Ly LO CONG
“..on one hand it is a simple narrative of lives entwined in the early 1970’s. Most of it takes place on one day in New York in August 1974 when Phillipe Petit (unnamed in the book) makes his tightrope walk across the World Trade Center towers, a walk that was called “the artistic crime of the 20 th century.”
Read MoreWhat inspired you to write this novel? Well I’d just written Dancer, a fictionalisation of the life of Rudolph Nureyev, a story that ranged time periods and continents and territories. So I wanted to take it easy for a while. I wanted a smaller story. But that’s exactly what I didn’t get. My wife, Allison, was…
Read MoreWhat did you know about the Roma before you started writing the book? Nothing. I came to the Romani culture empty-handed. That’s interesting, now that I finally understand it. The gadjo (non-Gypsy) comes in, swaggering, but is immediately apparent as empty-handed. What an idiot he is. He thinks he can watch. Even worse, he thinks…
Read MoreColum interviewed by Declan Meade, Stinging Fly Magazine, 2003 This is ostensibly the story of the life of Rudolf Nureyev and the lives of the people around him. What inspired you to write this novel? “Ostensibly” is a good word. This is not a biography. It’s a story, a novel, a tale. For a long…
Read MoreWhat kind of role did “research” (everyday materials, files…) play in “This Side of Brightness”? How much did it affect the final result? At the beginning of the novel, or when I was researching it, I used to go down to the tunnels four or five times a week. I’d hang out, outside the tunnels,…
Read MoreSasha: The beginning of Dancer is astonishing. You begin with a narrative that conveys the Soviet Army experience of World War 2, the subject of which is “they” and the section ends with zooming in on a six-year old boy who’s waiting for his father, one of “them”–who could be any one of them– to come…
Read MoreRobert Birnbaum: Is there really no Russian word for ‘privacy’? Colum McCann: No, there’s not. There is nothing that accurately reflects what we believe of as privacy. RB: That’s peculiar isn’t it? CM: There might be now. Certainly not in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. Right now there might be a developing word for privacy. That’s a country, right…
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Taking his inspiration from biographical facts, novelist Colum McCann tells the erotically charged story of the Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev through the cast of those who knew him: there is Anna Vasileva, Rudi’s first ballet teacher, who rescues her protégé from the stunted life of his provincial town; Yulia, whose sexual and artistic ambitions are thwarted by her Soviet-sanctioned marriage; and Victor, the Venezuelan street hustler, who reveals the lurid underside of the gay celebrity set.
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In his fourth book, Colum McCann turns to the “troubles” in Northern Ireland and reveals the reverberations of political tragedy in the most intimate lives of men and women, parents and children. In the title story, a teenage girl must choose between allegiance to her Catholic father and gratitude to the British soldiers who have…
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