Thirteen Ways of Looking
Colum McCann: a life in writing
By Tim Knox for The Guardian -First published on Sat 25 May 2013 17.30 AEST
- "I forget sometimes that you’ve got to entertain your reader" … Colum McCann. 'That's the beauty of being a writer – you continue to be reckless. You can jump off the edge'
- A Dublin accent is just made to say "arse": in Colum McCann's gentle brogue the word becomes a beautiful thing. This, in a sense, is what his fiction does too – few contemporary writers are better at extracting the sublime from the base.
- McCann had six novels to his name by the time he turned 40, but it was 2009's best-selling and prize-scooping Let the Great World Spin that made him an international name. The event on which its several narratives hinge is Philippe Petit's 1974 tightrope walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and in this way it manages to be a novel about 9/11 that never mentions 9/11 – an elegy as heightened and finely tuned as that wire Petit danced across decades before the towers fell. All of the book's characters have experienced some form of loss, and one bereaved mother observes that, "everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected". If you omit "New York", that sentence might also serve to describe McCann's approach to fiction. TransAtlantic, the 48-year-old's first novel since Let the Great World Spin, is a kind of cat's cradle of transatlantic journeys, all connected, all built on another thing.
McCann, who's lived in New York for almost two decades, had suggested a drink at a downtown Irish pub named – what else – Ulysses. "I actually opened this bar with Frank McCourt 10 years ago," he says. "Did you ever meet Frank? Beautiful man. We didn't cut a ribbon, we actually read Ulysses. - McCann is a talker of the best kind. He chats on happily, peppering me with questions, and it's a while before I can steer him on to TransAtlantic. Three of its stories come from real-life historical figures: the abolitionist movement leader and former slave Frederick Douglass, the US senator and Northern Ireland peace envoy George Mitchell, and Alcock and Brown, the two first world war veterans who made the first flight from Britain to America in 1919. It's their journey that forms the book's bravura opening section. Those two, he says, came easily, it was Douglass who gave him grief. He liked him, he disliked him, and it was when he realised "these two contradictory things actually worked together, they were both true," that he finally gained traction with the story.
"I did think," he adds, "about just doing Douglass but then it would have been a historical novel and" – he pulls a face – "I hate the term … It just seems steeped in aspic. I mean every novel's a historical novel anyway. But calling something a historical novel seems to put mittens on it, right? It puts manners on it. And you don't want your novels to be mannered."
The character of Lily, a 19th-century maid who makes her way to America, presented herself to him, as did Lottie, her granddaughter, who ends up meeting Alcock and Brown as they prepare for their flight. "And I was like: well this is strange and this is odd, but those women are there for a reason. Then it made absolute sense to me because I was dealing with three strands of male non‑fiction, and with three strands of female fiction that folded over on to one another." He adds: "I said in an interview about 12 years ago that writing about real biographical figures showed a sort of failure of the writer's imagination." "Busted, I say. Absolutely busted. Because then I wrote a novel called Dancer which is a fictionalisation of the life of Rudolf Nureyev, and then more or less ever since I've been hovering in this territory."
This is the first time, though, that he's taken a still-living person for a character – George Mitchell, instrumental in brokering the Good Friday agreement and a man McCann regards, unreservedly, as a hero. McCann wrote to Mitchell's wife, who happened to have read Dancer in her book group and so responded warmly, happy to set him straight on details such as the colour of Mitchell's shoes (black, not brown).
"But did I feel trepidation?" he says. "No. I feel no trepidation whatsoever. I like the idea – [Clifford] Geertz talks about it – that the real is as invented as the imaginary. William Maxwell has this idea that memory is mostly lies anyway and it's how we choose to invent it. I don't believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don't think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It's all about the good word, properly inserted."
McCann began his career as a journalist. Why write novels instead of journalism? "If I were writing journalism I'd know where it is that I'm supposed to go. With this, I have no idea where it's going to go or what's going to happen with it."
McCann's own transatlantic journey came when he was 18, fired up on the fiction of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Ferlinghetti – "young man's literature", he says. These were books that his father, a pro-footballer who went on to become literary editor at the Dublin Evening Press, brought back for him from business trips to the US. After a short spell as a runner at Universal Press in New York, McCann returned to Dublin to work at the Irish Press. "I had my own page. It was really awful. Hideous stuff. It was supposed to be for young people – what album came out, 'designer stubble' – all this sort of shit. It was awful. But I enjoyed it. My friends and I had a good laugh. We got invited to all the great parties and stuff."- After a while though, he realised that his literary ambitions eclipsed notes on designer stubble. At the start of one summer, aged 21, he took himself off to Cape Cod, bought an old typewriter, loaded it up with one long ream of paper a la Kerouac ("I know, ridiculous") and sat down to write his masterpiece. When the summer ended he took stock of his output: a foot and a half of paper.
- And I was like: shit, I don't know anything. I had," he says, "all the desire and none of the story."
So he set out in search of one, or rather many, on a bicycle adventure across America that proved the most formative experience of his life. When I ask him to tell me some of his favourite memories he blows his cheeks out, shakes his head: "There's so many." There was San Francisco ("cycled across the Golden Gate Bridge, went down to City Lights bookshop, cried my eyes out"), a moment of grace in a New Mexico diner ("being close to penniless, counting out pennies on the counter and slipping on my cycling gloves afterwards and finding a $20 bill, slipped in, anonymously – somebody beautiful"), and then a long stint teaching juvenile offenders that he'd met at a church service in Texas. "One reason I haven't written about it is because I'm still writing about it, if you know what I mean? All of those stories are still coming out."
He recounts getting lost in Utah and nearly dying. "I was really reckless. But I think that's part of the beauty of being a writer – you continue to be reckless. You can jump off the edge. Vonnegut said it beautifully – he said we should be continually jumping off the edge of a cliff and developing our wings on the way down. And that's what it feels like."
Even if it might not look like it: "I invented a desk where I actually sit in a cupboard," he says. "I lock myself in and then it becomes a different world. Yeah I'm very boring really: I live on the Upper East Side, a block from the park. I have three kids. I go for a jog around the park every day with my dog."
He also teaches creative writing at Hunter College, where he likes to welcome each year's intake by telling them he can't teach them anything. "I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page."
I tell him that my favourite line in the novel begins the Emily section: "Stories began for her as a lump in the throat," and McCann repeats the line out loud, reflective and pleased. "Yeah that was probably my most written paragraph about the act of writing. I think part of it is you have this thing inside you that you have to confront and you don't really know what it is. When finally I felt it came to me, it was a huge release and then that lump in the throat was gone."
