Colum McCann in Conversation with Niall: Mac Monagle

Listen to Colum McCann in conversation with Niall: Mac Monagle and reading from Let the Great World Spin, Thursday 16th June 2011 at Dublin City Library & Archive.

Niall Mac Monagle: Lord Mayor, Lady Mayoress, fellow readers, readers, readers, though Colum McCann is from over the road he enjoys an international reputation. His books have already been translated into thirty languages and yesterday the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award recognised Colum McCann’s rightful and well deserved place on the world’s stage and how happily bookended, as it were, is that word IMPAC, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award with the words International and Dublin on either side, remind those of us lucky to be here this evening of how both local and global this unique and handsome award is. From 126 cities around the world 162 titles were sent to Dublin, 166 public library systems were involved and the fact that novels first published in 2009 were eligible for the award meant that 5 very experienced judges brought to their task a real sense of perspective. The 2 year gap allows for the finest novels to find their place in the world and from those 10 shortlisted titles, named on the 15th of April last, these judges yesterday named McCann’s Let the Great World Spin the overall winner. It is not only the best novel of 2009 but one of the best novels in the world. In 2003 McCann was named Writer of the Year by Esquire Magazine and Let the Great World Spin won the 2009 National Book Award in the United States, the first Irish writer to win it. On winning this award The Irish Times devoted and an editorial to McCann’s success and 3 weeks ago McCann was presented with the Academy of Arts and Letters Award. In France the government awarded him Chevalier des Arts et Lettres and earlier this month 30,000 young people in Ireland in exam halls up and down the country read an extract from Let the Great World Spin ...

Colum McCann: God bless them! (laughter)

Niall: ... as part of their Leaving Cert English exam though why, why, why did the examining commissioning board butcher the passage – they call it editing I suppose but the omitted such vivid and memorable phrases as ‘sad-jeaned whores’, how those bureaucrats underestimate (laughter) not to mention insult Ireland’s youth. Now this novel in 0.10 seconds produces 4, 260,000 references on Google is testimony to the huge interest in it. I re-read it this week. I’ve now read it three times and I was hugely impressed all over again – not only does the novel honoured Joseph Conrad’s dictum above all to make you see but it asks essential questions about our being here on planet Earth and what McCann calls “the ongoing of ourselves”. At one point the young Fernando thinks about making people see differently, making them think twice. This is what the book does and the range, and the diversity are not only found among the unforgettable characters but in the writing, the writing, the writing. A simple McCann sentence of 10 words, 9 of them monosyllabic can catch a mother’s heartbreak as she watches her son leave for Vietnam. We read “the plane took off and went small against the sky” or the brilliantly interiorised unsettled voice of Claire Soderberg a style of writing in the great James Joyce and Virginia Woolf tradition, “clean the dishes, mop the floor, weep for our boys, a chore indeed, she reaches high into the top cupboard and pulls out the Waterford Glass, intricate cut, distant men do that, there are some that aren’t savages, yes, that will do nicely.” Her insights will prompt you to pause and reflect. The character Gloria tells Jazzlyn later in the book that it is necessary to love silence but before you could love silence you have to have noise and a humour, often wry, often black, give the book a terrific energy. The opening Nelson song tells us that life goes on and this old world keeps on turning but the line that McCann borrows from Tennyson for his title reminds us that there is always a tomorrow, that our lives, however troubled, however fragile, are part of something filled with possibility, like all true art this novel is on the side of life. How happy it is that in this year when Dublin was deservedly named a UNESCO City of Literature Colum McCann, Dublin born, is this year’s IMPAC winner. Happy too that today is Bloom’s Day, a day when we remember Joyce’s great novel that celebrates a city and its people, this Bloom’s Day we welcome the author of another truly great work that also celebrates a city and its people. Let the Great World Spin is a novel that sings a miracle, it sings humanity, it contains multitudes. On behalf of everyone here this evening I congratulate Colum McCann and welcome with great pleasure the maker of this masterpiece, the man from over the road, Colum McCann.