Colum McCann’s father was editor-in-chief of the Dublin Evening Press. He himself remembers accompanying him to the editorial office and describes how he watched him work. He also does not forget the advice he received: “Never be a journalist.” He didn’t pay attention. When he was 11, McCann took his bicycle and rode through the streets of Dun Laogahire, near Dublin, to watch football matches. He did not play, but he wrote chronicles that he later published in the local section of the ‘Irish Press’. Later, when he turned 18, in 1983, he was named Best Young Irish Journalist of the year.
He parked his journalism, but not his bicycle. In 1986 she decided to emigrate to the United States (since then she still lives in New York). He worked at a golf course and was a taxi driver and then, for two years, pedaled over 12,000 kilometers across the country, to “expand emotional lungs.” He lived with members of an Indian tribe in New Mexico and was part of an Amish community and also dug trenches to fight fires in Idaho. While studying in Texas, he served as social educator among young delinquents.
Perhaps the need to listen to voices, to receive information from everywhere, to penetrate to the depths of reality to write their stories, a huge mix of news and anecdotes, of readings and comments, of chance and symbols, of reality and fiction. A kaleidoscope that is both a plausible way of understanding the diverse world and also a formal resource for dealing with chaos. McCann has repeated Samuel Beckett’s phrase more than once: “Every novel tries to find a way to fit into the confusion of the world.”
When I was preparing ‘This Side of the Light’ (RBA), a story that combines the time of construction of the New York tunnels with the present of the uprooted people who live poorly there, McCann went down three or four times into the darkness of the subway to experience that misery up close. And he was also an English teacher in Russia, searching for material for his evocation of Rudolf Nureyev. And he traveled to Europe for two months to write about Gypsy refugees.
Israel and Palestine
When he had the idea for his best-known, most translated and, these days, most commented novel, he admits that he knew little about ornithology and almost nothing about the conflict in the Middle East. I say ornithology because birds have a predominant role in ‘Apeirogon’ (Seix Barral), and I speak of Israel and Palestine because this fascinating kaleidoscope (exactly, it is the word) refers us to the story of two fathers (one, Jewish, Rami Elhanan; the other, Palestinian, Bassam Aramin) who have lost their daughters, murdered at the hands of the enemy. Both belong to the Parents Circle Family Forum, an organization that advocates empathy and mutual understanding.
‘Apeirógono’ was born from McCann’s meeting with the parents of Smadar and Abir (the first died in a suicide attack; the second was shot by an Israeli soldier), following the activities of Narrative4, an entity created by McCann and which he defines as “the United Nations of young writers.” And from there, emerges this multifaceted and unique work, designed as a story of the 1001 nights, with 1001 chapters filled with confessions, quotes from Einstein and Freud, photographs, Brancusi and Joyce, dialogue with parents, excursions or details about the humiliations in Gaza and the West Bank or the fear of Jews to leave home.
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And of birds that fly over the borders or of Philippe Petit, the tightrope walker who crossed the sky between the Twin Towers (in the first scene of Let the Wide World Go Round (RBA), McCann’s other choral novel) and here he crosses the space between Arab and Jewish Jerusalem, with a dove of peace that is about to knock him down. “Peace – says the novelist – cannot be imposed from above as it has been trying to do for decades, by putting pressure, but it must come from below, from different voices, which is how a flock of flying birds works.”
In another fascinating book, McCann offers ’50 tips to be a writer’. He says that you have to tell the world something that it doesn’t already know and that writing doesn’t solve anything, “but at the same time never forget that writing matters.” Because? Because “we need to create what does not yet exist, to become a brake against despair.” Think, as Kundera stated, that the novel is where no one has the truth and everyone has the right to be understood.