Scan barcode
A review by toniclark
Thirteen Ways of Looking by Colum McCann
5.0
These are just stunning stories, magnificent writing, and the gorgeous audiobook narration (by McCann himself — oh, what a beautiful voice!) adds yet another dimension — one that seems to add emotion, sensitivity, and a deeper glimpse into the hearts of these brilliantly drawn characters. (Thanks to Goodreader Kelli for recommending the audio.)
There are, indeed, thirteen ways (and so many more) of looking at any situation, any life. The idea of multiple perspectives is most obviously employed in the title novella. Yet, these stories all explore the ways in which we scrutinize our own lives, as if studying ourselves in a mirror, turning the face this way and that, watching for something different to show up when we look from a different angle. What if this happened, what if that? If only I’d done thus and so. . . . What would my life be now?
The main characters are so alive — and treated with such empathy by the writer — that it’s hard to believe this is fiction (in three of the four pieces, anyway). That, combined with the pure poetry of the writing and the universality of the themes, elevates the collection to a high level of accomplishment. And tremendous pleasure for me. (I’ll no doubt listen to this one again, something I rarely do.)
And on some level, these are metafictions as well — one quite obviously so, the others more subtly. As the narrator comments in the title novella, “Just as a poem turns its reader into accomplice, so, too, the detectives become accomplice to the murder. But unlike our poetry, we like our murders to be fully solved: if, of course, it is a murder, or poetry, at all.”
From the Author’s Note: "Sometimes it seems to me that we are writing our lives in advance, but at other times we can only ever look back. In the end, though, every word we write is autobiographical, perhaps most especially when we attempt to avoid the autobiographical. For all its imagined moments, literature works in unimaginable ways.”
DON’T: Some people have read the title story as a murder mystery and expected to find out whodunnit. That’s not what it is.
DO: Start by reading Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird": http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/45236
DO: Look into the McCann’s background (beyond his other fiction). Here’s an excerpt from the Los Angeles Review of Books:
“While developing the story, McCann himself was the victim of such an attack — a punch to the head, which left him unconscious and hospitalised and, by his own admission, broken in more ways than one.This brutal incident occurred in New Haven, Connecticut last summer [2014] after McCann intervened on behalf of a woman who was being assaulted in the street. Even more ironically, the reason McCann was in New Haven at all was to attend a conference at Yale University based on the concept of empathy — an annual summit for the storytelling charity Narrative 4, to whom Thirteen Ways is dedicated.
Founded by McCann in 2013, and supported by everyone from Dave Eggers to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Oprah Winfrey, Narrative 4 is an international organization devoted to the art of storytelling as a means of breaking down barriers. Bringing together youths from alternative backgrounds and inviting them to share their stories with one another, McCann and his team strive to shatter damaging concepts of “otherness” in the hope of creating a “next generation of empathetic leaders.”
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-new-way-of-looking-colum-mccann-and-the-empathy-of-his-fiction/
There are, indeed, thirteen ways (and so many more) of looking at any situation, any life. The idea of multiple perspectives is most obviously employed in the title novella. Yet, these stories all explore the ways in which we scrutinize our own lives, as if studying ourselves in a mirror, turning the face this way and that, watching for something different to show up when we look from a different angle. What if this happened, what if that? If only I’d done thus and so. . . . What would my life be now?
The main characters are so alive — and treated with such empathy by the writer — that it’s hard to believe this is fiction (in three of the four pieces, anyway). That, combined with the pure poetry of the writing and the universality of the themes, elevates the collection to a high level of accomplishment. And tremendous pleasure for me. (I’ll no doubt listen to this one again, something I rarely do.)
And on some level, these are metafictions as well — one quite obviously so, the others more subtly. As the narrator comments in the title novella, “Just as a poem turns its reader into accomplice, so, too, the detectives become accomplice to the murder. But unlike our poetry, we like our murders to be fully solved: if, of course, it is a murder, or poetry, at all.”
From the Author’s Note: "Sometimes it seems to me that we are writing our lives in advance, but at other times we can only ever look back. In the end, though, every word we write is autobiographical, perhaps most especially when we attempt to avoid the autobiographical. For all its imagined moments, literature works in unimaginable ways.”
DON’T: Some people have read the title story as a murder mystery and expected to find out whodunnit. That’s not what it is.
DO: Start by reading Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird": http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/45236
DO: Look into the McCann’s background (beyond his other fiction). Here’s an excerpt from the Los Angeles Review of Books:
“While developing the story, McCann himself was the victim of such an attack — a punch to the head, which left him unconscious and hospitalised and, by his own admission, broken in more ways than one.This brutal incident occurred in New Haven, Connecticut last summer [2014] after McCann intervened on behalf of a woman who was being assaulted in the street. Even more ironically, the reason McCann was in New Haven at all was to attend a conference at Yale University based on the concept of empathy — an annual summit for the storytelling charity Narrative 4, to whom Thirteen Ways is dedicated.
Founded by McCann in 2013, and supported by everyone from Dave Eggers to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Oprah Winfrey, Narrative 4 is an international organization devoted to the art of storytelling as a means of breaking down barriers. Bringing together youths from alternative backgrounds and inviting them to share their stories with one another, McCann and his team strive to shatter damaging concepts of “otherness” in the hope of creating a “next generation of empathetic leaders.”
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-new-way-of-looking-colum-mccann-and-the-empathy-of-his-fiction/