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Indlæser... Everything in This Country Must : A Novella and Two Stories (udgave 2001)af Colum McCann (Forfatter)
Work InformationEverything in This Country Must: A Novella and Two Stories af Colum McCann (Author)
Ingen Indlæser...
Bliv medlem af LibraryThing for at finde ud af, om du vil kunne lide denne bog. Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog. McCann has a terrible gift with the words, so he does. This collection of two short stories and a novella is powerful, disturbing, brilliant but ultimately unsatisfying for me. The title selection has a straightforward beginning, middle and end, which I confess to admiring. But the ending, which I certainly saw coming, does not make sense to me on an emotional level. The novella and two stories in this slim book are set in Ireland and peripherally deal with The Troubles. Each features a teenaged protagonist hose life is somehow affected by the lingering residue of the hatred between Catholics and Protestants. In "Wood," young Sam and his mother must hide from his blind father the contribution they are making to a political march. The title story depicts the confusion of a girl whose father would rather lose his draft horse than owe a debt of gratitude to the British soldiers who try to save it. And in "Hunger Strike," a coming-of-age story, a boy rages against the disruption caused by the family moving from north to south for 'safety.' Always in the background, always presuring the foreground are the ongoing religious and political divisions that plague the Irish. A very fast read, but--as usual--McCann's lyrical prose demands close attention.
The two stories and novella that make up Colum McCann's very slim ''Everything in This Country Must'' seem to be a way of dealing with Ireland's sectarian conflict by coming at it sideways. That's not to say McCann has chosen the route of fable or metaphor. The battles between Protestant and Roman Catholic are alluded to in these three selections, but the characters seem to experience it all from a distance, or as part of a past that sits in the midst of their day-to-day experience like a lump of dry bread in the throat, impossible to digest or ignore. Indeholder
One powerful novella, with two thematically linked short stories on either side of it, forms the basis of Everything in this Country Must. These are stories about Ireland and the Troubles, but only in the sense that Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea is about fishing ¿ they have an almost mythical rather than a political feel. In the title story, 4 young soldiers help a farmer and his daughter free their horse from a stream in flood, unable to understand that their help will never be anything but an insult. In the novella, Hunger Strike, a young boy and his mother flee to Galway as the boy's uncle succumbs to a hunger strike in a Derry gaol. In Wood, a ten-year-old boy is asked by his mother to make poles for the marching season. These stories don't have a political purpose, they are almost three memories, three moments in time that changed the course of lives from innocence to something else. No library descriptions found. |
Forfatter-snakColum McCann chatted with LibraryThing members from Mar 1, 2010 to Mar 14, 2010. Read the chat. Current DiscussionsIngenPopulære omslag
Google Books — Indlæser... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit:
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The first story -- "Everything in This Country Must" -- tells of a British army patrol that happens on a man and his daughter attempting to rescue their horse drowning in the river. The brave efforts of the soldiers, at no small risk to themselves, is appreciated by the girl, but not by her father who threatens them as they depart. His anger shows how the attitude of the people toward the presence of the British army had evolved.
The second story -- "Wood" -- refers to the annual parade of Protestant Orangemen through the streets of Derry, Belfast, and other cities. The paraders carry banners with anti-catholic slogans. It commerates the victory of Protestant King William over Catholic King James in 1691. The parades are perceived by the Catholic population as insulting and an arrogant symbol of Protestant supremacy. (I witnessed our Protestant neighbor proudly dressed in his parade regalia on the eve of the march.) The marchers needed wood poles to display their banners and called on a family of skillful workworkers to make them. The head of the household had been incapacitated by a stroke and, although a Protestant himself, loathed the annual parades for all they represented. His wife and young son surreptiously gathered the materials and made the poles for the income they would bring. He embodied the rejection of sectarianism felt by many, but his helplessness symbolized how the forces of hatred prevailed.
The novella -- "Hunger Strike -- is told from the perspective of a 13-year-old boy from Derry who is staying with his widowed mother in the Republic (somewhere it seems on the west coast near Galway). His uncle, who he has never met, is imprisoned in Prison Maze at Long Kesh for his suspected IRA activities. The uncle and others had begun a campaign of hunger strikes to protest the refusal of the British authorities to recognize them as prisoners of war as opposed to suspected common criminals. This resulted in a number of starvation deaths that received major media attention across the world. The boy is extremely obsessed his uncle's slow death, even to charting what he believes to the the steady weight loss. He seethes with anger, fantasizing about the actions he would take in response. He meets an elderly couple who introduce him to kayaking in the bay and repays their kindness in an unexpected way that speaks to his troubled state of mind. ( )