Colum McCann

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Commentary
John Dunne, [omnibus review], review of Fishing the Sloe-Black River in Books Ireland (Sept. 1994), p.201; ‘in beating about the bush; the best collection I’ve read in the last few years’.

John Dunne, ‘Ancestry of Act’, review of Songdogs, in Books Ireland (Oct. 1995), p.244; a tracing of the life of a father who drifts to Spanish Civil War, then Mexico and America as a photographer, ending up in Mayo as cantankerous old man; ‘songdogs’ of title refers to songs of coyotes that created with world in Navajo myth; also a mother; set in notes comparability - even influence of - Desmond Hogan’s fiction, esp. Curious Street.

[Shirley Kelly,] ‘The Moral Complexity of Life in the North’, interview with Colum McCann in Books Ireland (Summer 2000): McCann says of This Side of Brightness that ‘it was sparked off by a story I heard at a party about a how one of the construction workers was filled when he was sucked through a hole in a tunnel. I started to go down into the tunnels and discovered all these people living there. I made friends with a couple of them and I still go down there now and then.’ (p.165). On his new collection: ‘It’s strange. You never initially know why certain voices or certain textures appear in your work. Sometimes it’s better not to be too acutely conscious. It’s only afterwards, when the stories are written, finished, that you have to take a sort of intellectual stock. [...] I work in a sort of emotional blizzard. Nothing is mapped out and I try to move forward, sometimes blindly.’ Further, discusses the use of the ‘voices of children’ in the novella “Hunger Strike” dealing with a young boy who flees to Galway with his mother as his uncle succombs in the Strike. Note also, Desmond Traynor, reviewing Everything in this Country Must, remarks that McCann’s story “As If There Were Trees” appeared in the Shenanigans anthology. (pp.165-66.)

Desmond Traynor, review of McCann, Everything in this Country Must (2000), remarks that his story ‘As if there were trees’ appeared in Shenanigans anthology. (Books Ireland, Summer 2000, q.p.)

John Kenny, review of Colum McCann, Everything in This Country Must (Phoenix House 2000), in The Irish Times [Weekend], 9 April 2000, notes ‘his emergent style of terseness and ascetic lyricism’ in This Side of Brightness (1998); new collection displays an intensification of the formal rigour evident in even his first stories’; contains two short stories of equal length and a novella of 100 pages focused on contemporary society and polics in Northern Ireland; in “Wood”, a young son and wife of stroke-striken and sceptical Presbyterian prepare marching poles for local Orange lodge; notes flawless appositeness of McCann’s style as mouthpiece of child narrator in shorter pieces; in title story, Katie relates how her mother and brother were killed and how the resentful father would prefer a horse to drown than to be saved by British soldiers; “Hunger Strike”, novella, deals with new Galway life of young boy and widowed mother as his uncles starves [in Long Kesh]; reviewer criticises intermittently falsity of political references (‘he thought to himself that he was a boy of two countries’); remarks ill-advised conclusion to Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal (1983); further quotes, ‘Daddy says he’s as good a Presbyterian as the next, always has been and always will, but it’s just meanness that celebrates other people dying.’; calls Eugene McCabe the non-pareil in this area; remarks that McCann ‘gives primacy to to the private human moment and avoid the denaturalistions of news-bulletin politics’; compares the writer’s aesthetic with McGahern’s insistence on showing not simply telling; ‘fine cadences and a robust topicality’, ‘his increasing success in splicing aesthetic seriousness with the social concern allows an unusual volume a density beyond its physical slightness [End].’ (The Irish Times, 9.4.2000 [Weekend], p.11; incl. photo-port in South-side centre-city Arcade.)

Michael Kerrigan, review of Colum McCann, Everything in this Country Must (Phoenix 2000), 143pp. in Times Literary Supplement, 2 June, 2000, p.11. Remarks, ‘If the subtitle of this book has the ring of the sort of penance hande dout at ‘Confession, that I siony fitting in a work characterised more by piety than challenging insight or liteary inter4est. Solumn Stations of the Cross, these stories commemorate Northern Ireland’s sufferings without illuminating them. Notes that closing lines from Paul Muldoon’s “Dancers at the Moy” supply epigraph for collection as a whole and finds their substance echoed in the title story of the carthorse; “Wood”, family sawmill, poles for Orange march. Further remarks, ‘The jarring details of rural poverty remind us that McdCann is a writer of great flair. His use again of a naïve, youthful narrator does, however, cause one to wonder if he isn’t, both morally and aesthetically, coasting here. Three decades since the Troubles started, can this sort of wide-eyed dismay really be an adequate response?’ Kerrigan concludes: ‘Oh for a bit of Muldoonian mischief’! For all McCann’s undoubted talent, these stories are as decorous as a genuflection; his robust non serviam would have served us all far better.’

