"Transatlantic" by Colum McCann

• Early Review edition
• Irish author
• Originally published 2013
• Setting:  Ireland, United States
• Key historical figures:  Frederick Douglass, George Mitchell, Alcock & Brown
• Epigraph Part 1: "No history is mute.  No matter how much they own it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth.  Despite deafness and ignorance, the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is."  - Eduardo Galeano
• Epigraph Part 2:  "But this is not the story of a life.  It is the story of lives, knit together, overlapping in succession, rising again from grave after grave." - Wendell Berry, From "Rising"
• Vocabulary:
• funambulist:  a tightrope walker.
• Quotes:
• p.1..."It was that time of the century when the idea of a gentleman had almost become myth."
• p.37..."The poor were so thin and white, they were almost lunar."
• p.79..."My sister has a mind of her own.  Unfortunately she lost it a few years ago."
• p.87..."What she worries most of all is that he will become the flesh at the end of an assassin's bullet."....nice phrasing
• p.95..."The vague hope of helping to turn the long blue iceberg, the deep underwater of Irish history."
• p.95..."It is one of their beauties, the Irish, the way they crush and expand the language all at once."
• p.101..."He was told once that any good Irishman would drive fifty miles out of his way just to hear an insult--and a hundred miles if the insult was good enough."
• p.120...."It is as if, in a myth, he has visited an empty grain silo........Three ways down from the silo,.  They can fall into the grain and drown, they can jump off the edge and abandon it, or they can learn to sow it very slowly at their feet."---metaphor for Irish peace talks
• p.124..."We prefigure our future by imagining our pasts.  To go back and forth.  Across the water.  The past, the present, the elusive future.  A nation.  Everything constantly shifted by the present.  The taut elastic of time.."
• p.153..."The glorious vanity of dying." - enlisting
• p.165..."The infinity of her inkwell....Hours of loss and escape.  Insanity and failure.  Scratching one word out, blotting the middle of a page so it was unreadable anymore, tearing the sheet into long thin strips.  The elaborate search for a word, like the turning of a chain handle on a well.  Dropping the bucket down the mineshaft of the mind.  Taking up empty bucket after empty bucket until, finally, at an unexpected moment, it caught hard and had a sudden weight and she raised the word, then delved down into the emptiness once more."
• p.191..."What was a life anyway?  An accumulation of small shelves of incident.  Stacked at odd angles to each other."
• p. 191..."Emily could sense the skip in her life, almost like the jumping of a pen.  The flick of ink across a pag.  The great surprise of the next stroke.  The boundlessness of it all.  There was something in it akin to a journey across the sky......
• p.218..."We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing mobius strip until we come home, eventually to ourselves."
• p.259..."We have to admire the world for not ending on us"
• Interesting points:
• Alcock & Brown:  1919, flew the Vickers Vimy from Newfoundland to Ireland, taking the war out of flight, "first aerial mail to cross from the New World to the Old......what a surprise it is when distance finally breaks
• Frederick Douglass:  comes to Ireland to raise funds for fight against slavery and to await final negotiations with his "owner" so he can return to the US a free man
• George Mitchell:  brokers peace between Northern and Southern Ireland
• Image of a footprint disappearing as water washes over it at the seashore....metaphor for ephemeral nature of of life
• Review:  I read an Early Reviewer edition of this new novel from Colum McCann.  Lots of authors are using the multi-narrative structure in the last few years, but Colum McCann is without a doubt the most adept in this model. His use of language is beautiful, his characters are memorable, and his narrative is engaging and thought-provoking on multiple levels.  In this novel, tranatlantic voyages frame the way in which lives can touch one another in what seems like a brief moment in time, yet have impact that can cross generations.  Taking three actual historical events, McCann is able to touch on themes of greatness, the ability to face challenge with courage, the intertwining of lives, loves, and honor.  Timelessness is central to this marvelous book, and timeless describes my feelings about the merit of this novel.