McCann has long been preoccupied with the Portugese term "saudade", the longing for something lost. In an earlier interview he admitted that, "nearly all of my characters are away from home and trying to find a way back home" and that's never been more true than with this novel. I ask him if he ever feels the need to check himself from becoming overly sentimental. "Yes," he says very firmly. "I do. Absolutely. I try to balance my sentiment out and parcel it … I'd be willing to take every cynic on in the department of cynicism – I can get down and dark just as quick as anybody else, I'm not afraid of that – but I also find it kind of useless.- "At the same time: "I don't want it to be all cool and poised and polished. Because that's completely uninteresting to me. So you do have to go into territory where you look at yourself and go" – he mimes confronting a page in front of him – "'Wow, that is terrible what I just did!' … But believing that this stuff matters – I've seen it in operation."
He is referring to Narrative 4, a global charity he has co-founded, dedicated to creating social change through storytelling. "So let's say it's kids from Limerick and kids from Chicago. They'll pair up and then they'll tell each other their story. And then they'll come back into a group and tell that story. But the real beautiful kicker is, you have to tell the other person's story. It's about developing empathy."
By this point, the afternoon has long faded to evening and the photographer has joined us, as well as the pub's owner, Danny McDonald, a fellow Irishman and old friend. McCann is talking about fiction versus nonfiction when he interrupts himself: "The one thing that we can't forget is that, in the end, it's also a form of entertainment. And we get so far up our own arses that I forget sometimes, that you've got to entertain your reader as well, you've got to look after them." As the bar noise swells, the empty Guinness glasses crowd and McCann talks on.
Review: Thirteen Ways of Looking proves Colum McCann’s talents remain unassailed
MICHAEL CHRISTIE
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published November 6, 2015 Updated March 22, 2018
As disclosed in the author's note, Thirteen Ways of Looking was edited and partly written during the summer of 2014, in the aftermath of a grisly attack Colum McCann suffered outside a Connecticut hotel after coming to the aid of a woman who'd been assaulted by her husband. The argument had ended and McCann left, but the husband followed, sneaked up and struck the author in the face, fracturing his cheekbone and breaking several of his teeth. In a sadly ironic twist, McCann was in New Haven attending a conference for a foundation called Narrative 4, which aims to teach "radical empathy" through storytelling. (This irony was not lost upon the author.)
Happily, McCann's talents remain unassailed. Thirteen Ways of Looking, the collection's titular novella, wonderfully showcases his fierce intellect and capacious, empathetic imagination. Inspired by Wallace Stevens's most celebrated poem, the modernist, perspective-shattering Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, this novella concerns an aging Supreme Court justice named J. Mendelssohn, a widower and literature lover who, in the twilight of his days, struggles against the weight of his unreliable mind, his even less reliable body and the disappointments of time.
It's immediately apparent that Mendelssohn's brain is lightly scrambled, his tale narrated by a jumble of frustrations, musings, reveries, hypotheticals and recollections. The playfulness of his mind-fizzling yields some lovely Joycean wordplay. Rhymes, literary allusions, failures of memory and hilarious non sequiturs abound and the prose sparkles as a result. Here he is describing his apartment's noisy radiators: "And then whack. Crash bang wallop. Good man, Dante. A divine comedy indeed. Abandon all hope. Jazz in the heating pipes. If only. Wake me up, Thelonious Monk. Come dwell with me in my steampipes." Of his beloved deceased wife, a poetry-loving Dubliner whose maiden name was Eileen Daly, Mendelssohn muses: "Oh, Eileen, I miss you. Daily, daily, daily."
While laying in his own filth, waiting for his nurse to change his diapers, Mendelssohn hilariously ponders the odd convention of putting a single pocket over the left breast of pajama tops ("A spot for the love letters from long ago?"). And realizes, somewhat guiltily, how undeniably apropos it is for the word Juicy to be written upon the seat of an attractive woman's sweatpants.
Mendelssohn is also a regular at Chialli's, a local restaurant, where he shuffles in nightly with his cane. It's there he meets his son, a philandering investment manager annoyingly addicted to his phone. Oh, I forgot to mention that, after their dinner, J. Mendelssohn will be murdered by a punch in the street. (Incredibly, McCann wrote this story before his own attack. "Sometimes it seems to me that we are writing our lives in advance," he says in the author's note). The reader is aware of this because Mendelssohn's story is ingeniously intercut with accounts of unnamed detectives poring over security footage of the doomed judge's final day, trying to assemble the narrative of his murder.
The result is a Rashomon-like view (cameras in the street, the restaurant, Mendelssohn's house), where multiple characters are implicated: his nurse, his son, as well as various restaurant employees. These scenes plumb our deeper insecurity in the age of surveillance and inescapable documentation, suggesting that, even with access to every conceivable perspective, we have as little access to the truth as ever.
But much more than the thrill of the whodunit, it's Mendelssohn's recollections, particularly of his deceased wife, Eileen, that cut the deepest. The way she lingers, years after her death, like a painfully sweet aftertaste in her husband's mouth, a taste that never fades.
The 13 ways of looking are performed by the 13-person jury, the numerous cameras that have captured the fatal incident, the various people that populate Mendelssohn's life and the many lenses through which he views his past. Because, when we closely examine a death, we also closely examine a life. While, in the end, the truth of the actual crime remains opaque, our view of its victim is crystal clear and Mendelssohn remains in the mind long after the story ends.
However, just after the novella's final, devastating note is struck, the collection falters. What Time Is It Now, Where You Are? is the story of a female Marine named Sandi sitting in a combat outpost in Afghanistan. It's also the story of a writer writing the story of a female Marine named Sandi sitting in a combat outpost in Afghanistan. A writer who's agreed to write a New Year's Eve story for a magazine and is now approaching deadline. Although it's somewhat interesting to peek behind the authorial velvet curtain and follow the world-building of a great writer's imagination – that slow push from general to specific, ("… or Sandi's birthplace which is, let's say, Ohio, though Sandi of course could be born just about any place, but Ohio feels right, let's say Toledo.") – the result remains the hazy sketch that McCann half-admits it is; an underwhelming, metafictional lark that never quite elevates itself above writing class exercise.