Maureen Boyle, ‘Fiction Isn’t Lies; Memoir isn’t Truth’, review of The Dancer [with works by Nuala O’Faolain and Kate Moss], in Fortnight [Belfast] (May 2003): ‘[W]e learn about Nureyev more through his effect on the lives of those around him. The novel is written [in] narrative as a kind of relay where the baton of the story is passed from person to person as they become central to hsi life: from the first war-weary soldiers to whom he is a small blond child who dances near ther beds; to his first ballet teacher who says of him that “[he] was somehow born within dance, that he was unlettered in it, yet he knew it intimately, it was a grammar for him, deep and untutored”; to Tom Ashworth, the little Englishman[,] who lives in a London boarding house and makes shoes for Fonteyn and then for Rudi when he arrives in the West.’ Considers that the novel captures Nureyev’s loneliness and how much was lost in the move to the West, an aspect of the story lost in the Cold War propaganda of the time; quotes McCann’s admission to ‘condensing two or more historical figures into one or distributing the traits of one person over two or more chracters’, and his direction to read the best biographies to find out what is ‘true’ of Nureyev. (p.17.) Quotes passage on Ashworth, shoe-maker to the London ballet: ‘and just by sketches alone he intuits the life of this foot [Nureyev’s], raised in barefoot poverty and - from the unusual wideness of the bone structure - barefoot on concrete rather than grass, then squeezed into shoes that where too small, coming to dance later than usual given the smallness yet breadth of the foot, 7 EEE, then a great violence done by excessive training, all hard angles but a remarkable strength. [...]’ (quoted in Maureen Boyle, ‘Fiction Isn’t Lies; Memoir isn’t Truth’, review of The Dancer with works by Nuala O’Faolain and Kate Moss, in Fortnight [Belfast], May 2003, p.17.)

Alastair Macaulay, ‘A Tribute to Rudolf Nureyev / Royal Opera House’, in Times Literary Supplement (9 May 2003), p.18: ‘It is ten years since Rudolf Nureyev died. From St Petersburg to Toronto, there have been galas, film seasons, written and spoken tributes. (There has even been a Nureyev novel, Dancer, by Colum McCann, which comes closer to catching Nureyev’s essence than the first two posthumous biographies.) Doubtless the sheer spread and quality of these commemorations have somethin gto do with the fact that there are two wealthy Nureyev foundations. Still, his place in history is secure. [...]’.

Shirley Kelly, ‘The Tormented Dancer’ [interview with Colm McCann], in Books Ireland (Feb. 2003): McCann gives an account of the origins of his new novel [Dancer]: ‘I was looking for an international story and the book grew out of a conversation I had with a friend from Ballymun. He was telling me how his father used to come home drunk every night and beat his wife and children. It was in the early seventies and one night, when this guy was about seven, his father came home sober, carrying a television. They plugged it in and nothing happened and the father went ballistic again. But later that night Jimmy woke up and carried the television around the room to try and get a decent reception and the first thing he saw on the screen was Rudolph Nureyev dancing. And I thought it was extraordinary how a Russian ballet dancer could penetrate the consciousness of a seven-year-old working-class Dublin boy.’ Further, ‘I describe myself as an Irish writer, and my heart is still in Ireland to some extent. It’s home in the sense that my parents still live there and I return there four or five times a year, often enough not to get sentimental about it. But I’m a new Yorker too. This is such an international place that it’s hard to think of oneself as an exile. I’[m just one of millions of people that come from other places. The thing about New York is that you can come here and immediately become a New Yorker. You couldn’t come to Dublin, say, from anywhere else in the world and immediately, or ever, become a Dubliner.’ Asked would he be a writer if still living in Ireland: ‘I don’t think so. At least my writing would have developed differently. Living in a different place to where you grew up, I think you develop a heightened awareness. And I certainly push myself harder here. I’m not sure I would embrace difficulty to the same degree if I were at home.’ (p.9.)

