Highbrow Magazine - colum mccann https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/colum-mccann en Best Books of 2013 https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/3400-best-books <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/books-fiction" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Books &amp; Fiction</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Sun, 12/29/2013 - 15:50</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/transatlantic_0_0.jpg?itok=8p9nrMY7"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/transatlantic_0_0.jpg?itok=8p9nrMY7" width="480" height="297" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p> </p> <p><em>The "best books of year" lists are out for 2013 and most contain the usual (and worthy) suspects. What follows here is a more idiosyncratic selection, highlighting works of fiction that in some cases may have been overlooked but deserve a wider readership. </em></p> <p> </p> <p><strong>TransAtlantic </strong>by Colum McCann</p> <p> </p> <p>A novelist who uses well-known historical figures in his work risks having readers judge the quality of his characterization by what they know (or think they know) about these real-life individuals. In <em>TransAtlantic</em>, Colum McCann takes this approach a step further by introducing Senator George Mitchell of Maine, a “character” drawn from real life. McCann succeeds in pulling it off, while simultaneously displaying the drawbacks inherent in this narrative strategy. But it’s finally the writing itself that keeps readers glued to the pages. Arresting phrases and images appear on every page (“Emily had the texture of old weather”), with only occasional missteps (“as if she might suddenly take flight, a parachute of intrigue”).  The book’s poetic language, combined with its elegant structure, make <em>TransAtlantic </em><a href="http://www.highbrowmagazine.com/2812-crisscrossing-pond-colum-mccann-s-transatlantic">one of the most beautiful and lyrical novels of the year.</a>   </p> <p><img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/pacificbook.jpg" style="height:600px; width:600px" /></p> <p><strong>Pacific </strong>by Tom Drury</p> <p> </p> <p>Anyone familiar with his work knows <a href="http://www.highbrowmagazine.com/2645-author-tom-drury-revisits-grouse-county-pacific">this is Tom Drury’s world</a> and the rest of us just happen to live in it. Ever since chapters from his first novel, <em>The End of Vandalism</em>, appeared in <em>The New Yorker </em>some 20 years ago, readers understood they were in the presence of a unique voice—deadpan yet deeply insightful, slightly off-kilter yet in its assessment of the ebb and flow of the human spirit, wonderfully on target. <em>Pacific </em>is a sequel of sorts to <em>The End of Vandalism, </em>revisiting the fictional Midwestern domain of Grouse County and inhabitants known to readers of his earlier work. Nothing ever gets stated outright; in Drury’s off-center worldview, such things simply aren’t done. But long before <em>Pacific </em>ends, the reader has come to know and care for virtually everyone and wishes the short scenes might continue on for yet another hundred pages.</p> <p><img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/meninmiamihotels.jpg" style="height:600px; width:398px" /></p> <p><strong>Men in Miami Hotels </strong>by Charlie Smith</p> <p> </p> <p>Cot Sims, the hero of Charlie Smith’s new novel, is a Florida-born gangster hoping to wind down his career after first seeing to the well-being of his destitute mother in Key West. Toward this end, Cot steals a pouch of emeralds belonging to his boss, Albertson, a gangland kingpin who sends his unpitying henchmen in pursuit. After the emeralds turn up missing (that is, out of Cot’s possession), things go bad, then very bad, and then <em>really </em>bad. While Smith makes supple use of traditional crime genre devices and motifs, the scenes he creates—in Miami, Key West and the surrounding islands, on the quaint backstreets of Havana—are fresh and beautifully rendered. The adroit use of <a href="http://www.highbrowmagazine.com/3119-love-and-mayhem-take-residence-men-miami-hotels">mood, metaphor and setting</a> invites comparisons to Thomas McGuane’s classic Key West novel, <em>Ninety Two in the Shade, </em>and Denis Johnson’s <em>Fiskadoro. </em>But <em>Men in Miami Hotels </em>inhabits a lush world of doomed love and sweat-soaked treachery that is uniquely its own.</p> <p><img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/adlicatetruth.jpg" style="height:600px; width:397px" /></p> <p><strong>A Delicate Truth </strong>by John le Carré</p> <p> </p> <p>John le Carré is, of course, a master of the spy thriller, though in recent years his efforts have been marred somewhat by outrage over the criminal excesses of the Bush Administration. In <em>A Delicate Truth</em>, he’s back on track, chronicling the unfolding of Operation Wildlife, a counter-terrorism scheme that goes terribly wrong. As in most of his work, the narrative voice moves seamlessly in and out of points of view and alternating time frames, with no sacrifice in clarity or momentum. In fact, the opening 45 pages are as suspenseful as anything le Carré has written since his immortal Smiley novels – a remarkable feat for a writer in his 80s. Don’t wait for the movie!