Next is Sh'khol, a modern retelling of the Irish myth of the selkie, a magic creature that takes the shape of a seal when in the sea and that of a human when on land. In these myths, selkies come ashore and live human lives, usually having children or taking lovers, until the longing for their aquatic home becomes unbearable and they disappear into the waves without explanation. In McCann's update, Rebecca is living with her son Tomas on the Galway coast. Rebecca and her estranged partner, Alan, adopted Tomas at the age of 6 in Vladivostok, where he previously endured some kind of unspeakable trauma (which includes a mild case of fetal alcohol syndrome), leaving him mute.
The story continues with Rebecca giving Tomas a wetsuit for Christmas so he can swim in the freezing bay. But very quickly, he starts disobeying her by plunging farther out than she'd like. "I have, she thought, made a terrible mistake." After he goes missing overnight, she discovers the wetsuit gone, and the town's gears of child-recovery leap into motion. There are some truly tense moments as they troll the bay for the boy (what lost-child search isn't tense?), but the lovely concept and the crackling language are hobbled by a poor characterization of the boy. Selkie stories are about abandonment and how even those we love can be strangers – so what better comparison to draw than with this scarred child? However, as readers we never see Tomas struggle, and he feels distant, as a selkie should, perhaps, but any emotion the story accumulates is sacrificed. Sh'khol is a better effort than the previous, albeit a mostly unexplored one.
The final effort, Treaty is about a non-conforming nun (she smokes!) who spots the televised image of the right-wing paramilitary leader who brutally abused her years ago in Bolivia. The man is now cleaned up, fighting for peace, and she travels to London to confront him and assess whether he's changed. Again, this story has a sketched-in feel, and lacks detail enough to attain the full texture of life.
Given the author's horrible assault, it's impossible not to read this collection accordingly. Each of these stories attempts reconstruction in the wake of horror, particularly in the their fascination with the long, cruel reach of trauma. While the facts are gathered and characters face their abusers, the truth remains slippery, and justice, even more so.
So why is this collection so uneven? One can't help but suspect today's squeamish fiction-buying public, whose fickle taste demands that even a masterfully soaring novella like Thirteen Ways of Looking must be padded into publishability by a trio of parboiled, flightless stories and then ambiguously described as "Fiction" on the cover, all because readers fear to tread beyond their novelistic comfort zone. Still, regardless of the soggy second half, I'd recommend this book to anyone. Because I'll take stumbling greatness over steady mediocrity any day.
MICHAEL CHRISTIE
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published November 6, 2015 Updated March 22, 2018
As disclosed in the author's note, Thirteen Ways of Looking was edited and partly written during the summer of 2014, in the aftermath of a grisly attack Colum McCann suffered outside a Connecticut hotel after coming to the aid of a woman who'd been assaulted by her husband. The argument had ended and McCann left, but the husband followed, sneaked up and struck the author in the face, fracturing his cheekbone and breaking several of his teeth. In a sadly ironic twist, McCann was in New Haven attending a conference for a foundation called Narrative 4, which aims to teach "radical empathy" through storytelling. (This irony was not lost upon the author.)
Happily, McCann's talents remain unassailed. Thirteen Ways of Looking, the collection's titular novella, wonderfully showcases his fierce intellect and capacious, empathetic imagination. Inspired by Wallace Stevens's most celebrated poem, the modernist, perspective-shattering Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, this novella concerns an aging Supreme Court justice named J. Mendelssohn, a widower and literature lover who, in the twilight of his days, struggles against the weight of his unreliable mind, his even less reliable body and the disappointments of time.
It's immediately apparent that Mendelssohn's brain is lightly scrambled, his tale narrated by a jumble of frustrations, musings, reveries, hypotheticals and recollections. The playfulness of his mind-fizzling yields some lovely Joycean wordplay. Rhymes, literary allusions, failures of memory and hilarious non sequiturs abound and the prose sparkles as a result. Here he is describing his apartment's noisy radiators: "And then whack. Crash bang wallop. Good man, Dante. A divine comedy indeed. Abandon all hope. Jazz in the heating pipes. If only. Wake me up, Thelonious Monk. Come dwell with me in my steampipes." Of his beloved deceased wife, a poetry-loving Dubliner whose maiden name was Eileen Daly, Mendelssohn muses: "Oh, Eileen, I miss you. Daily, daily, daily."
While laying in his own filth, waiting for his nurse to change his diapers, Mendelssohn hilariously ponders the odd convention of putting a single pocket over the left breast of pajama tops ("A spot for the love letters from long ago?"). And realizes, somewhat guiltily, how undeniably apropos it is for the word Juicy to be written upon the seat of an attractive woman's sweatpants.
Mendelssohn is also a regular at Chialli's, a local restaurant, where he shuffles in nightly with his cane. It's there he meets his son, a philandering investment manager annoyingly addicted to his phone. Oh, I forgot to mention that, after their dinner, J. Mendelssohn will be murdered by a punch in the street. (Incredibly, McCann wrote this story before his own attack. "Sometimes it seems to me that we are writing our lives in advance," he says in the author's note). The reader is aware of this because Mendelssohn's story is ingeniously intercut with accounts of unnamed detectives poring over security footage of the doomed judge's final day, trying to assemble the narrative of his murder.
The result is a Rashomon-like view (cameras in the street, the restaurant, Mendelssohn's house), where multiple characters are implicated: his nurse, his son, as well as various restaurant employees. These scenes plumb our deeper insecurity in the age of surveillance and inescapable documentation, suggesting that, even with access to every conceivable perspective, we have as little access to the truth as ever.
But much more than the thrill of the whodunit, it's Mendelssohn's recollections, particularly of his deceased wife, Eileen, that cut the deepest. The way she lingers, years after her death, like a painfully sweet aftertaste in her husband's mouth, a taste that never fades.
The 13 ways of looking are performed by the 13-person jury, the numerous cameras that have captured the fatal incident, the various people that populate Mendelssohn's life and the many lenses through which he views his past. Because, when we closely examine a death, we also closely examine a life. While, in the end, the truth of the actual crime remains opaque, our view of its victim is crystal clear and Mendelssohn remains in the mind long after the story ends.
However, just after the novella's final, devastating note is struck, the collection falters. What Time Is It Now, Where You Are? is the story of a female Marine named Sandi sitting in a combat outpost in Afghanistan. It's also the story of a writer writing the story of a female Marine named Sandi sitting in a combat outpost in Afghanistan. A writer who's agreed to write a New Year's Eve story for a magazine and is now approaching deadline. Although it's somewhat interesting to peek behind the authorial velvet curtain and follow the world-building of a great writer's imagination – that slow push from general to specific, ("… or Sandi's birthplace which is, let's say, Ohio, though Sandi of course could be born just about any place, but Ohio feels right, let's say Toledo.") – the result remains the hazy sketch that McCann half-admits it is; an underwhelming, metafictional lark that never quite elevates itself above writing class exercise.
