Picador, 2004
ISBN: 0312423381
Short story collections are often hit or miss, stuffed with filler acting as packing peanuts for a few noteworthy stories. But every once in a while, a collection comes along that surpasses the status of merely a few stories by the same author cohabiting on the same pages, and forms a cohesive and powerful combination of stories, each building on the last, creating a larger, more meaningful whole. To come across a collection as consistently engrossing and emotionally powerful as Colum McCann’s Fishing the Sloe-Black River is a real coup for short story readers.
McCann, is a native of Ireland, but currently lives in New York, and the bulk of the stories in Fishing the Sloe-Black River deal with the experiences of Irish immigrants as they cope with separation from their homeland. Yet, McCann rarely describes these events as they happen, rather, relying on the memories of his characters, who are constantly flashing back to the day (or days) that changed their lives.
ISBN: 0312423381
Short story collections are often hit or miss, stuffed with filler acting as packing peanuts for a few noteworthy stories. But every once in a while, a collection comes along that surpasses the status of merely a few stories by the same author cohabiting on the same pages, and forms a cohesive and powerful combination of stories, each building on the last, creating a larger, more meaningful whole. To come across a collection as consistently engrossing and emotionally powerful as Colum McCann’s Fishing the Sloe-Black River is a real coup for short story readers.
McCann, is a native of Ireland, but currently lives in New York, and the bulk of the stories in Fishing the Sloe-Black River deal with the experiences of Irish immigrants as they cope with separation from their homeland. Yet, McCann rarely describes these events as they happen, rather, relying on the memories of his characters, who are constantly flashing back to the day (or days) that changed their lives.
McCann’s over-arching themes of love, loss, remembrance, despair, and hope among the people of the Irish Diaspora are present in each story, but never become repetitive. His remarkable ability to create unique characters while keeping within the larger context of the collection gives the reader a chance to meet each character, while neither forgetting nor confusing them with their neighbors from the other stories, and in doing so, McCann creates a series of contextually intertwined stories that speaks volumes to the impact of memory on our daily lives. In fact, if the title hadn’t already been taken, I couldn’t think of a more appropriate moniker for the collection than Remembrance of Things Past.
The situations in Fishing the Sloe-Black River run the gamut from simple stories of the relationships we foster on a daily basis like “Breakfast for Enrique,”a touching story of a man who takes a day off from work to take care of his ill lover and “Stolen Child,” a snapshot of an Irish émigré’ who becomes a father figure to a young, abused blind girl, and then has to deal with losing her to marriage, to more intricate tales of the lost loves that we can never quite overcome.
The situations in Fishing the Sloe-Black River run the gamut from simple stories of the relationships we foster on a daily basis like “Breakfast for Enrique,”a touching story of a man who takes a day off from work to take care of his ill lover and “Stolen Child,” a snapshot of an Irish émigré’ who becomes a father figure to a young, abused blind girl, and then has to deal with losing her to marriage, to more intricate tales of the lost loves that we can never quite overcome.
“Step We Gaily, on We Go,” in which an eccentric old boxer steals clothes from the laundromat to give to his ex-movie star wife sticks out as a poignant tale of love lost as does “A Word in Edgewise,” a comically one-sided dialogue between female friends, where one woman prepares another for one of the most important days of her life.
The most memorable story in Fishing the Sloe-Black River is “A Basket Full of Wallpaper,” possibly because it details not an Irish immigrant, but a Japanese immigrant in an Irish community. Osobe, who immigrates to Ireland shortly following WWII, attracts the attention of the entire community, not only because he is a Japanese man in a lily-white Irish town, but also because he has just come from experiencing one of the worst atrocities in history. Told through the eyes of a young boy named Sean, whom Osobe hires to help him with his wallpapering business, “A Basket Full of Wallpaper” captures an interesting aspect of human nature–the need to personalize the tragedy of others.
The most memorable story in Fishing the Sloe-Black River is “A Basket Full of Wallpaper,” possibly because it details not an Irish immigrant, but a Japanese immigrant in an Irish community. Osobe, who immigrates to Ireland shortly following WWII, attracts the attention of the entire community, not only because he is a Japanese man in a lily-white Irish town, but also because he has just come from experiencing one of the worst atrocities in history. Told through the eyes of a young boy named Sean, whom Osobe hires to help him with his wallpapering business, “A Basket Full of Wallpaper” captures an interesting aspect of human nature–the need to personalize the tragedy of others.
Sean, and the rest of the townsfolk, constantly try to get Osobe to speak about his experiences during the attack on Hiroshima, attempting to get closer to the horror themselves. When Osobe declines to comment, the townspeople feel somehow insulted, as if they have a right to Osobe’s memories. But, for Osobe, the memories are far too personal to become the part of a community identity. Like the other characters who inhabit McCann’s stories, Osobe, is a product of his memories, and for him, the only way to deal with the unspeakable horrors he witnessed is to try to forget them, or at the very least, not relive them on a daily basis.
