TransAtlantic

by Colum McCann

Newfoundland, 1919. Two aviators—Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown—set course for Ireland as they attempt the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, placing their trust in a modified bomber to heal the wounds of the Great War.

Dublin, 1845 and '46. On an international lecture tour in support of his subversive autobiography, Frederick Douglass finds the Irish people sympathetic to the abolitionist cause—despite the fact that, as famine ravages the countryside, the poor suffer from hardships that are astonishing even to an American slave.

New York, 1998. Leaving behind a young wife and newborn child, Senator George Mitchell departs for Belfast, where it has fallen to him, the son of an Irish-American father and a Lebanese mother, to shepherd Northern Ireland's notoriously bitter and volatile peace talks to an uncertain conclusion.

These three iconic crossings are connected by a series of remarkable women whose personal stories are caught up in the swells of history. Beginning with Irish housemaid Lily Duggan, who crosses paths with Frederick Douglass, the novel follows her daughter and granddaughter, Emily and Lottie, and culminates in the present-day story of Hannah Carson, in whom all the hopes and failures of previous generations live on. From the loughs of Ireland to the flatlands of Missouri and the windswept coast of Newfoundland, their journeys mirror the progress and shape of history. They each learn that even the most unassuming moments of grace have a way of rippling through time, space, and memory.

The most mature work yet from an incomparable storyteller, TransAtlantic is a profound meditation on identity and history in a wide world that grows somehow smaller and more wondrous with each passing year.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Ireland, Book Club, Historical, Irish Literature, Literary Fiction

304 pages, Hardcover

First published June 4, 2013

About the author

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Colum McCann is the author of three collections of short stories and six novels, including "Apeirogon," published in Spring 2020. His other books include "TransAtlantic," "Let the Great World Spin," "This Side of Brightness,""Dancer" and “Zoli,” all of which were international best-sellers.

His newest book, American Mother, written with Diane Foley, is due to be published in March 2024.

American Mother takes us deep into the story of Diane Foley; whose son Jim, a freelance journalist, was held captive by ISIS before being beheaded in the Syrian desert.
Diane’s voice is channeled into searing reality by Colum, who brings us on a journey of strength, resilience, and radical empathy.

"American Mother is a book that will shake your soul out," says Sting.

Apeirogon (2020) became a best-seller on four continent.

“Let the Great World Spin” won the National Book Award in 2009. His fiction has been published in over 40 languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Paris Review and other places. He has written for numerous publications including The Irish Times, Die Zeit, La Republicca, Paris Match, The New York Times, the Guardian and the Independent.

In December 2023 Colum (as co-founder of Narrative 4) was the 2023 Humanitarian Award nominee, awarded by the United Nations delegations at the Ambassador's Ball in New York City.

Colum has won numerous international awards. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Irish association of artists, Aosdana. He has also received a Chevalier des Artes et des Lettres from the French government. He is the cofounder of the global non-profit story exchange organisation Narrative 4.

In 2003 Colum was named Esquire magazine's "Writer of the Year." Other awards and honors include a Pushcart Prize, the Rooney Prize, the Irish Independent Hughes and Hughes/Sunday Independent Novel of the Year 2003, and the 2002 Ireland Fund of Monaco Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award. He was recently inducted into the Hennessy Hall of Fame for Irish Literature.

His short film "Everything in this Country Must," directed by Gary McKendry, was nominated for an Academy Award Oscar in 2005.

Colum was born in Dublin in 1965 and began his career as a journalist in The Irish Press. In the early 1980's he took a bicycle across North America and then worked as a wilderness guide in a program for juvenile delinquents in Texas. After a year and a half in Japan, he and his wife Allison moved to New York where they currently live with their three children, Isabella, John Michael and Christian.

Colum teaches in Hunter College in New York, in the Creative Writing program, with fellow novelists Peter Carey and Tea Obreht.

Colum has completed his new novel, "Apeirogon." Crafted out of a universe of fictional and nonfictional material, McCann tells the story of Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan. One is Israeli. One is Palestinian. Both are fathers. Both have lost their daughters to the conflict. When Bassam and Rami learn of each other's stories they recognize the loss that connects them, and they begin to use their grief as a weapon for peace.

