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 perspective, but “B” for not quite succeeding in making her come alive for me. Maybe that’s inevitable for such an “alien” and closed off culture, so I still recommend the book for taking me the distance.The story most drew me in with its initial sections of the imagined life of a Roma girl growing up with her grandfather after losing her family at an early age and finding her niche as a singer. The secretive but rich life of this mobile culture is lovingly revealed through the lens of Zoli’s vision. The essence of life on the move, the caravans joining in the woods and byways, the sense of togetherness of a people, the joy of dance and song, the power of the myths and traditions alien to Western traditions. Her grandfather allows her to learn to read and write, forbidden by their culture. The strange poetry in their traditional songs helps Zoli develop her identity:If the women were swaying with cucu [alcohol], they could not remember where the song had led the night before. They said to me: Zoli, what did I sing? And I would say: “They broke, they broke my little brown arm, now my father cries like the rain.” Or they would say: “I have two husbands, one of them sober, one of them drunk, but each one I love the same.” Or I sang: “I want no shadow to fall on your shadow, your shadow is dark enough for me.” They smiled when these words came out of my mouth and told me again I had the look of my mother. At night I fell asleep thinking of her.They survive the period of fascist oppression, which was not as severe in Slovakia as in other parts of Nazi-occupied Europe. Throughout Europe as many as 250,000 Roma people were executed or killed in the camps or along with the Jews, roughly a fourth of their population. It didn’t matter that they were “Aryan”, with origins from India in the Middle Ages. In the communist era after the war, Zoli gains notoriety as a poet and singer. This part of the tale is told by an English socialist writer, Swann, who moves to Bratislava in sympathy with a Czech father who left his Irish mother to fight and die supporting the Bolshevics. In his work with the Writer’s Union, he becomes mesmerized and smitten by Zoli and motivated to have her become the voice of her people. The regime ultimately makes her the poster child for the Roma people, an icon of proof of the new egalitarian society. But a woman telling the secrets of the Roma is forbidden, as is a love affair outside their people. When the policy comes down to assimilate the Roma and abolish their nomadic life, she pays the cost of schism with her people and a crisis I best say nothing more of. Her survival and life she forges over the rest of the story reveals the strengths in her character founded in her origins. The writing for this part, in the form of a journal addressed to her daughter as an old woman from 2003, brings a welcome synthesis.The middle part from Swann’s perspective highlights how hard it is for European’s to really understand the Roma people. His captivation with her mystery is captured in these few quotes:Zoli believed there was a life-spring that went down to the center of the earth and that it ran both ways but mostly it rose from the well of her childhood.He saw her as fully authentic now, she had forged herself in a world that was not ours, a poet filled with mysterious voices that sometimes even she didn’t know the meaning of. …she had an intellect that came to her like a bird off a branch, unrecognized, the images chasing her with speed.She quoted a line from Neruda about falling out of a tree she had not climbed. I felt exasperated by her, always turning, always changing, always making me feel as if I was looking for oxygen—how much like fresh air and how much, at the same time, like drowning.The challenge of the Roma people not being understood outside their culture is nicely captured by Zoli’s refelection:The worst burden in life is what others know about us. But maybe there is one burden even worse than this. It happens when they don’t know about us, it is what they think about us when, in silence, they force us to be what they expect us to be. Even worse is how we become it and I, chonorroejoa [daughter], had become it.A journalist who seeks to capture her story near the end prompts Zoli to formulate these thoughts:Tell him that nothing is ever arrived at. …Tell him that nothing is ever fully understood, that’s what I’d like to say.So in the end, I get that McCann realizes the limits to how much understanding about a people that he can convey in his tale. I admire him for his effort.
Exploring the UnknownOne of the best aspects of reading emerges in the many unknown ideas a bibliophile encounters. You can explore the world from your couch. You can become immersed in cultures vastly different from your own. But this couch-surfing comes at a cost, especially for those wearing their critical thinking caps. How can you ever truly know the veracity of what you read? Even in non-fiction, the space between truth and fabrication is exceedingly opaque.When you are reading, especially a particular book on a singular topic, you must always balance the intrigue of a new idea against the possibility of such an idea not representing the sparkling truth.For the reason, reviewing Colum McCann’s Zoli is impossible.Snapshots of LifeThe novel follows its titular character, the Romani poet Zoli, through her life. We get snapshots of her existence, one during the War and at the height of discrimination against Gypsies. Zoli’s parents, in fact, were murdered, in cold blood.“We went down the road, Grandfather and I. My days were spent still staring backwards, waiting for my dead family to catch up, though of course I knew then that they never would” (22).We see post-War Czechoslovakia, immersed in the communist ideal with Zoli representing the future of the Romani people given her intellect, her singing voice, and her discovery from socialist academics.“She was a new sort of Czechoslovakian woman, taken out of the margins to illustrate our steps forward under socialism” (97).We encounter her in the new Millennium, forced to recognize new facets of discrimination as a post-modern Europe continues to try its best to accept a culture it does not understand. In these times, Zoli finds it difficult to understand and communicate her identity when her culture no longer becomes a talking point.“I asked Enrico why he had not asked my anything about being a Gypsy and he asked me why I had never asked him anything about not being one. It was perhaps the most beautiful answer I have ever heard in my life” (268).An Introduction to a Culture?And yet, I possess little understanding of the Romani plight to the point that I am unaware of the best way to approach a review of McCann’s Zoli.My cursory understanding of the Central European people labeled “Gypsies” mostly comes from the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame as well as a handful of viewings of the TLC “Gypsy Wedding” series.I have a small recognition around the racism and discrimination of the Romani people, but most of it surrounds the thought that “modern” culture wants the Romani people to “settle down” while Romani culture has a foundation in nomadic movement.McCann’s novel opens up a view into this culture and I find it a fascinating read, but without a rigorous study of its historical setting, it’s hard to say much more. If it’s of any value, Ian Hancock, the director of the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas finds Zoli a moving narrative and an “introduction to the bleak reality of Romani life.” So there’s that.But I fear making any application to the wide view of what Romani culture might be. It’s never good to know just enough to be dangerous, as the saying goes.If you enjoy solid, literary writing that brings culture to life, McCann’s Zoli is a good read. But if you’re looking for an introduction into the work of Colum McCann, I’d recommend Let the Great World Spin.Originally published at http://www.wherepenmeetspaper.com
What do You think about Zoli (2007)?