</p> <p><img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/cityofbohane.jpg" style="height:578px; width:600px" /></p> <p><strong>City of Bohane </strong>by Kevin Barry</p> <p> </p> <p>This novel, published in 2012, seems to me <em>sui generis </em>in its vision and language. Set in a lawless Irish city sometime in the near future, the story features a wide array of colorful characters, most notably the two protagonists – Logan Hartnett, leader of the gang that runs the city, and Gant Broderick, the former (yet still highly feared) gang leader of Bohane. Events leading to their inevitable showdown are depicted in a vivid argot entirely the author’s own, and the reader is quickly swept up in a flood of language unlike what we’ve read before: “The water’s roar for Hartnett was as the rushing of his own blood and as he passed the merchant yards the guard dogs strung out a sequence of howls all along the front. See the dogs: their hackles heaped, their yellow eyes livid. We could tell he was coming by the howling of the dogs.”</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Author Bio:</strong></p> <p><em>Lee Polevoi is </em>Highbrow Magazine’s <em>Chief Book Critic. </em></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/best-books-2013-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">best books of 2013</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/transatlantic" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">transatlantic</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/colum-mccann" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">colum mccann</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/pacific" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">pacific</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/john-le-carre" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">john le carre</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/delicate-truth" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">a delicate truth</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/city-bohane" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">city of bohane</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Lee Polevoi</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Sun, 29 Dec 2013 20:50:06 +0000 tara 4033 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/3400-best-books#comments Crisscrossing the Pond in Colum McCann’s ‘TransAtlantic’ https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/2812-crisscrossing-pond-colum-mccann-s-transatlantic <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/books-fiction" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Books &amp; Fiction</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Thu, 09/19/2013 - 10:03</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1transatlantic.jpg?itok=s16Iy81m"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1transatlantic.jpg?itok=s16Iy81m" width="322" height="480" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p> <strong>TransAtlantic</strong></p> <p> <strong>Colum McCann</strong></p> <p> <strong>Random House</strong></p> <p> <strong>304 pages</strong></p> <p>  </p> <p> A novelist who uses well-known historical figures in his work risks having readers judge the quality of his characterization by what they know (or think they know) about these real-life individuals. In <em>TransAtlantic</em>, the new novel by <a href="http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/428447/august-08-2013/colum-mccann">Colum McCann</a>, winner of the National Book Award for <em>Let the Great World Spin</em>, the author takes this approach a step further by introducing Senator George Mitchell of Maine, a “character” drawn from real life. McCann largely succeeds in pulling it off, while simultaneously displaying the drawbacks inherent in this narrative strategy.</p> <p>  </p> <p> The stories in <em>TransAtlantic </em>span more than a century in time and a great ocean in space. In addition to Mitchell, other “real” characters include John Alcock and Arthur Brown, the first men to fly nonstop across the Atlantic, and Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist author who spent two years on a lecture tour in Ireland.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Alcock and Brown take off from Newfoundland 1919 in a refurbished Vickers Vimy bomber, bound for the Irish coast. Their flight is thrillingly depicted, and the most accomplished section of the novel:</p> <p>  </p> <p> “Brown adjusts his gloves, pulls his earflaps tight, hikes his scarf high around his mouth. He swivels in his seat. A throb in his bad leg when he moves. Right knee against the edge of the fuselage. Then the left knee, the bad one. He grabs hold of the wooden strut and pulls himself up into the blast of air. The chloroform of cold. The air pushing him back. The sting of snow on his cheeks. His soaking clothes stuck to his neck, his back, his shoulders. A chandelier of snot from his nose. The blood backing off his body, his fingers, his brain … He extends himself into the thrashing wind, but can’t quite reach. His flight jacket is too bulky. He loosens the zip, feels the whoosh of wind at his chest, stretches backwards, knocks the snow off the glass gauge with the tip of his knife. Good God. This cold. Almost stops the heart.