Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Everything in This Country Must: A Novella and Two Storiesby Colum McCann
None Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I enjoyed this, but after some years since reading it, I don't recall enough to discuss it. ( ) McCann has a terrible gift with the words, so he does. This collection of two short stories and a novella is powerful, disturbing, brilliant but ultimately unsatisfying for me. The title selection has a straightforward beginning, middle and end, which I confess to admiring. But the ending, which I certainly saw coming, does not make sense to me on an emotional level. The novella and two stories in this slim book are set in Ireland and peripherally deal with The Troubles. Each features a teenaged protagonist hose life is somehow affected by the lingering residue of the hatred between Catholics and Protestants. In "Wood," young Sam and his mother must hide from his blind father the contribution they are making to a political march. The title story depicts the confusion of a girl whose father would rather lose his draft horse than owe a debt of gratitude to the British soldiers who try to save it. And in "Hunger Strike," a coming-of-age story, a boy rages against the disruption caused by the family moving from north to south for 'safety.' Always in the background, always presuring the foreground are the ongoing religious and political divisions that plague the Irish. A very fast read, but--as usual--McCann's lyrical prose demands close attention. These two stories and novella astounded me. McCann manages to evoke clear cut characters and images with minimal descriptions in each of these works. All of them revolve around the Troubles, which I found especially interesting since I just read his latest novel, "Transatlantic", a short time ago. Lyrical, moving and beautifully written.
The two stories and novella that make up Colum McCann's very slim ''Everything in This Country Must'' seem to be a way of dealing with Ireland's sectarian conflict by coming at it sideways. That's not to say McCann has chosen the route of fable or metaphor. The battles between Protestant and Roman Catholic are alluded to in these three selections, but the characters seem to experience it all from a distance, or as part of a past that sits in the midst of their day-to-day experience like a lump of dry bread in the throat, impossible to digest or ignore. Contains
One powerful novella, with two thematically linked short stories on either side of it, forms the basis of Everything in this Country Must. These are stories about Ireland and the Troubles, but only in the sense that Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea is about fishing ¿ they have an almost mythical rather than a political feel. In the title story, 4 young soldiers help a farmer and his daughter free their horse from a stream in flood, unable to understand that their help will never be anything but an insult. In the novella, Hunger Strike, a young boy and his mother flee to Galway as the boy's uncle succumbs to a hunger strike in a Derry gaol. In Wood, a ten-year-old boy is asked by his mother to make poles for the marching season. These stories don't have a political purpose, they are almost three memories, three moments in time that changed the course of lives from innocence to something else. No library descriptions found. |
Author ChatColum McCann chatted with LibraryThing members from Mar 1, 2010 to Mar 14, 2010. Read the chat. Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
|