the reader alike. A work suffused with mystery and wonder.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Mary is a solitary old lady. Her much-loved son grew into a charismatic man who surrounded himself with damaged sycophants and gathered huge crowds wherever he went. Eventually the authorities killed him. Now other men, men with agendas, harass her. While they try to mine her for evidence that her son is a god, she knows that he was a man, not the Christ. First a play, then an award-winning novella and a Broadway production, and available now as an audiobook, this is a highly revisionist look at the woman many Christian churches revere as Mary, (virgin) Mother of Jesus. This is a tired Mary, a not-very-sympathetic Mary, a self-tortured Mary, and, most of all, a totally human Mary. VERDICT Superbly read, as expected, by the incomparable Meryl Streep, this audiobook is recommended for two groups of individuals, those interested in a personal reexamination of implicit church doctrine and/or those just interested in a good story about a troubled mother's life. ["A moving and thought--provoking take on the life of a religious icon," read the review of the Scribner hc, LJ 9/1/12.]-I. Pour-El, Ames Jewish Congregation, IA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Testament of Mary They appear more often now, both of them, and on every visit they seem more impatient with me and with the world. There is something hungry and rough in them, a brutality boiling in their blood, which I have seen before and can smell as an animal that is being hunted can smell. But I am not being hunted now. Not anymore. I am being cared for, and questioned softly, and watched. They think that I do not know the elaborate nature of their desires. But nothing escapes me now except sleep. Sleep escapes me. Maybe I am too old to sleep. Or there is nothing further to be gained from sleep. Maybe I do not need to dream, or need to rest. Maybe my eyes know that soon they will be closed for ever. I will stay awake if I have to. I will come down these stairs as the dawn breaks, as the dawn insinuates its rays of light into this room. I have my own reasons to watch and wait. Before the final rest comes this long awakening. And it is enough for me to know that it will end. They think I do not understand what is slowly growing in the world; they think I do not see the point of their questions and do not notice the cruel shadow of exasperation that comes hooded in their faces or hidden in their voices when I say something vague or foolish, something which leads us nowhere. When I seem not to remember what they think I must remember. They are too locked into their vast and insatiable needs and too dulled by the remnants of a terror we all felt then to have noticed that I remember everything. Memory fills my body as much as blood and bones. I like it that they feed me and pay for my clothes and protect me. And in return I will do for them what I can, but no more than that. Just as I cannot breathe the breath of another or help the heart of someone else to beat or their bones not to weaken or their flesh not to shrivel, I cannot say more than I can say. And I know how deeply this disturbs them and it would make me smile, this earnest need for foolish anecdotes or sharp, simple patterns in the story of what happened to us all, except that I have forgotten how to smile. I have no further need for smiling. Just as I had no further need for tears. There was a time when I thought that I had, in fact, no tears left, that I had used up my store of tears, but I am lucky that foolish thoughts like this never linger, are quickly replaced by what is true. There are always tears if you need them enough. It is the body that makes tears. I no longer need tears and that should be a relief, but I do not seek relief, merely solitude and some grim satisfaction which comes from the certainty that I will not say anything that is not true. Of the two men who come, one was there with us until the end. There were moments then when he was soft, ready to hold me and comfort me as he is ready now to scowl impatiently when the story I tell him does not stretch to whatever limits he has ordained. Yet I can see signs of that softness still and there are times when the glow in his eyes returns before he sighs and goes back to his work, writing out the letters one by one that make words he knows I cannot read, which recount what happened on the hill and the days before and the days that followed. I have asked him to read the words aloud to me but he will not. I know that he has written of things that neither he saw nor I saw. I know that he has also given shape to what I lived through and he witnessed, and that he has made sure that these words will matter, that they will be listened to. I remember too much; I am like the air on a calm day as it holds itself still, letting nothing escape. As the world holds its breath, I keep memory in. So when I told him about the rabbits I was not telling him something that I had half forgotten and merely remembered because of his insistent presence. The details of what I told him were with me all the years in the same way as my hands or my arms were with me. On that day, the day he wanted details of, the day he wanted me to go over and over for him, in the middle of everything that was confused, in the middle of all the terror and shrieking and the crying out, a man came close to me who had a cage with a huge angry bird trapped in it, the bird all sharp beak and indignant gaze; the wings could not stretch to their full width and this confinement seemed to make the bird frustrated and angry. It should have been flying, hunting, swooping on its prey. The man also carried a bag, which I gradually learned was almost half full of live rabbits, little bundles of fierce and terrorized energy. And during those hours on that hill, during the hours that went more slowly than any other hours, he plucked the rabbits one