Next is Sh'khol, a modern retelling of the Irish myth of the selkie, a magic creature that takes the shape of a seal when in the sea and that of a human when on land. In these myths, selkies come ashore and live human lives, usually having children or taking lovers, until the longing for their aquatic home becomes unbearable and they disappear into the waves without explanation. In McCann's update, Rebecca is living with her son Tomas on the Galway coast. Rebecca and her estranged partner, Alan, adopted Tomas at the age of 6 in Vladivostok, where he previously endured some kind of unspeakable trauma (which includes a mild case of fetal alcohol syndrome), leaving him mute.
The story continues with Rebecca giving Tomas a wetsuit for Christmas so he can swim in the freezing bay. But very quickly, he starts disobeying her by plunging farther out than she'd like. "I have, she thought, made a terrible mistake." After he goes missing overnight, she discovers the wetsuit gone, and the town's gears of child-recovery leap into motion. There are some truly tense moments as they troll the bay for the boy (what lost-child search isn't tense?), but the lovely concept and the crackling language are hobbled by a poor characterization of the boy. Selkie stories are about abandonment and how even those we love can be strangers – so what better comparison to draw than with this scarred child? However, as readers we never see Tomas struggle, and he feels distant, as a selkie should, perhaps, but any emotion the story accumulates is sacrificed. Sh'khol is a better effort than the previous, albeit a mostly unexplored one.
The final effort, Treaty is about a non-conforming nun (she smokes!) who spots the televised image of the right-wing paramilitary leader who brutally abused her years ago in Bolivia. The man is now cleaned up, fighting for peace, and she travels to London to confront him and assess whether he's changed. Again, this story has a sketched-in feel, and lacks detail enough to attain the full texture of life.
Given the author's horrible assault, it's impossible not to read this collection accordingly. Each of these stories attempts reconstruction in the wake of horror, particularly in the their fascination with the long, cruel reach of trauma. While the facts are gathered and characters face their abusers, the truth remains slippery, and justice, even more so.
So why is this collection so uneven? One can't help but suspect today's squeamish fiction-buying public, whose fickle taste demands that even a masterfully soaring novella like Thirteen Ways of Looking must be padded into publishability by a trio of parboiled, flightless stories and then ambiguously described as "Fiction" on the cover, all because readers fear to tread beyond their novelistic comfort zone. Still, regardless of the soggy second half, I'd recommend this book to anyone. Because I'll take stumbling greatness over steady mediocrity any day.
Review - By Jonathan Dee - "The New York Times"
Colum McCann has an old-school belief in the capabilities of literature. Even as au courant novelists all around him grow skeptical of the artifices of character and plot, and embrace the self as the fiction writer’s only truly accessible subject, McCann’s work continues to assert that nothing human is alien to him, that the empathetic imagination can and should go where it pleases. He has written eight previous books in which he fearlessly simulates identities dauntingly remote from his own — including the identities of real-life figures both dead and living — and in which plot performs a function that might fairly be described as redemptive. From the perspective of academic fashion it is a hoary, virtually benighted approach to narrative art; yet to judge by the enormous success of his work, most notably the panoramic novels “Let the Great World Spin” and “TransAtlantic,” its appeal to readers somehow endures.
The novella and three stories making up McCann’s new collection of fiction, “Thirteen Ways of Looking,” all bear out this belief in one way or another. “Treaty” imagines a Maryknoll nun traveling to London to confront her Latin American torturer-rapist, 37 years after the fact. “Sh’khol,” a harrowing tale (the collection’s best) about the agonies of an Irish single mother whose deaf child goes missing near the ocean, takes as its guiding metaphor a novella the mother is translating from Hebrew: “There were words, of course, for widow, widower and orphan, but no noun, no adjective, for a parent who had lost a child. . . . It had bothered her for days. She wanted to be true to the text, to identify the invisible.”
“What Time Is It Now, Where You Are?” is a fascinatingly self-conscious metafiction in which a male writer composes a story about a female Marine in Afghanistan — a rebuke, witting or not, to the spate of contemporary fiction about life in the American military whose central tenet seems to be that we can’t understand what it was like, that nobody can possibly understand what it was like, that returning vets are constantly victimized by our inability to understand what it was like. Yet McCann is uninhibited by the challenges of writing across difference, of creating experimental selves. His fearlessness on the page somehow never reads as arrogance or presumption; one always has the sense it’s not himself he holds in such high regard, but rather his tradition, his office.
But the anchor of the book is the title novella with which it commences: the tale of an octogenarian Manhattan judge named Mendelssohn, on what we learn early will be the last day of his life. His end will not be peaceful: On a snowy afternoon, not far at all from his home on the Upper East Side, he will be fatally assaulted. The novella draws its title from Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”; each of its 13 chapters takes as its epigraph a stanza of the poem. The implication seems to be that even a clear-cut physical encounter has multiple, sometimes hidden perspectives; among the perspectives McCann adopts are those of the many video cameras, public and private, that capture Mendelssohn’s short journey from his bedroom to the restaurant down the street where he has a final lunch with his boorishly successful son. None of those views prove definitive, however, and as the narrative crosscuts between Mendelssohn’s last day and the efforts of the police charged with solving his murder, the investigation itself is likened to the endeavors of literature: “If it happened, it can be unraveled. . . . Just as a poem turns its reader into accomplice, so, too, the detectives become accomplice to the murder. But unlike our poetry, we like our murders to be fully solved: if, of course, it is a murder, or poetry, at all.”
Under normal circumstances it might seem undisciplined to interpret an author’s fiction through the lens of publicity about his life. But McCann himself acknowledges, in a short afterword to this collection, how deeply it is informed by one traumatic event: In June 2014, on an otherwise ordinary evening in New Haven, the author intervened in a violent domestic dispute on the street, its participants strangers to him, and was himself assaulted and badly injured. His attacker, who later turned himself in, received a suspended sentence and spent three weeks in jail.
Mendelssohn — elderly, frail, dependent on a live-in nurse — may seem at first an unlikely avatar for his robust author, but the more you think about it, the more sense it makes: What is a fiction writer, after all, but a judge, a dispenser of justice, an arranger of fates, an agent, above all, of moral order? That Mendelssohn should not be allowed to die in his bed — that he should be struck down, as it were, by moral chaos — is a mocking subversion of the principles to which he has devoted his life.
