I'm about a third in and really enjoying it so far. I especially loved the opening paragraphs:
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SOMETIMES IN THE NIGHT he dreamed about the dead – familiar faces and the others, half-forgotten ones, fleetingly summoned up. Now as he woke, it was, he imagined, an hour or more before the dawn; there would be no sound or movement for several hours. He touched the muscles on his neck which had become stiff; to his fingers they seemed unyielding and solid but not painful. As he moved his head, he could hear the muscles creaking. I am like an old door, he said to himself.
It was imperative, he knew, that he go back to sleep. He could not lie awake during these hours. He wanted to sleep, enter a lovely blackness, a dark, but not too dark, resting place, unhaunted, unpeopled, with no flickering presences.
When he woke again, he was agitated and unsure where he was. He often woke like this, disturbed, only half remembering the dream and desperate for the day to begin. Sometimes when he dozed, he would bask in the hazy, soft light of Bellosguardo in the early spring, the distances all misty, feeling the sheer pleasure of sunlight on his face, sitting in a chair, close to the wall of the old house with the smell of wisteria and early roses and jasmine. He would hope when he woke that the day would be like the dream, that traces of the ease and the colour and the light would linger at the edge of things until night fell again.”
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So beautiful. I feel a little bit like I'm reading a novel about ghosts, as if they're all a little diaphanous. I don't know if that's exactly what he was going for per se, but I do think he was going for something close to that and I like it.
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Originally Posted by ccowie
I agree. I'm about the same amount in and I noticed this as well. Interesting because capturing the actual interior musings of characters is something James himself is well known for.
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I think I'd read somewhere that Tóibín was going for just that. I think he's doing an excellent job of reflecting James' style in this novel while still maintaining one of his own as well.