"The Changing of Stories is a Cheerful Affair"

I'm thinking about turning this blog into a Colum McCann fansite. I wrote about him here once before, after being left bruised and battered (in the best possible way) by his novel Let the Great World Spin, which won the National Book Award in 2009.

Having subsequently devoured Everything in this Country Must and This Side of Brightness, I have moved on to Zoli.


I'm not sure why this man doesn't win awards for everything he writes. He has not yet failed to pull me entirely into a new world with an opening sentence. An Irishman who has settled in New York City, McCann sings in the tongues of these places and of the people who inhabit them, better than most. But Zoli is the tale of a Roma woman -- a poet, no less -- who came of age in what we now call Slovakia during the 1930s and 40s. As she recounts the story of her life, McCann recedes. He is a mere ghost in this book. Maybe not even that.

I can't say very much else yet. I picked Zoli up at a loud corporate book store yesterday and I'm glad I did, as I needed to escape my own life into something big, dark, difficult, bright-red and reeling. I will, however, quote freely and without fear of repercussion.

I was writing things down then, on any paper I could find, even the labels from bottles. I dunked them in water, dried them out, and filled the emptiness with ink. Old newspapers. Brown butcher sheets. I dried them out until the bloodstains were faint. It was still a secret, my writing. I pretended to most that I could not read, but, I thought, then, surely it could do no harm? I said to myself that writing was no more nor less than song. My pencil was busy and almost down to a nubbin.

Wash your dress in running water. Dry it on the southern side of the rock. Let them have four guesses and make them all be wrong. Take a fistful of snow in the summer heat. Cook haluški with hot sweet butter. Drink cold milk to clean your insides. Be careful when you wake: breathing lets them know how asleep you were. Don't hang your coat from a hook in the door. Ignore curfew. Remember weather by the voice of the wheel. Do not become the fool they need you to become. Change your name. Lose your shoes. Practice doubt. Dress in oiled cloth around sickness. Adore darkness. Turn sideways in the wind. The changing of stories is a cheerful affair. Give the impression of not having known. Beware the Hlinkas, it is always at night that the massacres occur.