It took me quite a while to get in to it but once I did I was so glad that I'd persevered. The prose is beautiful, even lyrical in places. His style reminds me rather of John Banville's in that there is a crisp turn of phrase and a spareness to it but, in McCann, I feel there is more of a warmth...
I enjoyed this a lot for its window on Romany (“Gypsy”) culture in Slovakia from the 30’s to the 50’s and its portrait of the life of a fictional poet trying to put a voice to her people. “A” for the effort by an American author in trying to portray such a girl and woman from a first person pers...
Being a hobby photographer myself, I found the premise of this story interesting. Can a man's life be told and re-told through the scrutiny of his own photographic documentation of it? It surely makes for a potentially vivid tale, and I definitely think the author makes good on this prospect. To ...
This is fiction, but based on the true life events of the famed Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993). Through fiction the author attempts to show readers not only the external facts of Nureyev’s life but also how he perceived his own life. We are not so much told his inner thoughts, m...
"Everything In This Country Must" is quite simply too short. The title story only lasts 23 minutes. I am listening to the audiobook performance. Yes, it feels like a performance, not the reading of a story! The narration by Clodagh Bowyer, in her young feminine Irish patois, was fantastic. The ...
Rating: 3.75* of fiveThe Publisher Says: The short fiction of Colum McCann documents a dizzying cast of characters in exile, loss, love, and displacement. There is the worn boxing champion who steals clothes from a New Orleans laundromat, the rumored survivor of Hiroshima who emigrates to the tra...
McCann’s third book and second novel, This Side of Brightness has a number of things in common with McCann’s most recent novel, the prize winning Let the Great World Spin. Both novels are set in New York; both involve issues of race, class, and immigration; and both novels are testimonies to the ...
No shit? You think I’m a retard? Is that what you think? —Give me someone else there, will ya? —Why? he says again, and we hear him pull the phone away from his mouth again and there’s a crowd around him, jabbering away, oohs and ahhs, and then we hear the phone drop, and he says something about ...