In the end, an arrest is made in Mendelssohn’s murder, and a trial is held. Yet the motives of the supposed agents of this chaos never seem all that convincing — neither from a legal nor from a literary point of view — which may be why, without giving too much away, the novella ends on the irresolute note it does. Why sell a bill of goods about closure? The crime itself is senseless; to build an airtight, just, elaborate plot around it — the kind of plot one customarily associates with McCann’s work — would traduce that idea.
What’s most complicated, paradoxically, about “Thirteen Ways of Looking” is that its heart doesn’t seem fully in its titular conceit. Mendelssohn is the novella’s only real character; the others are more like events, plot points, things that happen to the judge. (That they perform, by and large, functions of service to the elite life Mendelssohn enjoys — the West Indian nurse, the Puerto Rican doorman, the Zimbabwean waitress, the Latino busboy and dishwasher — does not mitigate this impression.) McCann says in his afterword that the fictional attack on Mendelssohn was conceived before the real-life attack on the author occurred, and there is no reason to believe otherwise; nevertheless, Mendelssohn’s story reads ultimately like a step in the restoration of its author’s own faith in his art, and in that art’s notion of benevolent design. Anyone doubting the link, in McCann’s view, between divinity and writing is referred to the closing words of his author’s note: “Literature works in unimaginable ways.”
This newspaper ran several articles about the assault on McCann, one of them headlined: “An Author Known for Empathy Has None for His Attacker.” That article appeared five days after the assault itself; just over a year has passed since then, which is still not much. McCann tries his best here to allow his creative imagination to do the work of forgiveness, of impartiality, to imagine himself — as a good fiction writer must do — not just as one perspective on the drama but as all of them. That he has fallen somewhat short of that priestly goal is not only understandable; it’s somehow more interesting, more moving, more distinctly human than it would have been had he succeeded.
Colum McCann has an old-school belief in the capabilities of literature. Even as au courant novelists all around him grow skeptical of the artifices of character and plot, and embrace the self as the fiction writer’s only truly accessible subject, McCann’s work continues to assert that nothing human is alien to him, that the empathetic imagination can and should go where it pleases. He has written eight previous books in which he fearlessly simulates identities dauntingly remote from his own — including the identities of real-life figures both dead and living — and in which plot performs a function that might fairly be described as redemptive. From the perspective of academic fashion it is a hoary, virtually benighted approach to narrative art; yet to judge by the enormous success of his work, most notably the panoramic novels “Let the Great World Spin” and “TransAtlantic,” its appeal to readers somehow endures.
The novella and three stories making up McCann’s new collection of fiction, “Thirteen Ways of Looking,” all bear out this belief in one way or another. “Treaty” imagines a Maryknoll nun traveling to London to confront her Latin American torturer-rapist, 37 years after the fact. “Sh’khol,” a harrowing tale (the collection’s best) about the agonies of an Irish single mother whose deaf child goes missing near the ocean, takes as its guiding metaphor a novella the mother is translating from Hebrew: “There were words, of course, for widow, widower and orphan, but no noun, no adjective, for a parent who had lost a child. . . . It had bothered her for days. She wanted to be true to the text, to identify the invisible.”
“What Time Is It Now, Where You Are?” is a fascinatingly self-conscious metafiction in which a male writer composes a story about a female Marine in Afghanistan — a rebuke, witting or not, to the spate of contemporary fiction about life in the American military whose central tenet seems to be that we can’t understand what it was like, that nobody can possibly understand what it was like, that returning vets are constantly victimized by our inability to understand what it was like. Yet McCann is uninhibited by the challenges of writing across difference, of creating experimental selves. His fearlessness on the page somehow never reads as arrogance or presumption; one always has the sense it’s not himself he holds in such high regard, but rather his tradition, his office.
But the anchor of the book is the title novella with which it commences: the tale of an octogenarian Manhattan judge named Mendelssohn, on what we learn early will be the last day of his life. His end will not be peaceful: On a snowy afternoon, not far at all from his home on the Upper East Side, he will be fatally assaulted. The novella draws its title from Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”; each of its 13 chapters takes as its epigraph a stanza of the poem. The implication seems to be that even a clear-cut physical encounter has multiple, sometimes hidden perspectives; among the perspectives McCann adopts are those of the many video cameras, public and private, that capture Mendelssohn’s short journey from his bedroom to the restaurant down the street where he has a final lunch with his boorishly successful son. None of those views prove definitive, however, and as the narrative crosscuts between Mendelssohn’s last day and the efforts of the police charged with solving his murder, the investigation itself is likened to the endeavors of literature: “If it happened, it can be unraveled. . . . Just as a poem turns its reader into accomplice, so, too, the detectives become accomplice to the murder. But unlike our poetry, we like our murders to be fully solved: if, of course, it is a murder, or poetry, at all.”
Under normal circumstances it might seem undisciplined to interpret an author’s fiction through the lens of publicity about his life. But McCann himself acknowledges, in a short afterword to this collection, how deeply it is informed by one traumatic event: In June 2014, on an otherwise ordinary evening in New Haven, the author intervened in a violent domestic dispute on the street, its participants strangers to him, and was himself assaulted and badly injured. His attacker, who later turned himself in, received a suspended sentence and spent three weeks in jail.
Mendelssohn — elderly, frail, dependent on a live-in nurse — may seem at first an unlikely avatar for his robust author, but the more you think about it, the more sense it makes: What is a fiction writer, after all, but a judge, a dispenser of justice, an arranger of fates, an agent, above all, of moral order? That Mendelssohn should not be allowed to die in his bed — that he should be struck down, as it were, by moral chaos — is a mocking subversion of the principles to which he has devoted his life.
In the end, an arrest is made in Mendelssohn’s murder, and a trial is held. Yet the motives of the supposed agents of this chaos never seem all that convincing — neither from a legal nor from a literary point of view — which may be why, without giving too much away, the novella ends on the irresolute note it does. Why sell a bill of goods about closure? The crime itself is senseless; to build an airtight, just, elaborate plot around it — the kind of plot one customarily associates with McCann’s work — would traduce that idea.
