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Read Everything In This Country Must (2001)

Everything in This Country Must (2001)

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Genre
Rating
3.95 of 5 Votes: 3
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ISBN
0312273185 (ISBN13: 9780312273187)
Language
English
Publisher
picador

Everything In This Country Must (2001) - Plot & Excerpts

"Everything In This Country Must" is quite simply too short. The title story only lasts 23 minutes. I am listening to the audiobook performance. Yes, it feels like a performance, not the reading of a story! The narration by Clodagh Bowyer, in her young feminine Irish patois, was fantastic. The book’s narrator is a fifteen year old. Her perception of the event is that of a young Catholic Irish girl. She saw the body of the male swimmer. That is what she would see. She saw the agony and frustration of her father. She saw both, and there she stands wondering how one reconciles the two! Politics and religion and culture all mirrored in one short episode. I end up frustrated because I want more! I have been given a beautiful snapshot!The second story lasts only 26 minutes, narrated by Paul Nugent. This story shows the other side, a Presbyterian family living in Northern Ireland. The point of contention is here within the family. Secrets. Still, very, very Irish! I am less sure what McCann is trying to tell us, but the small details create a picture that you feel rather than see. The short remarks, which can scarcely be called dialog, capture the mood perfectly. Another snap-shot, but less satisfying because I don’t know what is being said.Awfully glad that the next track is two hours and forty minutes long. Something to bite into and hold a while…. This one is narrated by Sean Gormley. Beautiful. That is the best adjective to describe this. McCann knows how to capture a person, that person’s cultural identity, age, family, circumstances and what makes that person who he is. He knows how to capture the wonderful in the sorrowful. He knows how to make you draw parallels between the book’s characters and your own loved ones. The main character is a Catholic, 13 years old and Irish. The setting is, I would guess, in the early 1980s. The themes are sexual awakening, family relationships, friendship and of course the religious/political strife that so characterizes Northern Ireland. You don’t have to be interested in the political theme to love this book. Any mother who has had a 13 year old son will relate to this book. It is believable, it is sweet, and it is hard. This too is a snap shot, of a few weeks in a thirteen-year-old's life. Do you remember swimming with your young adolescent son, splashing water, the cold air, the quiet lake, the pull on your arms as you propel yourself forward?Took away one star only because the “glimpses” are too short and the middle short story confused me. It is amazing that I can give a book of short stories many stars!

Not quite up to the standard of Let the Great World Spin, but these are much different stories on a different scale.The two short stories and novella in this collection all revolve around “the Troubles” in the North of Ireland which haunted generations of Irish people on both sides of the border as well as in Britain for decades. Significantly, none of the main characters are directly involved in direct conflict. In the first, titular, story a Catholic farmer and his daughter receive unwanted help from a group of British soldiers. The second story, “Wood”, details a mother and son’s efforts to produce partisan parade articles against a background of a family’s financial struggles with a bed-ridden father. The novella—”Hunger”—is set in the West of Ireland: an adolescent and his mother escape the Troubles in Derry. Their connexion is more than casual: the boy’s uncle—brother of his late father and brother-in-law of his widowed mother—is an IRA prisoner in the infamous H-Block of the Maze prison. He’s one of the hunger strikers, destined to die for the “cause”, pressing for the right to be treated as a political prisoner, a prisoner of war, and not as a common criminal. How this tiny family is affected by events beyond their control.These stories address a different Ireland, one now happily—hopefully—in the past. Consistent amongst them is the relationship of an adolescent with their single-parent and the “collateral damage” inflicted by the political events of the wider world on the small and intimate relationships between parents and children.

What do You think about Everything In This Country Must (2001)?

This is my first Colum McCann book. After reading this one, I will definitely read more. His writing, while spare, considered and focused, was almost lyrical in its use of language, and drove me to re-read many sentences I found particularly lovely. As an example, I quote this from the first story in the book (**potential spoiler**):"The ticking was gone from my mind and all was quiet everywhere in the world and I held the curtain like I held the sound of the bullets going into the draft horse, his favourite, in the barn, one two three, and I stood at the window in Stevie’s jacket and looked and waited and still the rain kept coming down outside one two three and I was thinking oh what a small sky for so much rain."Wonderful.Both stories and the novella are told from the point of view of children, and all concern the Troubles in Northern Ireland. I think it's particularly difficult to write about Northern Irish politics, and most who do fall into the inevitable pitfalls of sentimentality, outrage, or too closely aligning with one political viewpoint. McCann avoids most of these problems by viewing events through the eyes of those too young to be yet jaded or hysterical. This is particularly true in the stories, which I found more successful than the novella. The novella, Hunger Strike, was the most thought-provoking but the least polished of the stories in this book, for me. It concerns a Derry teenager whose mother has removed him to Galway while his uncle is on hunger strike in prison. I appreciated that McCann didn't feel compelled to give us a history lesson here, and anyone who doesn't know their history can get themselves to Google and figure out who Bobby Sands was on their own. The fury and injustice of this time in history are encapsulated in young Kevin, whose coming of age is marked by his rage and helplessness. He is so angry, and so powerless to do anything. He is relegated to wearing a black armband far from his home and the ongoing riots. While his uncle starves to death and his hometown burns, Kevin plays video games in a Galway arcade and takes up kayaking with an elderly Lithuanian couple. I think, in the end, I wanted more clarification on what Kevin's final act signifies, although perhaps the random violence is an answer in itself.
—Erin

Two stories and a novella. The novella is an absolute stunner, a thing of beauty, and ranks as one if the very best pieces I have had the fortune to read. Think of McCann as Joyce mixed with Hemingway, although this is a stupid way of putting things. But if you liked Old Man and the Sea, you will love this. All three works have an adolescent protagonist. McCann really captures this age of flux perfectly, and in a serious tone. This is quite unlike what others, say David Mitchell, do with their adolescents. They make them fun. McCann, on the other hand, grounds his young ones in the same conflicts as the elders.
—Tanuj Solanki

After thinking about it for a few days I'm changing my rating from 4 to 5 stars. This is a collection of two short stories and a novella, all set in Northern Ireland during "The Troubles" of the late 70's, early 80's and all told from a child's point of view. McCann not only explores the politcal struggles of that time, but the struggles kids face when they feel pulled in two different directions. In the first story "Everything in this Country Must" a young girl struggles with her feelings of gratitude towards a group of British soldiers and her loyalty to her father after the soldiers free their horse from a river.In "Wood" a young boy helps his mother with a job comissioned by the British while keeping it a secret from his father. The novella "Hunger Strike" is about a boy whose uncle has recently joined the hunger strike in the H Block of Long Kesh prison, after Bobby Sands and a few others have already died. The boy's mother has moved them from Northern Ireland to Galway so they can escape the mayhem but he longs to be back there, to be in the thick of things.McCann's writing is sparse, almost terse, but he packs so much into every sentence. Although the subject matter here is sad, McCann manages not to make it depressing, which is quite an accomplishment. A lot of times when the writing is stark, the descriptions bleak, the book becomes heavy and depressing, but not here. I have always loved authors who write they lyrical descriptions, they make me want to savor every word (think Pat Conroy, Amy Tan.) McCann is almost the opposite, he's not flowery, he doesn't go on for pages and pages about the Irish countryside, making you feel as if you're there. McCann writes these short little sentences that squeeze your heart. In the first story (I returned my copy to the library so I'm paraphrasing) he writes "the sky seemed too small for so much rain."I have to read more by McCann.
—Joanie

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