The Testament of Mary: A Novel

The Testament of Mary: A Novel

Colm Toibin

Language: English

Pages: 96

ISBN: 1451692382

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


“Tóibín 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. Tóibín’s tour de force of imagination and language is a portrait so vivid and convincing that our image of Mary will be forever transformed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

chin. He looked like someone who could do no harm except maybe with his eyes, which had a way of fixing on something or someone, a way of taking in a complete scene as though he would need not to forget it, and then shifting his gaze to a scene close to it. But it was always an animal gaze, there was no intelligence apparent in his face, not even a coldness, just something distant, passive, brutish. For a moment I caught his eye but I turned away and for some time looked only on the figure of

the address I have given you,’ he replied, ‘they will know more than I do.’ I almost asked him then why I should trust someone who knew more than he did, but I watched him as he hesitated at the door, and even in the last second before he finally departed I thought there was one more thing I should have asked or said. One more thing. But I could not think what it was. And then he went, and, perhaps because there had been no one in this house for so long, he left behind a smell of pure unease.

made to run towards him but was held back by my companions, Mary whispering to me that I would have to be quiet and controlled or I would be recognized and taken away. He was the boy I had given birth to and he was more defenceless now than he had been then. And in those days after he was born, when I held him and watched him, my thoughts included the thought that I would have someone now to watch over me when I was dying, to look after my body when I had died. In those days if I had even

there was a large crowd following him and that it was the Sabbath. No one, Marcus said, was in any doubt about who had caused this breach of the Sabbath. The only reason my son was not arrested then and there, Marcus said, was because he was being watched to see where he might go next and to see who was backing him. The authorities, both Jewish and Roman, wondered where he would take them, what would happen if they made sure that he went nowhere without spies and observers. ‘Is there anything we

approached. 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. 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

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