by one from the sack and edged them into the barely opened cage. The bird went for some part of their soft underbelly first, opening the rabbit up until its guts spilled out, and then of course its eyes. It is easy to talk about this now because it was a mild distraction from what was really going on, and it is easy to talk about it too because it made no sense. The bird did not seem to be hungry, although perhaps it suffered from a deep hunger that even the live flesh of writhing rabbits could not satisfy. The cage became half full of half-dead, wholly uneaten rabbits exuding strange squealing sounds. Twitching with old bursts of life. And the man's face was all bright with energy, there was a glow from him, as he looked at the cage and then at the scene around him, almost smiling with dark delight, the sack not yet empty. • • • By that time we had spoken of other things, including the men who played with dice close to where the crosses were; they played for his clothes and other possessions, or for no special reason. One of these men I feared as much as the strangler who arrived later. This first man was the one among all those who came and went during the day who was most alert to me, most menacing, the one who seemed most likely to want to know where I would go when it was over, the one most likely to be sent to bring me back. This man who followed me with his eyes seemed to work for the group of men with horses, who sometimes appeared to be watching from the side. If anyone knows what happened that day and why, then it is this man who played with dice. It might be easier if I said that he comes in dreams but he does not, nor does he haunt me as other things, or other faces, haunt me. He was there, that is all I have to say about him, and he watched me and he knew me, and if now, after all these years, he were to arrive at this door with his eyes narrowed against the light and his sandy-coloured hair gone grey and his hands still too big for his body, and his air of knowledge and self-possession and calm, controlling cruelty, and with the strangler grinning viciously behind him, I would not be surprised. But I would not last long in their company. Just as my two friends who visit are looking for my voice, my witness, this man who played dice, and the strangler, or others like them, must be looking for my silence. I will know them if they come and it should hardly matter now, since the days left are few, but I remain, in my waking time, desperately afraid of them. Compared to them, the man with the rabbits and the hawk was oddly harmless; he was cruel, but uselessly so. His urges were easy to satisfy. Nobody paid any attention to him except me, and I did because I, perhaps alone of those who were there, paid attention to every single thing that moved in case I might be able to find someone among those men with whom I could plead. And also so that I could know what they might want from us when it was over, and more than anything else so that I could distract myself, even for a single second, from the fierce catastrophe of what was happening. They have no interest in my fear and the fear all those around me felt, the sense that there were men waiting who had been told to round us up too when we sought to move away, that there seemed no possibility that we would not be held. The second one who comes has a different way of making his presence felt. There is nothing gentle about him. He is impatient, bored and in control of things. He writes too, but with greater speed than the other, frowning, nodding in approval at his own words. He is easy to irritate. I can annoy him just by moving across the room to fetch a dish. It is hard to resist the temptation sometimes to speak to him although I know that my very voice fills him with suspicion, or something close to disgust. But he, like his colleague, must listen to me, that is what he is here for. He has no choice. I told him before he departed that all my life when I have seen more than two men together I have seen foolishness and I have seen cruelty, but it is foolishness that I have noticed first. He was waiting for me to tell him something else and he sat opposite me, his patience slowly ebbing away, as I refused to return to the subject of his desires: the day our son was lost and how we found him and what was said. I cannot say the name, it will not come, something will break in me if I say the name. So we call him "him," "my son," "our son," "the one who was here," "your friend," "the one you are interested in." Maybe before I die I will say the name or manage on one of those nights to whisper it but I do not think so. He gathered around him, I said, a group of misfits, who were only children like himself, or men without fathers, or men who could not look a woman in the eye. Men who were seen smiling to themselves, or who had grown old when they were still young. Not one of you was normal, I said, and I watched him push his plate of half-eaten food towards me as though he were a child in a tantrum. Yes, misfits, I said. My son gathered misfits, although he himself, despite everything, was not a misfit, he could have done anything, he could have been quiet even, he had that capacity also, the one that is the rarest, he could have spent time alone with ease, he could look at a woman as though she were his equal, and he was grateful, good-mannered, intelligent. And he used all of it, I said, so he could lead a group of men who trusted him from place to place. I have no time for misfits, I said, but if you put two of you together you will get not only foolishness and the usual cruelty but you will also get a desperate need for something else. Gather together misfits, I said, pushing the plate back towards him, and you will get anything at all--fearlessness, ambition, anything--and before it dissolves or it grows, it will lead to what I saw and what I live with now. Excerpted from The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.