Product Description

For four years from 1990, Colm Tóibín made a series of trips through Catholic Europe. The result is this beautifully wrought book. He shows the complications and contradictions of the Catholic Church, and tries to unravel how they in turn influence a country's sense of nationalism. It is not quite a travelogue, nor is it autobiographical. Rather it is a work that tests both faith and the written word, a work that redefines what we have come to expect from non-fiction.

'Colm Tóibín writes beautifully in a spare style that allows for plain description, high humour and effects that are carefully toned. He is at once an honest, uncertain pilgrim with a press card and a sense of devilment, and a son on an Oedipal trail' Sean Dunne, Irish Times

'A mixture of autobiography, travelogue and journalism which tantalises the reader with what it witholds as much as it entertains and instructs with what it describes... The Sign of the Cross, like all good writing, is a treat' Independent on Sunday

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #420588 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 180 pages

Review
"'Colm Toibin writes beautifully in a spare style that allows for plain description, high humour and effects that are carefully toned. He is at once an honest uncertain pilgrim with a press card and a sense of devitment, and a son on an Oedipal trail' Sean Dunne, Irish Times"

About the Author

Colm Tóibín was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of five novels, most recently The Master which was shorlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize. His non-fiction includes Bad Blood, Homage to Barcelona and The Sign of the Cross. His work has been translated into seventeen languages. He lives in Dublin.

Customer Reviews

Interesting and insightful
Toibin travels through various catholic regions of Europe generally at times of high catholic festivals. The journey takes us from an Irish past in the 1950s-60s to Croatia's nationalist catholicism, a Regensburg (FRG) theology professor, an Old Firm match in Glasgow (Celtic win), repeatedly to Poland and also to the Czech republic, eventually to Sevilla's local chauvinist and self contradictory catholicism where people are ardent socialists but still will just as fervently support the annual processions of the Virgin. The book is at its strongest when focussing on observing local culture, 'ordinary' people, getting involved in discussion with people. The various passages on papal visits tend to become slightly boring after a while. Some passages can be frightening and distressing, when catholicism and nationalism go so closely hand in hand (Croatia).

I was surprised that the author desperately tries to convince the reader that there is a problem with the fact that there are next to no catholics among the younger Scottish generation of writers. However, all his Scottish interview partners tell him, that they had never thought about it before and not a single one of them (not even the catholic) thought there was a problem. Toibin's obsession with possible discrimination seems strange and sectarian - about as absurdly out of place as if he had discovered that there were no left handed among Scotland's younger writers, and that the only explanation was discrimination...

There is a passage in the book which seems entirely out of place. This is the confession about the author's experience in a psychotherapeutic seminar. It looks as if writing it down and publishing it - no matter in what context - had been part of the therapy rather than he result of literary judgment.

Take away these small weak points and you'll read an entertaining and well observed book.