TransAtlantic by Colum McCann is not just well-written, its stories are as beautifully woven as a hand-made Persian rug. It portrays the first transatlantic flight in 1919, leaving from Newfoundland, Canada to Dublin, Ireland. Then it jumps back to Frederick Douglass's historic visit to Dublin in 1845 where he is treated with respect and awe. He lectures on the Abolitionist movement in the US, and although a freed slave, is astonished by the Irish Famine. Leaping to 1998, McCann describes Senator George Mitchell's part in the Irish peace negotiations.
The structure is Cloud-Atlasesque. David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is one of my favorite books. I read the novel, saw the movie and read the book again, but I'm obsessed with literature and impossibly long and complex movies. Connecting the Atlantic crossings in TransAtlantic is a series of related Irish women beginning with a young maid named Lily who sees Frederick Douglass in Dublin, travels to the United States and marries. The daughters and mothers they produce are hardworking and grateful for their chance to live in a country where there's food, freedom and possibility.
McCann's description of mother-daughter relationships is tender and tear-provoking. Then there's the blue letter, which has traveled back and forth to Dublin but never delivered. This 100-year old letter, with its fading address and no postage, ends up in Dublin, in the possession of Hannah. I was reminded of Virginia Woolfs' To the Lighthouse. And whenever Hannah pulled on her boots and waded into estuary outside her house, I thought of Woolf's suicide, filling her pockets with stones and walking into a lake.
TransAtlantic should win the National Book Award this year.
Recovery to Equilibrium
1 year ago
2 comments:
Ok I'm sold, I'll read it and then maybe we can discuss. I have a thing about Newfoundland, dating back to *before* The Shipping News. In my second stint in college, in my mid-30s in Omaha, I wrote a paper for English: "Newfoundland: America's Next to Last Frontier", a reference to their late 1940's referendum that included the possibility of applying for US statehood, a decade before Alaska, the FINAL frontier, actually did become a state. It still surprises Canadians I've met that I know who Joey Smallwood is.
I also have a thing about Ireland, I've actually made it all the way through the history tome "Ireland Since the Famine" and have read Leon Uris' Trinity twice.
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