What’s most complicated, paradoxically, about “Thirteen Ways of Looking” is that its heart doesn’t seem fully in its titular conceit. Mendelssohn is the novella’s only real character; the others are more like events, plot points, things that happen to the judge. (That they perform, by and large, functions of service to the elite life Mendelssohn enjoys — the West Indian nurse, the Puerto Rican doorman, the Zimbabwean waitress, the Latino busboy and dishwasher — does not mitigate this impression.) McCann says in his afterword that the fictional attack on Mendelssohn was conceived before the real-life attack on the author occurred, and there is no reason to believe otherwise; nevertheless, Mendelssohn’s story reads ultimately like a step in the restoration of its author’s own faith in his art, and in that art’s notion of benevolent design. Anyone doubting the link, in McCann’s view, between divinity and writing is referred to the closing words of his author’s note: “Literature works in unimaginable ways.”
This newspaper ran several articles about the assault on McCann, one of them headlined: “An Author Known for Empathy Has None for His Attacker.” That article appeared five days after the assault itself; just over a year has passed since then, which is still not much. McCann tries his best here to allow his creative imagination to do the work of forgiveness, of impartiality, to imagine himself — as a good fiction writer must do — not just as one perspective on the drama but as all of them. That he has fallen somewhat short of that priestly goal is not only understandable; it’s somehow more interesting, more moving, more distinctly human than it would have been had he succeeded.
Review: Colum McCann’s ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking,’ Stories Linked by Unease
By Sarah Lyall
In the summer of 2014, the writer Colum McCann was attacked and knocked unconscious on a street in New Haven. He was badly hurt — he fractured his cheekbone, broke several teeth and gashed his face — but the damage reverberated beyond the physical.
“My family and friends and I suffered what I can only term as a series of punches behind the punch,” he wrote in a witness impact statement submitted at the trial of his assailant, who admitted to hitting Mr. McCann after assaulting his own wife and becoming angry when Mr. McCann intervened. For a long time, he couldn’t write.
Though he had already begun the stories in his latest collection, “Thirteen Ways of Looking,” they are informed by what happened to him that day, he has explained. So while this melancholy and affecting work is by no means autobiography dressed up as fiction, it helps to understand what lies beneath. “Sometimes it seems to me that we are writing our lives in advance, but at other times we can only ever look back,” the author says.
Mr. McCann is a writer of power and subtlety and beauty best known for his National Book Award-winning novel “Let the Great World Spin,” which took a large cast of disparate characters in New York City in the 1970s and beyond, plunged the reader headlong into their messy, troubled, often quietly heroic lives and then showed how they all fit together.
About Thirteen Ways of Looking - NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY CHICAGO TRIBUNE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • NPR • Los Angeles Times • The Boston Globe • The Seattle Times • The Independent
In such acclaimed novels as Let the Great World Spin and TransAtlantic, National Book Award–winning author Colum McCann has transfixed readers with his precision, tenderness, and authority. Now, in his first collection of short fiction in more than a decade, McCann charts the territory of chance, and the profound and intimate consequences of even our smallest moments.
“As it was, it was like being set down in the best of poems, carried into a cold landscape, blindfolded, turned around, unblindfolded, forced, then, to invent new ways of seeing.”
In the exuberant title novella, a retired judge reflects on his life’s work, unaware as he goes about his daily routines that this particular morning will be his last. In “Sh’khol,” a mother spending Christmas alone with her son confronts the unthinkable when he disappears while swimming off the coast near their home in Ireland. In “Treaty,” an elderly nun catches a snippet of a news report in which it is revealed that the man who once kidnapped and brutalized her is alive, masquerading as an agent of peace. And in “What Time Is It Now, Where You Are?” a writer constructs a story about a Marine in Afghanistan calling home on New Year’s Eve.
Deeply personal, subtly subversive, at times harrowing, and indeed funny, yet also full of comfort, Thirteen Ways of Looking is a striking achievement. With unsurpassed empathy for his characters and their inner lives, Colum McCann forges from their stories a profound tribute to our search for meaning and grace. The collection is a rumination on the power of storytelling in a world where language and memory can sometimes falter, but in the end do not fail us, and a contemplation of the healing power of literature.
Praise for Thirteen Ways of Looking
“Extraordinary . . . incandescent.”--Chicago Tribune
“The irreducible mystery of human experience ties this small collection together, and in each of these stories McCann explores that theme in some strikingly effective ways. . . . [The first story] is as fascinating as it is poignant. . . . [The second] captures the mundane and mysterious aspects of shaping characters from the gray clay of words, placing them in realistic settings and breathing life into their lungs. . . . That he makes the story so emotionally compelling is a sign of his genius. . . . The most remarkable [piece] is Sh’khol. . . . Caught in the rushing currents of this drama, you know you’re reading a little masterpiece.”--The Washington Post
“McCann is a writer of power and subtlety and beauty. . . . The powerful title story loiters in the mind long after you’ve read it.”—Sarah Lyall, The New York Times
“[McCann] unspools complex and unforgettable stories in this, his first collection in more than a decade.”--The Boston Globe
“McCann is a passionate writer whose impulse is always toward a generous understanding of his diverse characters.”--The Wall Street Journal
“Powerful, profound, and deeply empathetic, McCann’s beautifully wrought writing in Thirteen Ways of Looking glides off the page.”--BuzzFeed
“McCann weaves the magic that made Let the Great World Spin so acclaimed.”--The Huffington Post
In such acclaimed novels as Let the Great World Spin and TransAtlantic, National Book Award–winning author Colum McCann has transfixed readers with his precision, tenderness, and authority. Now, in his first collection of short fiction in more than a decade, McCann charts the territory of chance, and the profound and intimate consequences of even our smallest moments.
“As it was, it was like being set down in the best of poems, carried into a cold landscape, blindfolded, turned around, unblindfolded, forced, then, to invent new ways of seeing.”
In the exuberant title novella, a retired judge reflects on his life’s work, unaware as he goes about his daily routines that this particular morning will be his last. In “Sh’khol,” a mother spending Christmas alone with her son confronts the unthinkable when he disappears while swimming off the coast near their home in Ireland. In “Treaty,” an elderly nun catches a snippet of a news report in which it is revealed that the man who once kidnapped and brutalized her is alive, masquerading as an agent of peace. And in “What Time Is It Now, Where You Are?” a writer constructs a story about a Marine in Afghanistan calling home on New Year’s Eve.
Deeply personal, subtly subversive, at times harrowing, and indeed funny, yet also full of comfort, Thirteen Ways of Looking is a striking achievement. With unsurpassed empathy for his characters and their inner lives, Colum McCann forges from their stories a profound tribute to our search for meaning and grace. The collection is a rumination on the power of storytelling in a world where language and memory can sometimes falter, but in the end do not fail us, and a contemplation of the healing power of literature.
