Colum McCann

These two stories and novella resonate particularly to me and bring back memories of my time in Northern Ireland from 1970-72, as the "Troubles" were heating up. I was among a small detachment of USN sailors operating a communication station. The thing about being an American in Derry was that the populace -- Catholics and Protestants -- viewed us as neutrals in their conflict. I have said that we Americans were the only people in the community who could enter any of the sharply segregated secterian neighborhoods. We had Catholic friends from Bogside and Protestant friends in the Waterside. (There was no mistaking which sect lived where by the graffiti, banners and curbstones painted the red, white and blue of Great Britain or the orange, green and white of Ireland). I arrived at the base (located right in the city) in November 1970. The Protestant assault against Catholic civil rights marchers at the Burntollent bridge outside Derry had happened in 1969. When the British army came shortly after to separate the fighting factions they were viewed at first by the Catholic community as protectors. This changed sharply in 1970 as the IRA adherents became actively violent. My wife and I rented a flat near the city center. Our landlords were partners in an auto dealership whose showrooms were on the ground floor. They were an unusual pair because one was Catholic and the other Protestant. In August 1971, the British rounded up suspected IRA militants and incarcerated them without charges in the prison at Long Kesh. This sparked a violent response across the province including stepping up bombing of civilian businesses. On the night of August 11, my wife and I were entertaining an Irish friend in our flat when, at about 10:00 pm, a bomb exploded outside the car showroom. We were not injured but the flat was no longer habitable. My sense is that whoever placed the bomb did not know that people were living above. My Navy bosses made arrangements with the British army for us to occupy a British army house outside the city adjacent to a weapons depot no longer in use. (The house was isolated so for obvious reasons they could not have their own soldiers living there.) Our neighbors in this rural setting were Protestant "Orangemen", but very nice people. I was invited by a civilian worker aquaintance at the base to attend the civil rights march on Sunday January 30, 1972 -- "it'll be a lark", he said. I declined. The march became the infamous "Bloody Sunday".

The first story -- "Everything in This Country Must" -- tells of a British army patrol that happens on a man and his daughter attempting to rescue their horse drowning in the river. The brave efforts of the soldiers, at no small risk to themselves, is appreciated by the girl, but not by her father who threatens them as they depart. His anger shows how the attitude of the people toward the presence of the British army had evolved.

The second story -- "Wood" -- refers to the annual parade of Protestant Orangemen through the streets of Derry, Belfast, and other cities. The paraders carry banners with anti-catholic slogans. It commerates the victory of Protestant King William over Catholic King James in 1691. The parades are perceived by the Catholic population as insulting and an arrogant symbol of Protestant supremacy. (I witnessed our Protestant neighbor proudly dressed in his parade regalia on the eve of the march.) The marchers needed wood poles to display their banners and called on a family of skillful workworkers to make them. The head of the household had been incapacitated by a stroke and, although a Protestant himself, loathed the annual parades for all they represented. His wife and young son surreptiously gathered the materials and made the poles for the income they would bring. He embodied the rejection of sectarianism felt by many, but his helplessness symbolized how the forces of hatred prevailed.

The novella -- "Hunger Strike -- is told from the perspective of a 13-year-old boy from Derry who is staying with his widowed mother in the Republic (somewhere it seems on the west coast near Galway). His uncle, who he has never met, is imprisoned in Prison Maze at Long Kesh for his suspected IRA activities. The uncle and others had begun a campaign of hunger strikes to protest the refusal of the British authorities to recognize them as prisoners of war as opposed to suspected common criminals. This resulted in a number of starvation deaths that received major media attention across the world. The boy is extremely obsessed his uncle's slow death, even to charting what he believes to the the steady weight loss. He seethes with anger, fantasizing about the actions he would take in response. He meets an elderly couple who introduce him to kayaking in the bay and repays their kindness in an unexpected way that speaks to his troubled state of mind.… (lisätietoja)

I had started this book of 12 stories about six or so years ago and then misplaced it. I found it again while spring cleaning. It was a nice surprise and I set out to re-read the stories I read earlier and finish the ones I had not. Once again, I am mesmerized by McCann's tight, gorgeous command of language. This relatively short book (196 pages) is focused on modern Irish people who have either emigrated or still cling to home. That seemed to be the common thread.
In the title story, "Fishing the Sloe-Black River," women go to a riverbank to fish for sons to replace the ones who have moved away from Ireland. One of my favorites, "A Basket Full of Wallpaper," was evocative of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, not just in name. In it, a Japanese survivor of Hiroshima moves to a small Irish village and compulsively wallpapers his cottage over and over, creating an ever-thickening insulation against the maddening world. Gilman's protagonist is lost in the wallpaper in the room to which she is confined as she descends into madness. Another favorite was "Cathal's Lake," a tale in which a new swan appears in the farmer's pond each time someone is killed in Irish factional violence until his pond is completely filled with swans.… (lisätietoja)

An “apeirogon” is “a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.” And Apeirogon, the novel, is a story with a countably infinite number of tellings, depending on the teller, and the day, and the synergies. The story takes place in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and brings together two men – 67-year-old Jewish graphic designer Rami Elhanan and Palestinian Bassam Aramin, who survived seven years in an Israeli jail. Coping with grief over the senseless killing of their daughters draws them together. Rami’s teenage daughter, Smadar, was killed in a suicide bombing in 1997. Bassam’s ten-year-old daughter, Abir, was felled by a rubber bullet shot by Israeli soldiers in a truck passing by as she and her friends came from the store where she bought a candy bracelet. The two men work through the grief that unites them in the Parents Circle-Family Forum, made up of parents and other relatives on both sides of the ever-present conflict who lost their loved ones. But my summary could never do justice to the exquisite prose, the sensitivity and skill McCann has in making tangible the agonies of these men living always with both the unbearable loss of their daughters and the omnipresent reality of the occupation, which he beautifully described as “the rim of a tightening lung.”

A bit about the structure of the novel. There are, in essence, 1,001 chapterlets that do not unfold in a linear fashion but are logical. Some are one sentence long; others go on for pages. They tell the central story; they go off on wonderfully informative tangents. The middle of the book is where we get the full story of each of the protagonists – in chapter 1001, which is both preceded and succeeded by chapter 500. The chapterlets in the first half of the book are numbered 1 to 500, and in the second half of the book are numbered backwards from 500 to 1. I assume the 1,001 was a nod to 1,001 Arabian Nights, which he mentions a couple of times in the book.… (lisätietoja)

Once in a while you come across a book that crackles with some electricity that hums deep inside you, and you know you are under the pull of a great work. Let the Great World Spin is such a novel for me. Using the real Iife event of Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center as the jumping off point to weave a tale, Mr. McCann gives us rich, varied characters whose lives peripherally or intimately collide on that day. The writing itself is so lovely, the tales sad and funny and poignant. The tightrope walker’s tale. The tale of the judge before whom he was brought after being taken into custody. The tale of the two prostitutes charged with robbery, on the court’s docket just before the tightrope walker. The Irish monk who watched out for the hookers in his neighborhood, whose brother comes from Ireland to stay with him — their beginnings in Dublin, their interconnection with others in the novel. I cared about the characters, their small stories and how they intersected with each other on that day. It was like a modern day Canterbury Tales. Lovely, lovely book.… (lisätietoja)