Fishing for Voices - Colum McCann at Concordia

A Guest Contribution from Nathan Murray

Ireland is a bit of a curious nation in terms of its literary production. English profs love readings by Irish writers because of their themes of oppression and their outside perspective on Anglo-American culture,while the younger crowd go to readings by Irish writers for the sexy Irish accents (and maybe some good writing).

Colum McCann is an award winning Irish ex-pat novelist who has written two collections of short stories and three novels. This Friday, Colum came to Concordia as part of the Writer’s Read series of public lectures and readings. He’s a good looking, slightly balding man with a slight Irish accent, who offers an amazing insight into what it means to be Irish even when outside of the homeland.

He started the night with a story called Fishing in the Slow Black River, which he described as a story that he thought, when writing it, would be timeless. However, due to major economic shifts in the Irish culture, this magic realist story has become a little bit “quaint”, as he described it. The story describes mothers fishing in the town’s river for their sons who have left the country in search of jobs. However, as Colum pointed out, Ireland has become an immigrant nation. How does a historically oppressed people deal with being one of the world’s richest nations? As Joseph Brodsky pointed out, “you can’t go back home to the country that doesn’t exist anymore.”

McCann is a quick, sprightly reader, whose prose is peppered with subtle jokes and sparse, effective metaphors. He is a master puppeteer and manages to take the voice of wildly different characters in his novels. In Zoli, McCann’s latest novel, McCann takes on the voice of a Romany man in Eastern Europe during the Second World War. Curious parallels are drawn between the Irish people and the Roma. In Dancer, McCann takes on the voice of Rudolf Nureyev, the gay ballet icon. The section that McCann read from was hypercharged, sexy prose that gave the reader the impression of being addled with cocaine.

In the question and answer period, McCann discussed the novelist’s obligation to fact, his research methods, and whether or not there is such thing as an “Irish sentence”. McCann described the Irish sentence as a particular way of valuing words “bumping up against each other” above their meaning. But McCann’s words bump up against each other in just the right way, sacrificing none of the poignant, startling meaning.