GLR July-August 2023

was an opening shot that seems to have raised the issue for gen eral discussion, but those who hoped for homophobic laws to be struck down had a long wait ahead of them. Homosexuality was not decriminalized in Ireland until 1993. Another, somewhat related issue that Tóibín tackles is the public reckoning with sexual abuse within the Catholic church. In the 2010 essay, “Among the Flutterers,” Tóibín says that “the power of the church in Ireland has been fatally undermined” by several reports which exposed the widespread sexual abuse of children and youth by members of the clergy, and the general failure of church authorities to deal with it. In an essay from 2005, the author describes the privileges that a student could gain by “becoming friends” with a teaching priest in St. Peter’s College, the church-run boys’ school he attended. The exact na ture of these relationships was open to speculation. In the 1990s, three of these priests were charged with vari ous sexual offences against students, and the school system that enabled this behavior was analyzed in a government report. Tóibín does not claim to be one of the victims. However, he ex plains why an attraction to boys might have seemed like a reli gious “calling” to most of the men, who chose a supposedly

celibate life as an alternative to a “normal” life of marriage and child-raising, and why none of the offenders seemed like mon sters at the time he knew them. Tóibín no longer identifies as a Catholic, but the Church and its teachings still clearly fascinate him, and he claims to believe in a spiritual reality beyond the limits of the physical world. His adult ambivalence about the church enables him to write about oppression and abuse in Catholic institutions in the even handed, journalistic style that he developed in his twenties while writing for the Irish media and editing Magill magazine. The power of religious art lured him to Italy during the pan demic. In his last essay, “Alone in Venice,” Tóibín recounts his intimate encounters with various churches, statues, and paint ings at a time when the usual crowd of tourists had been re placed by a resounding silence. By this time, Tóibín had recovered enough from his bout with testicular cancer to re count this medical journey in a detailed essay ending with the words: “The age of one ball has been set in motion.” Self-pity is clearly not part of Tóibín’s style, and readers can only hope that he will continue to observe the world in good health for many years to come.

But Were You Gracious in Your Suffering?

T HE FIRST SENTENCE of Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s biographical novel reveals the book’s unortho doxy. The use of the second per son here and throughout suggests a tone of probing intimacy designed to offer insight into the thoughts and feelings of the subject, renowned Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. That the novel begins with the poet’s sui cide echoes the novel’s subtitle and sets the tone for the narrative to come.

of the narrative. Short chapters propel the story forward with a compelling, relentless momentum, pointing to the ruthless opera tion of the Stalinist state following Tsve taeva’s family’s ill-fated decision to return from exile. Along the way, the novel recounts the poet’s early life as the daughter of the founder of the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, a credential that would become a

A NNE C HARLES

MARINA TSVETAEVA To Die in Yelabuga by Vénus Khoury-Ghata Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan Seagull Books. 140 pages, $21.

liability after the Bolshevik Revolution, her mother’s death, and the poet’s marriage at nineteen to Sergei Efron, who would later enlist in the White Army during the Russian Civil War. The personal circumstances of prominent literary figures of the early 20th century make appearances. Among them is writer Anna Akhmatova, who stopped writing following the execution of her husband. Tsvetaeva’s ex-lover, lesbian poet Sophia Parnok, is discussed, primarily as an object of recrimination. Poet-playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky’s suicide is often in voked among the litany of former friends and colleagues who experienced a violent fate. Austrian poet Rainer Marie Rilke and Russian writer Boris Pasternak are also mentioned, each having played an important role toward the end of Tsvetaeva’s life. A point of confusion in the book occurs when the narrator describes Rilke as “The only one who responded to your call the day before your suicide,” when of course she means Paster nak, Rilke having died fifteen years earlier. In this instance, elu sive language runs amok. To be sure, the difficulties of Marina Tsvetaeva’s life were extreme: living through the Famine, the Russian Revolution (with a husband on the losing side), exile, poverty, and disfa vor. Yet the portrait that emerges is anything but flattering.

Readers expecting clear historical narrative with literary markers may be disappointed. A brief chronology is included at the end of the book, but readers may still need to consult other sources for clarity and context before diving in. The prose is oc casionally florid: “Long the list of your passions, your infatua tions, whether experienced or expressed in writing.” The translation is sometimes infelicitous: “That he kissed your hand ravaged by household chores raises you up in your own self es teem.” Several of Tsvetaeva’s actual poems are included, and it seems that the author intends the novel to be a poetic rendering in its own right. The book discloses key events in Tsvetaeva’s private life that may have been mentioned in other accounts, but not thor oughly explored. One such event is the starvation of her daugh ter Irina during the Great Russian Famine of 1921. The intolerable circumstance of the death, for which the poet blames herself with some justification, is recounted in the first pages, reappearing in the poet’s thoughts throughout the rest Anne Charles cohosts the cable-access show All Things LGBTQ with her partner in Vermont. July–August 2023

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