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Eileen Battersby, ‘From the ballet stage to the page’, interview-article with Colum McCann, in The Irish Times ( 16 Jan. 2003 [Weekend]: ‘[... T]he novel is not really a book abou Nureyev, or rather “it is not an attempt to present the facts and figures of his life - we already know them”. Instead it is a fiction engaged with telling a story, the story of one man’s life, a contradictory, volatile individual who happens to be a famous Russian ballet star, and the impact that one life had on the lives of those who hovered in his wake. [...] Most importantly, though, it draws on what has become a recurring McCann theme, that notion of exile. It is also about alienation, the history of the 20th century as seen through the lives of the famous from different contexts, the arts, politics, society and how these worlds converge. “And I hope that this doesn’t sound pretentious, but it is also an attempt at a portrait of an artist. It’s not so much a book about Nureyev as the quest for the unknowable. He is all sorts of things. A dancer, a sex symbol,, a gay icon. But it is a book about storytelling and history and fiction.”’ Further quotes McCann: ‘It’s not a ballet book, it’s a novel.’

Eve Patten, ‘Dancing in the Dark’, review of Colum McCann, Dancer, in The Irish Times (8 Feb. 2003), Weekend: ‘[The] refusal to smooth out the awkwardness of Nureyev gives Dancer the same degree of emotional intelligence as Janice Galloway’s recent departure into bio-fiction, in her novel of the pianist and composer Clara Schumann. If he doesn’t exactly capture his subject’s life, McCann stages it perfectly and frames it from a series of unpredictable perspectives.’ Further: ‘The novel’s opening pages tell of how the frozen, broken bodies of Russian soldiers were bathed in welded metal vats when they returned from the front, an image recalled much later in the book in the erotic yet repellant description of Nureyev, naked, beautiful and vulnerable, immersing himself in a gay bath house in New York. Here, through McCann’s careful and understated compositional arrangement, the invisible patterns of history are suddenly illuminated. [...]’ (For full text, see RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or as attached.)

Eve Patten, ‘ The politics of literacy’, review of Colm McCann, Zoli, in The Irish Times (23 Sept. 2006), Weekend: ‘[...] Within this context, Zoli’s story is foremost an engagement with the politics of literacy. Like Papusza, she becomes a celebrated performer among her own people, but when her poems and songs fall into the hands of an English/Slovakian scholar, Stephen Swann, she finds herself exposed to a gadze world desperate to use her - to read her - as a symbol of authenticity and originality. In the camp, she hides books under her skirts, respectful of the Romani belief that print culture belongs to an outsider system of control and oppression. Yet in the city, she performs on stage and radio, visits bookshops and reads Mayakovsky, until her immersion in literature and strategic co-option by the communist ministry of culture leads to crisis. Caught in a cultural no-man’s land, she is a filter for the novel’s reconceptualisation of illiteracy and orality, authorship and knowledge. /But is Zoli more than a filter, a historical representative? [...]’ (For full text, see RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or as attached.)

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Mike Peed, ‘Walking the Tightrope of Big City Life’, review of Let the Great World Spin, in The Washington Post (15 July 2009).‘As the narrator of Colum McCann’s new novel sees it, Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974 triggered a quietude generally unknown to New Yorkers. “Those who saw him hushed,” McCann writes. “It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.” In “Let the Great World Spin,” Petit’s stunt acts as a centerline on which McCann hangs the stories of a dozen spiritually disheveled characters, each searching for an alcove of silence in a clamorous city. A recovering drug addict wonders if Petit, famed also for his juggling, can keep aloft the shards of her broken existence. [...] McCann can craft penetrating phrases - a smoker resembles “his last cigarette, ashen and ready to fall” - but his theme is stale, and the exhaustive back stories he gives each character never pay off. McCann relies on streams of short sentences that can seem lazy and distracted. “Pureness moving” describes a break-dancer 140 pages before the exact phrase is used again to describe Petit. Perhaps the repetition is deliberate, but, either way, the line doesn’t land a punch. By book’s end, McCann is writing of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, the width of his canvas enhancing neither the plot nor our concern for it.’ [For full text, see RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or as attached.]