Praise for Thirteen Ways of Looking
“Extraordinary . . . incandescent.”--Chicago Tribune
“The irreducible mystery of human experience ties this small collection together, and in each of these stories McCann explores that theme in some strikingly effective ways. . . . [The first story] is as fascinating as it is poignant. . . . [The second] captures the mundane and mysterious aspects of shaping characters from the gray clay of words, placing them in realistic settings and breathing life into their lungs. . . . That he makes the story so emotionally compelling is a sign of his genius. . . . The most remarkable [piece] is Sh’khol. . . . Caught in the rushing currents of this drama, you know you’re reading a little masterpiece.”--The Washington Post
“McCann is a writer of power and subtlety and beauty. . . . The powerful title story loiters in the mind long after you’ve read it.”—Sarah Lyall, The New York Times
“[McCann] unspools complex and unforgettable stories in this, his first collection in more than a decade.”--The Boston Globe
“McCann is a passionate writer whose impulse is always toward a generous understanding of his diverse characters.”--The Wall Street Journal
“Powerful, profound, and deeply empathetic, McCann’s beautifully wrought writing in Thirteen Ways of Looking glides off the page.”--BuzzFeed
“McCann weaves the magic that made Let the Great World Spin so acclaimed.”--The Huffington Post
REVIEW
Ron Charles
Critic, Book World - October 13, 2015
Colum McCann’s new collection includes a piece that sounds like the classic high-school cop-out: It’s a story about a writer trying to write a story. That McCann manages to overcome the necrotic cliche of that premise is a sign of his technical skill; that he makes the story so emotionally compelling is a sign of his genius.
“What Time Is It Now, Where Are You?” is the shortest piece in “Thirteen Ways of Looking,” and the only one that feels autobiographical, though McCann claims in the “Author’s Note” that “every word we write is autobiographical.” In 13 short segments, this story describes an Irish writer living in New York struggling to meet a deadline for a newspaper magazine. His editor’s only criterion is that the plot be related to New Year’s Eve, a topic that looks as fresh as Dick Clark.
If you’ve ever gone to an author reading, you’ve heard someone in the audience rise and say, “Tell us about your process” (which is pretty much why I stopped going to author readings). But here, in just 10 pages, is an answer that captures the mundane and mysterious aspects of shaping characters from the gray clay of words, placing them in realistic settings and breathing life into their lungs.
We watch as McCann’s writer casts about for a protagonist and finally lights upon a Marine — “let’s say a young woman” — in Afghanistan, pining for home. She’s vague at first but gradually gains definition: age, home, name. “The essence of Sandi’s story has begun to place layers upon layers,” McCann writes, “though he does not know yet who the loved one is or what might eventually exist between them.”
Sometimes, the writer feels boxed in by what he’s already decided (having made her 26, how can he give her a 14-year-old son?) or intimidated by what he doesn’t know (“Could a bullet travel that distance?”). But the rough scaffolding begins to shape the story in interesting ways. Suddenly, Sandi and her stateside lover and their little boy have a claim on our affections. Their voices break from the writer’s, their hopes and fears inflating into life-size. It’s like watching an engineer construct a plane in flight and then parachute away. They’re on their own now, the members of this little family; their final destination can’t be seen, but we’re desperate to know.
The irreducible mystery of human experience ties this small collection together, and in each of these stories McCann explores that theme in some strikingly effective ways. The collection’s title comes from a poem that Wallace Stevens published a century ago, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” One of that poem’s 13 haiku-like stanzas speaks of “The mood/Traced in the shadow/An indecipherable cause.”
Those lines echo through the title story, a novella about a retired judge in New York City. At 82, Peter Mendelssohn is enduring the indignities of old age with a mixture of irritation, befuddlement and wit, doing his best to remain urbane to all who care for him. His thoughts drift erratically into the past — good times, mostly, but heartache, too, of a life that spanned the Atlantic and achieved a degree of renown.
McCann has perfected a method of finely blending his own narration with his characters’ thoughts and dialogue, without allowing any of those distinct strains to blur. In summary, there’s not much here for a story that runs to 138 pages: Peter gets dressed, hobbles through the snow to a nearby restaurant and eats lunch with his obnoxious son. But as that simple action gains surprising weight and colour, it’s constantly interrupted by police detectives studying surveillance footage to see who punched and killed Peter as he left the restaurant. (In a horrific example of life imitating art, this story was conceived before McCann himself was beaten unconscious on a street in New Haven, Conn.).
The effect of reading these two converging narratives — the event and the recording of the event — is as fascinating as it is poignant. And McCann uses both tracks to explore the limits of what can really be determined. While Peter wonders how his little boy could have become such an unpleasant man, the detectives study videos frame by frame, speeding them up, slowing them down, comparing them with others. They’re certain that if they look hard enough, carefully enough, the truth will make itself apparent: “The homicide, like a poem, had to open itself to whatever might still be discovered.” And yet, as McCann points out, “Unlike our poetry, we like our murders to be fully solved.” It’s a perfect story for an age naively convinced that if only we installed cameras everywhere, we could, in the words of Saint Paul, “understand all mysteries and all knowledge.”
Any of its four pieces is enough to recommend this collection, but the most remarkable one is “Sh’khol.” It’s the story of a translator, a single mother named Rebecca, who’s raising her son, Tomas, in a remote village in Galway. Adopted from Russia when he was 6, Tomas is now a strong 13-year-old, deaf, with no formal method of communication. In dark moments, Rebecca worries how she’ll be able to control him as he gets bigger, but for now, “there was a raw wedge of thrill in her love for him,” McCann writes. “Some days Tomas took her hand, leaned on her shoulder as they drove through the village, beyond the abandoned schoolhouse, past the whitewashed bungalows toward home. She wanted to clasp herself over him, shroud him, absorb whatever came his way. Most of all she wanted to discover what sort of man might emerge from underneath that very pale skin.”
The story opens on a happy Christmas morning, when Rebecca gives Tomas his first wetsuit and they swim together in the ocean. But the next day, she finds that her son has gone out to the water alone, and so begins the terror that haunts every parent.
It’s no wonder that “Sh’khol” won a Pushcart Prize and has been included in the just released “The Best American Short Stories,” edited by T.C. Boyle. Caught in the rushing currents of this drama, you know you’re reading a little masterpiece. Even as Rebecca struggles to peer through her deepening guilt, she’s haunted by her work translating an Israeli novella about a couple who lose both their children. How, she wonders, to translate the Hebrew word sh’khol. “There was no proper match. There were words, of course, for widow, widower and orphan, but no noun, no adjective, for a parent who had lost a child. . . . She wanted to be true to the text, to identify the invisible, torn open, ripped apart, stolen.” Watching this mother discover the most faithful translation for that unspeakable fate is only one of the treasures in this collection.
