The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (Vintage Departures) - Softcover

Toibin, Colm

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9780679758556: The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (Vintage Departures)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679758550 ISBN 13: 9780679758556

Publisher: Vintage, 1996

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Colm Toibin is one of Ireland's most distinguished young writers; he is also a lapsed Catholic. Yet over a succession of Holy Weeks, Toibin found himself traveling to places where Catholicism still possesses mystery and power, from Poland to Lithuania, from Lourdes to Santiago, and from Croatia to Ireland. And in seeing how the faith persisted in other people's lives, he discovered how it still resonated in his own. In this beautifully observed work of travel writing and spiritual reportage, Toibin turns his eye on Catholicism's rituals and processions, its high-minded fanatics and humble communicants. He shows how it ripples outward into the history and politics of homelands. Yet Toibin also encounters the cross-shaped wound that lies at his own center--and it is his unflinching examination of that wound that makes The Sign of the Cross as moving as it is perceptive and urbane.
"A writer of considerable poetic gifts. Toibin's descriptions are enlivening."--Los Angeles Times Book Review
"An extraordinary document."--Entertainment Weekly

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About the Author:

Colm Toibin 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.

From Booklist:

Like a majority of Irishmen, this celebrated novelist was raised in the Catholic Church. Although he is no longer a practicing Catholic, his latest book is a meditation on his own boyhood beliefs and on the ways in which the church influences the lives of Catholics in Europe today. Toibin traveled extensively--from Lourdes to Barcelona and on to Prague, Warsaw, the Baltic coast, Berlin, Sweden, Estonia, and points further--all the while partaking in pilgrimages, papal masses, and religious festivals. At the book's midpoint he writes incisively about a personal epiphany experienced in a psychotherapy session he attended. And from his numerous conversations with politicians and priests, literary figures, and ordinary men and women encountered as he journeyed, Toibin's remarkably articulate voice reveals a startling range of perceptions, even as it conveys the intricate couplings between politics and Catholicism. Alice Joyce

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