Being an Irish writer owes an added debt to nostalgia and colum mccann he knows. It is something like the peremptory feeling of everything. Sensation or perception of the fleeting as fate of the Irish soul. From Oscar Wilde but also Samuel Beckett, an inescapable tendency to the tragicomic of the time uploaded to the scene of life is repeated in Irish prose.
This is how things happen for the people of Ireland or at least this is how the great storytellers of the island teach us. With your innate baggage, Colum McCann dyes those vivid and intense colors the sensations of bad living the contradictions, the losses, the absences and the time to live after feeling that there should be no more time.
The fatalism, adversity, and misfortune of Colum's characters are lessons for readers. The characters loaded with their chains towards the ghostly sensation of survival start with the advantage of knowing that everything is trompe l'oeil easily removable from a blow of misfortune.
And in the end, strange as it may seem, there remains the laughter, the desperate life, the determined extreme, all the gray hours surpassed. When the mist of the Irish poet turned novelist manages to rise above that haze loaded with cold existential humidity, the greatness of any tragicomedy lived with the exclusivity of the unrepeatable is glimpsed.
Colum McCann's Top 3 Recommended Novels
Thirteen ways to look
A story fragmented into a thousand pieces. Those of the characters that cross the soul of the reader with their particular imprint, with their passage through the world in moments where their lives take finalist paths, bitter aspects, icy touches or states that border on despair.
The most remarkable thing about this work is its ability to immerse us in quick stories, barely outlined, but perhaps for that reason magically close. The characterization of a character is a moment of magical neutrality where mimicry becomes easier. The author Colum McCan has known how to take advantage of that sketch of souls to make us feel within their destinies, of their first profiles of feelings, of their deepest desires without justifying in great developments or previous plots.
A kind of raw reading, an approach to the various protagonists of this mosaic of lives in a violent and direct way, as authentic possessions of our reading eyes on the thoughts of those who invite us to live them.
All we need to know about them is that they have that something to tell, even if they don't reveal it at all. And that probably with more time and more development we could reach that level of depth to which we are accustomed when we read any novel. But Colum has not considered it necessary, why explain what they are if we can take care of making them the characters we think they are?
An interesting book to share in a book club. An invitation to the fantasy of assumption, prosecution and the implantation of motives so that these characters move as they move and what happens to them happens.
Suggestive and suggestive literature is welcome, the writer's invitation to fill the scenes with the soul of characters built to be lived differently in each one of those who begin to chain one word after another.
Transatlantic
In light of the advancement of the XNUMXst century, the last century appears to us as the last opportunity to discover a world that has finally become small, limited, even threatening ...
That is why this novel still acquires a greater melancholic touch, beyond even what is intended. Because the jump between present and past invites us to yearn for a possibility to suspend time and return to those moments in which there was still room for adventure as a symbol of life and discovery.
1919 Two young pilots astonish the world by making the first non-stop transatlantic flight from Newfoundland in Canada to Ireland. On the plane travels a letter signed by reporter Emily Ehrlich, a letter that will take almost a century to open and whose words contain the fate of four generations of women.
Colum McCann has written a dizzying fresco spanning three centuries, a literary feat that demonstrates how courage and hope can be passed down from generation to generation and stand the test of time.
May the vast world keep turning
You can look for the artistic symbology, the dimension beyond the action. The thing is that Philippe Petit crossed the twin towers with his pole at the ready on the tightrope. And while the observers considered the recklessness just as they could consider the idealized privilege of contemplating the world from there, the truth is that Petit was only concerned with representing all the passers-by in a world in unstable equilibrium. Something that we soon discover as the story progresses...
At dawn on a late summer morning, lower Manhattanites stared up at the top of the Twin Towers. We are in August 1974 and a tiny and enigmatic figure walks in an unlikely balance on a cable between the two buildings.
And down below, in the bustling and violent New York of the seventies, the destinies of several characters will intersect and their seemingly ordinary lives will change forever: an Irish priest who fights his demons and lives among prostitutes in the Bronx, a a group of mothers who gather to mourn their children who died in Vietnam, an artist who will witness an accident that will mark her forever, a young grandmother who helps her teenage daughter while trying to prove to herself that her life has meaning …