Niall MacMonagle, review of Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann, in The Irish Times (29 Aug. 2009), Weekend: ‘[...] This Man on Wire, this Angel in Air is an otherworldly, thrilling, exciting, inspiring presence. US soldiers were returning from Vietnam, Nixon resigned on August 9th and McCann’s memorable phrase “Another day another dolor” rewrites the American dream. Petit’s astonishing achievement becomes a release and a contrast for characters with broken, troubled lives. / The novel begins in 1950s Sandymount, where Ciaran and John Corrigan spend their childhood, but swiftly moves to the South Bronx in the 1970s where the younger, now a monk and known by his surname, lives in a housing project among hookers and drives “a van for old folk in the local nursing home”. Tillie and Jazzlyn, mother and daughter, ply their trade and Corrigan’s apartment is open house: “the girls” use his bathroom - “it’s not much. Just a little gesture”. So far, so saintly. But in a world of fur-coated, neon swim-suited, high-heeled whores, Corrigan, a doer of good deeds, struggles with “the mess of myself”. Cut to the Upper East Side where affluent Claire Soderberg - this chapter is called “Miró, Miró on the Wall” - is one of a grieving group of mothers whose sons died in Vietnam. Cut to artists Blaine and Lara, Upstate cabin-dwellers who, having lived a hedonistic, arty life in New York, quit drugs and embraced rural simplicity. / It’s an ambitious and carefully mapped work. A fatal car crash allows for a gradual interweaving of lives in a neatly jigsawed plot.’ [...; for longer extract, see RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index or as attached.]

Rosita Boland, ‘Tracing what’s left after the dust settles’, interview with Colum McCann, in The Irish Times (22 Aug. 2009), Weekend: ‘McCann sees his job as a novelist as being “to inhabit those little dusty corners that nobody else is necessarily going to value on the six o’clock news”. The characters in Let the Great World Spin who live in those neglected dusty corners include a hooker and her drug-addicted daughter, and a woman who has lost her sons to the Vietnam war. / There is also an Irish emigrant who is a St Francis-type character, giving away all his possessions and living in poverty in a South Bronx housing project. / “Hopefully the book will emotionally engage you on such a level that your world gets shifted sideways for a little moment and then you will look at things in a slightly different way,” McCann says. There is a coda at the end of the book, set in October 2006, where all the characters’ stories fuse together in varying ways. In 1974, the war the world was watching was in Vietnam. By 2006, global attention was on Iraq, in the final years of the Bush presidency. In the coda, there are moments of hard-won redemption for some of the characters. / “The last chapter is an Obama metaphor for me,” McCann says. “Things turned. The narrative turns. It’s open-ended.”’

Tim Adams, review of Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann , in The Observer (30 Aug. 2009): ‘[...] In some senses, this new novel knocked at his door. McCann, who grew up in Dublin, and who has lived across Europe and in Mexico, settled in Manhattan more than a decade ago. On the morning of 11 September, his father-in-law had been working on the 59th floor of the north tower, the first to be hit. He got out, staggered uptown to his daughter’s place, ash-covered. McCann has recalled elsewhere how his own daughter, then four, went to hug her grandfather, and then recoiled at the smell of burning - she thought he was on fire. / That instinct - of the proximity of calamity - is as close as McCann’s book gets to the facts of 9/11. Until a coda set in 2006, the lives he describes are all played out in 1974, in the shadow of Petit’s crossing. But it is a “Twin Towers” novel none the less and, moreover, one to bear comparison with the very best - Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, Clare Messud’s The Emperor’s Children. / Petit’s feat is mirrored in the book in the life of Corrigan, an Irish emigre to the Bronx who looks for his equilibrium in the riskiest of places.’ [...; for longer extract, see RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or as attached.]

