Ford went on, “He’s great fun and naughty, not constantly watching his back.” Last year, Tóibín and Damon Galgut, the South African writer, attended a festival in Cape Town. It is blank.” Richard Ford told me, “Colm’s the best on his feet of any writer I know.” Once the panels end, Tóibín is up for an escapade. “A long novel is two thousand details.” He has distanced himself from the trend for autofiction by declaring, “The page you face is not a mirror. “A novel is a thousand details,” he likes to say.
At literary festivals, he is a charming presence-modest, attentive, and eager to entertain the audience. When many novelists are done writing for the day, they want to be alone. “I really enjoy anything that’s going on,” he told me, adding, “If there was a circus, I’d join it.” He occasionally helps curate exhibits for the Morgan Library & Museum, in Manhattan, and, with his agent, Peter Straus, he runs a small publishing imprint in Dublin, Tuskar Rock Press. There are many other demands on Tóibín’s time: he is a literature professor at Columbia University and the chancellor of the University of Liverpool (“You have no idea how beautiful the robes are”). “I could not have done the book had I not foolishly taken on three biographies of Mann in 1995 that were all this size,” he said, spreading his hands far apart. “You learn a huge amount by opening yourself to things that are going on,” he explained, offering as a case in point his new novel, “ The Magician,” a fictionalization of Thomas Mann’s life. He described his appetite for pickup work to me as a form of intellectual fomo. “I have absolute curiosity and total commitment,” Tóibín, who is sixty-six, told me. His Pessoa essay, published in August in the London Review of Books, begins, “As he grew older, Fernando Pessoa became less visible, as though he were inexorably being subsumed by dreams and shadows.” Reviewing a recent biography of Fernando Pessoa, by Richard Zenith, Tóibín read the eleven-hundred-page text and three translations of Pessoa’s “ The Book of Disquiet.” Tóibín sometimes assimilates his subject to the point that the writer in question begins to sound like one of his own characters. He produced a great amount of literary journalism, as well as the novels.” But, unlike Burgess, Tóibín gravitates to assignments demanding considerable diligence. “I suppose thousands might be accurate,” he said, adding that his level of output used to be more common among writers: “Anthony Burgess, whom I knew slightly, used to write a thousand words a day.
When I asked Tóibín-the name is pronounced “ cuh-lem toe- bean”-how many articles he had written, he could only guess.
He has also published three reported books, three collections of essays, dozens of introductions to other writers’ work, prefaces to art catalogues, an opera libretto, plays, poems, and so many reviews that it’s surprising when a week goes by and he hasn’t been in at least one of the New York, London, or Dublin papers. Since he published his first novel, “ The South,” at thirty-five, in 1990, he has written eleven more books of fiction. The Irish writer Colm Tóibín is a busy man. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.