McCann, a novelist so good that both Ireland and America claim him as their own, is the author most recently of Let the Great World Spin. Zoli is McCann’s sixth work of fiction and the one that immediately preceded Let the Great World Spin. What the two novels have in common, as does This Side of Brightness, McCann’s second novel, which are the three I’ve read so far, are an historical setting, a collage of narrative voices, a recurring theme of multi-cultural migrant peoples, and a strong sense of compassion in the face of life’s hardships and dangers.Zoli Novotna, the novel’s main character, is loosely based on the Romani poet and singer known as “Papusza” (Bronislawa Wajs, 1908-1987). Papusza was a Polish Gypsy; Zoli is a Slovakian Gypsy. Despite that difference in nationalities: both the fictional and source figures embraced and defied Gypsy traditions, both were writers and singers, both survived the Nazis and the Communists, the latter of whom first celebrated and then tried to compel conformity to the Soviet-citizen ideal, and both real and imagined heroines were viewed with suspicion internally because of their being promoted by literary and political figures in the outside world. McCann is an inspired researcher; he reportedly knew little or nothing about Romani culture when he began working on the book. He read, he interviewed, he traveled and observed and he convincingly constructs (to someone as blank a slate as the author was off the start) a unique insular world as it intersects and is overwhelmed by a larger one. His zealous research carries him and the reader a long way but perhaps not all the way it needs to.The story, though, is compelling on a personal (Zoli) and ethnic level. In the end the larger world with its international politics and near universal social values and its own cultural and ethnic prejudices refuses the Gypsies any escape. Nazi racism, Soviet social control, and the societal norms of modern Europe all have little tolerance for a way of life that resists a national adjective on a culture whose tradition is timeless and transcends conventions like national borders. Granted these forces of compulsion are different in their intent and imposition—Nazi concentration camps versus insistent social service agencies—but all are unwilling to allow Gypsy traditions to continue unchanged. McCann’s novel captures this larger tragedy while focusing on Zoli’s life.The novel spans a period from the 1930s into the early 2000s, jump cutting between its past and present, shifting narrators between first person (Zoli and Stephen Swann, an Irish-Anglo of Slovakian origin who moves to Czechoslovakia for political reasons and falls in love with Zoli) and third person. We begin with a young Zoli traveling with her grandfather and end with the widowed Zoli visiting her daughter in Paris in 2003, encountering at a conference celebrating Romani culture her former lover and the recognition that this once mobile and restless wanderer and performer had for some decades become rooted and is now satisfied with anonymity. It’s a well-crafted and thoughtful novel and one that works better at capturing the universals of the human condition than representing a deep investigation of what is unique and entrenched in the world of Gypsies. There is sufficient and convincing detail to tell the tale, not to make a culture come fully to life. McCann’s gift however is the way he invests his readers in the universal elements of his characters. How they strive and struggle for meaning, success, comfort, identity, notice and how despite the turmoil and loss there is dignity and hope, compassion and resilience.
—Rick
Really had trouble caring about the characters despite caring deeply for story. The prose is, of course, beautiful given how McCann narrates but something is lost. I think, perhaps, that it is a really bold move to do lots of research pertaining to fiction. It's wasn't so much that it was fact overload or that McCann was trying to get the backdrop just right. I think at times he was perfectly lost in his story about a gifted gypsy to not burden us with that. However, maybe he was a little too lost and left me out. "Let the Great World Spin" gave so much depth to the characters. It's one of the extremely few books that left me close to tears. With "Zoli" I stood outside these people and the time period. The point may be made that the gypsy life, in general, is one of mystery. But I think I was ready to be opened up into this world I know little about. And now, I still feel that way.
—Miranda
This wasn't a romance story. Relationships happened, Zoli did fall in love, but the love i can see is the way Zoli speaks to her daughter, and how she speaks of her grandfather and memories of frozen blades of grass. I loved this book because it was a love story from beginning to end but the love appeared in places that were plain, werent dressed up like Swann's airy proposals. THe true love i saw in this book was in the letters to her daughter, and how she told her of all the beautiful things she knew of, like when she asked Enrico “why he had not asked me anything about being a Gypsy and he asked me why I had never asked him anything about not being one.” And the love was in the family and in her culture and it was never about anyone else except family.
—Samantha
