SOURCE: Wall, Eamonn. Review of The South, by Colm Tóibín. Review of Contemporary Fiction 11, no. 3 (fall 1991): 288-89.

In the following review, Wall offers a positive assessment of The South, noting that the novel “succeeds brilliantly.”

When her husband, against her objections, insists on taking a local Catholic family to court for allowing their cattle to graze illegally on their land, Katherine Proctor leaves him and her son and travels to Barcelona where she becomes a painter: she is thirty-two. In Spain, in Colm Tóibín's brilliant first novel [The South,] she becomes part of a bohemian set, takes art classes, meets Miguel and has a daughter with him, and, after he dies, returns to Ireland an accomplished artist.

On the surface it appears that Spain and Ireland are completely different: Spain offers Katherine Proctor the artistic and sexual fulfillment that was impossible in Ireland. There...