Kim Forrester, review of Let the World Spin, at Kimbofo (22 Nov. 2009): ‘[...] Long-time readers of this blog will know I have a penchant for Irish writers and stories set in New York, so I rather suspected that Let The Great World Spin would be right up my street, seeing as it ticked both boxes. But there was something about this book that didn’t gel with me and I’ve spent the best part of a week trying to figure it out. / I think the problem is not so much the scope and the huge canvas that McCann uses, nor the diversity of his characters - an Irish monk, a prostitute and an Upper Eastside housewife among them, all expertly drawn - but that the book reads very much like a collection of short stories strung together (pun not intended) by Petit’s high-wire act. Some of these stories interconnect, others, such as the very brief chapter about Fernando, a 13-year-old subway graffiti artist, do not. And, as ever with books of this type, there is a danger that the reader will like some characters better than others, so that certain chapters become more exciting, or more dull, than others, leading to an inconsistent read. / But I don’t want to sound too harsh, because there’s no doubt that McCann knows how to write beautifully, painting pictures in just a handful of words [...; for longer extract, see RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or as attached.]

The Irish Times (21 Nov. 2009): ‘Earlier this year in an interview in this newspaper Colum McCann expressed some disappointment at not being included in the long-list for the much-hyped Booker Prize. His recompense in receiving the National Book Award this week is not to be under estimated. Along with the Pulitzer, this award is regarded as America’s most eminent literary prize. McCann’s achievement in becoming the first Irish writer to win it places him alongside some of the iconic names of contemporary American fiction. / The judges noted McCann’s “lyrical gifts” which are abundantly displayed in Let The Great World Spin. This book, which has been described as “the first great 9/11 novel”, is not, only a showcase of the author’s finest writing to date, but also a remarkable triumph of storytelling and insight into the human spirit. An imaginative paean to his adopted city of New York, McCann’s interweaving of different lives and stories deserves all the plaudits and acclaim that this life-affirming novel has received. [...]’ (For longer extract, see RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or as attached.)

Eileen Battersby, ‘I decided to write the great Irish novel but couldn’t. I wasn’t messed-up enough’, interview-article, in The Irish Times (Thurs., 16 June 2011): ‘[...] Let The Great World Spin is an international, full-hearted and openly emotional novel that takes place largely in New York, and McCann agrees that the city is one of its major characters. He also agrees that, although he has lived there for so long (18 years), he still looks at it through the eyes of an emigrant. “I watch everything. An outsider always has an advantage.” / There are no answers in his novel. “I didn’t want to offer any, I think everything is open-ended. The events of 9/11 were shocking but you know, the New Yorkers are surprising. There was no anger, everyone was very calm. The most noticeable thing was in the stores, all the shelves where the eye wash stuff was usually kept were empty. The real reaction came later, in Iraq. That’s when we saw the anger.” / His response was very different from that of his friend, Don De Lillo. “Let the Great World Spin  was a three-year project and I was working on it when Falling Man  – I love that book – came out. It’s funny, you know I had begun the book with this line, “The prospect of a falling man.’ Throughout the novel, the characters are aware of the man walking a tightrope suspended between the twin towers. It is seen as exciting, although there is the anticipation that he might fall.” / McCann remarks that whereas De Lillo approached 9/11 directly, “he has the ash falling on the first page, I had to go further back, to the aftermath of Vietnam and then forward to Philippe Petit. I think in the future that the things that will remain from this period, the stuff that will be remembered, will be the workings of capitalism – that’s what the towers represented – and the wire walk, and of course the image of the towers falling.” / But the tightrope walker is not the hero, John Corrigan is. He is a Christ figure. [...]’ (See full-text version in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or as attached.)

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Quotations

‘Waking up to a country I do not understand’, in The Irish Times, “Weekend” (6 Nov. 2004): ‘I have often thought that I am a peson of two countries: having grown up in Ireland and then having spent a considerable amount of time in the US [...] I do not understand the triumphant [accent] on the front of the newspapers. I do not undersand you, Ohio. I do not understand the mother of the dead soldier who voted for her commander-in-chief [...] There is so much that I admire about this country but I am at a loss to gather it together and present it. I am sad. I am raw. I am empty [...] He comprehends the depths of shallow language. He knows how dangerous it is to photograph a coffin [...] He understands the stupidiies of complexity. He recognises the value of aggressive cynicism. He knows that wars remains war, no matter what language we give them [...] He also knows that while poor people commit terror, rich people commit war, but the rich have enough money to pretend that it’s right. He can say shock and awe. He has said it. One only hopes he will not say it again.’ (p.1.)