Ron Charles
Critic, Book World - October 13, 2015
Colum McCann’s new collection includes a piece that sounds like the classic high-school cop-out: It’s a story about a writer trying to write a story. That McCann manages to overcome the necrotic cliche of that premise is a sign of his technical skill; that he makes the story so emotionally compelling is a sign of his genius.
“What Time Is It Now, Where Are You?” is the shortest piece in “Thirteen Ways of Looking,” and the only one that feels autobiographical, though McCann claims in the “Author’s Note” that “every word we write is autobiographical.” In 13 short segments, this story describes an Irish writer living in New York struggling to meet a deadline for a newspaper magazine. His editor’s only criterion is that the plot be related to New Year’s Eve, a topic that looks as fresh as Dick Clark.
If you’ve ever gone to an author reading, you’ve heard someone in the audience rise and say, “Tell us about your process” (which is pretty much why I stopped going to author readings). But here, in just 10 pages, is an answer that captures the mundane and mysterious aspects of shaping characters from the gray clay of words, placing them in realistic settings and breathing life into their lungs.
We watch as McCann’s writer casts about for a protagonist and finally lights upon a Marine — “let’s say a young woman” — in Afghanistan, pining for home. She’s vague at first but gradually gains definition: age, home, name. “The essence of Sandi’s story has begun to place layers upon layers,” McCann writes, “though he does not know yet who the loved one is or what might eventually exist between them.”
Sometimes, the writer feels boxed in by what he’s already decided (having made her 26, how can he give her a 14-year-old son?) or intimidated by what he doesn’t know (“Could a bullet travel that distance?”). But the rough scaffolding begins to shape the story in interesting ways. Suddenly, Sandi and her stateside lover and their little boy have a claim on our affections. Their voices break from the writer’s, their hopes and fears inflating into life-size. It’s like watching an engineer construct a plane in flight and then parachute away. They’re on their own now, the members of this little family; their final destination can’t be seen, but we’re desperate to know.
The irreducible mystery of human experience ties this small collection together, and in each of these stories McCann explores that theme in some strikingly effective ways. The collection’s title comes from a poem that Wallace Stevens published a century ago, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” One of that poem’s 13 haiku-like stanzas speaks of “The mood/Traced in the shadow/An indecipherable cause.”
Those lines echo through the title story, a novella about a retired judge in New York City. At 82, Peter Mendelssohn is enduring the indignities of old age with a mixture of irritation, befuddlement and wit, doing his best to remain urbane to all who care for him. His thoughts drift erratically into the past — good times, mostly, but heartache, too, of a life that spanned the Atlantic and achieved a degree of renown.
McCann has perfected a method of finely blending his own narration with his characters’ thoughts and dialogue, without allowing any of those distinct strains to blur. In summary, there’s not much here for a story that runs to 138 pages: Peter gets dressed, hobbles through the snow to a nearby restaurant and eats lunch with his obnoxious son. But as that simple action gains surprising weight and colour, it’s constantly interrupted by police detectives studying surveillance footage to see who punched and killed Peter as he left the restaurant. (In a horrific example of life imitating art, this story was conceived before McCann himself was beaten unconscious on a street in New Haven, Conn.).
The effect of reading these two converging narratives — the event and the recording of the event — is as fascinating as it is poignant. And McCann uses both tracks to explore the limits of what can really be determined. While Peter wonders how his little boy could have become such an unpleasant man, the detectives study videos frame by frame, speeding them up, slowing them down, comparing them with others. They’re certain that if they look hard enough, carefully enough, the truth will make itself apparent: “The homicide, like a poem, had to open itself to whatever might still be discovered.” And yet, as McCann points out, “Unlike our poetry, we like our murders to be fully solved.” It’s a perfect story for an age naively convinced that if only we installed cameras everywhere, we could, in the words of Saint Paul, “understand all mysteries and all knowledge.”
Any of its four pieces is enough to recommend this collection, but the most remarkable one is “Sh’khol.” It’s the story of a translator, a single mother named Rebecca, who’s raising her son, Tomas, in a remote village in Galway. Adopted from Russia when he was 6, Tomas is now a strong 13-year-old, deaf, with no formal method of communication. In dark moments, Rebecca worries how she’ll be able to control him as he gets bigger, but for now, “there was a raw wedge of thrill in her love for him,” McCann writes. “Some days Tomas took her hand, leaned on her shoulder as they drove through the village, beyond the abandoned schoolhouse, past the whitewashed bungalows toward home. She wanted to clasp herself over him, shroud him, absorb whatever came his way. Most of all she wanted to discover what sort of man might emerge from underneath that very pale skin.”
The story opens on a happy Christmas morning, when Rebecca gives Tomas his first wetsuit and they swim together in the ocean. But the next day, she finds that her son has gone out to the water alone, and so begins the terror that haunts every parent.
It’s no wonder that “Sh’khol” won a Pushcart Prize and has been included in the just released “The Best American Short Stories,” edited by T.C. Boyle. Caught in the rushing currents of this drama, you know you’re reading a little masterpiece. Even as Rebecca struggles to peer through her deepening guilt, she’s haunted by her work translating an Israeli novella about a couple who lose both their children. How, she wonders, to translate the Hebrew word sh’khol. “There was no proper match. There were words, of course, for widow, widower and orphan, but no noun, no adjective, for a parent who had lost a child. . . . She wanted to be true to the text, to identify the invisible, torn open, ripped apart, stolen.” Watching this mother discover the most faithful translation for that unspeakable fate is only one of the treasures in this collection.
LINKS
https://vimeo.com/254019511
https://colummccann.com/about-colum/https://www.amazon.com/Thirteen-Ways-Looking-Novella-Stories/dp/081298658X
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/thirteen-ways-of-looking-by-colum-mccann--review---/
https://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-thirteen-ways-of-looking/chapanal001.html#gsc.tab=0
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/240260/thirteen-ways-of-looking-by-colum-mccann/9780812986587/readers-guide/
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/thirteen-ways-of-looking-by-colum-mccann-reality-trumps-invention-1.2394467
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2016/02/colum-mccanns-thirteen-ways-looking-seeks-mental-depth-cameras-cant-see
https://presspack.rte.ie/2017/12/29/why-we-tell-stories/
BH