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> McCann is fond of sentence fragments (“The air pushing him back. The sting of snow on his cheeks”), which are sometimes frustrating to follow in their staccato, screenplay-like rhythms. The technique is more successful here than in <em>Let the Great World Spin</em>, because he keeps this authorial tic mostly in check.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Frederick Douglass comes to Ireland in 1845, a world-famous author of slave origins determined to bring awareness of the anti-slavery cause to rich benefactors in Europe. He encounters an alien environment where the ravages of the great potato famine go on beyond the walls of the mansion belonging to his wealthy Quaker host.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Another jump in time to New York City, 1998. Retired U.S. Senator George Mitchell is five years into a thankless diplomatic effort to bring peace to Northern Ireland. As he awaits take-off at JFK airport to cross the Atlantic (under far different conditions than Alcock and Brown), Mitchell reflects on the motives behind his quest:</p> <p>  </p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/2transatlantic%28US%20Navy%20Imagery%20Flickr%29.jpg" style="width: 650px; height: 464px;" /></p> <p>  </p> <p> “It’s the tenacity of the fanatic that he wants to pitch himself against. There is, he knows, something akin to his own form of violence in the way he wants to hang on and fight. The way the terrorist might hide himself in a wet ditch all night. Cold and the damp seeping down into the gunman’s boots, right up into the small of his back, along his spine, through his cranium, out his pores, so cold, so very cold, watching, waiting, until the stars are gone, and the morning chatters with a bit of light. He would like to outlast that man in the ditch, outwait the cold and the rain and the filth, and the opportunity for a bullet, remain down in the reeds, underwater, in the dark, breathing through a hollow piece of grass.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> The prose throughout this section is vivid and compelling, but the portrayal of Mitchell bumps up against what seems like unblemished admiration for the man himself. Mitchell comes across as saintly rather than multidimensional, and his journey towards a successful negotiation of the Good Friday peace agreement feels oddly static. Is it because we know the outcome of the story before we read it? Or was the author unable to achieve the critical distance needed to round out his account of a man who’s still very much among the living?</p> <p>  </p> <p> Fictional characters that appear fleetingly in these early sections rise to prominence later in <em>TransAtlantic. </em>From the 19<sup>th</sup> century to nearly the present day, McCann brilliantly draws us into the lives of several generations of women: Lily Duggan, a penniless maid in Webb’s Dublin household who immigrates to America; her daughter Emily, a journalist, who reports on Brown and Alcock’s historic flight; Emily’s daughter, Lottie, who suffers a mother’s loss during the Troubles and later exhorts Sen. Mitchell to end the violence. These characters’ lives are deftly intertwined, adding considerable texture to a story that otherwise threatens to be sprawling and diffuse.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Finally, the writing itself keeps the reader glued to the pages. Arresting phrases and images appear on every page (“Emily had the texture of old weather”), with only occasional missteps (“as if she might suddenly take flight, a parachute of intrigue”).  The book’s poetic language, combined with its elegant structure, make <em>TransAtlantic </em>likely to be one of the best novels published this year.  </p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>Author Bio:</strong></p> <p>  <em>Lee Polevoi, </em>Highbrow Magazine’s <em>chief book critic and author of </em>The Moon in Deep Winter, <em>is currently completing a new novel.</em></p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong><em>Photo: US Navy Imagery (Flickr).</em></strong></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/transatlantic" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">transatlantic</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/colum-mccann" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">colum mccann</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/writers" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">writers</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/authors" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">authors</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">literature</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/new-books" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">new books</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Lee Polevoi</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Thu, 19 Sep 2013 14:03:48 +0000 tara 3533 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/2812-crisscrossing-pond-colum-mccann-s-transatlantic#comments