In the novel McCann crosses centuries and continents. He stitches together time, art, history, nature and politics in a tale both heartbreaking and hopeful. Musical, cinematic, muscular, delicate and soaring, Apeirogon is a novel for our times.

It is scheduled for release in the U.S in February 2020.


Advance copies will be available here on GoodReads!!!!

Reviews

[Kris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was very happy to win a copy of TransAtlantic from Goodreads in return for an honest review. I had been looking forward to this novel for some time. As I have mentioned before, I tend to be very picky about historical fiction -- an occupational hazard for some historians. I want engaging style as well as good research, and I sometimes have difficulty focusing on the characters and the plot instead of historical details. I also tend to shudder at some writers' tendency to name drop as many famous historical figures as they can.

In TransAtlantic, McCann does not disappoint. As he moves back and forth over time and across space, he does include famous historical figures in the first half of the novel -- Frederick Douglass, George Mitchell, and, in the beautifully crafted opening chapters, Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown. All are men, all move back and forth across the Atlantic, from England to Ireland or from the United States to Ireland. McCan explores different understandings of freedom and constraint as he moves his readers from setting to setting, as we sit in a fragile airplane with Alcock and Brown, looking for the Irish coast to appear through the mist, as we watch with Frederick Douglass as he witnesses the struggles of the Irish during the Great Famine, as we walk the halls of Stormont with George Mitchell, striving for peace in Northern Ireland.

I easily could populate this review with photographs of these historical figures. They are all inspiring men, and McCann writes about them with a reserved awe, all the more so because he depicts them with their humanity intact (perhaps with the exception of George Mitchell, who comes across as dignified and contained, definitely admirable, but not always 100% human). But the heart and soul of TransAtlantic is not so much in these historical figures, as in the women that McCann creates, related by blood, circling these famous men like satellites while they engage in their own battles for freedom and family. Lily (Bridie) Fitzpatrick, née Lily Duggan, who meets Frederick Douglass while she was working as a maid in Dublin and who travels across the Atlantic in search of the freedom that he represents to her. Her daughter Emily, and he granddaughter Lottie, who cover the flight of Alcock and Brown as journalist and photographer, breaking barriers of gender. Lottie's later life in Northern Ireland with her family -- her husband Ambrose, her daughter Hannah, and her grandson Tomas, all seeking peace in the family lough in the shadow of The Troubles. And finally, Hannah's struggles with memory, loss, and a history that remains raw and personal.

McCann's structure for this novel works beautifully. I've read comparisons with David Mitchell's structure for Cloud Atlas, but TransAtlantic remains much more contained and personal, because of family ties and McCann's interweaving of characters from section to section. He reminds us that history is not only made by famous people who have pages in history textbooks and shelves of libraries devoted to them. There are also people living their lives, sustaining hopes and coping with heartache, spiraling around them. These individuals are not simply touched by history--they create history, they curate it and own it and try desperately to find ways to connect themselves to their pasts, to their loved ones and memories, while looking ahead into an uncertain future. McCann brings these people, all of us, alive through the experiences of the women in his novel.

[Richard Derus · Rating 5 out of 5]

$1.99 on Kindle!

Real Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: National Book Award-winning novelist Colum McCann delivers his most ambitious and beautiful novel yet, tying together a series of narratives that span 150 years and two continents in an outstanding act of literary bravura.

In 1845 a black American slave lands in Ireland to champion ideas of democracy and freedom, only to find a famine unfurling at his feet. In 1919, two brave young airmen emerge from the carnage of World War One to pilot the very first transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to the west of Ireland. And in 1998 an American senator criss-crosses the ocean in search of a lasting Irish peace. Bearing witness to these history-making moments of Frederick Douglass, John Alcock and "Teddy" Brown, and George Mitchell, and braiding the story together into one epic tale, are four generations of women from a matriarchal clan, beginning with Irish housemaid Lily Duggan. In this story of dark and light, men and women, history and past, fiction and fact, National Book Award-winning novelist Colum McCann delivers a tour de force that is his most spectacular achievement to date.

My Review: This is an ambitious book indeed. McCann refines storytelling techniques he used in Let the Great World Spin, and layers in more complexity than he created in that National Book Award-winner. For that reason alone, I'd give him high marks.

But as a work of social commentary on Ireland, on its colonial past and its enraged present, the book comes alive. Without ever leaving his focus on the personal lives of people, he limns the results of the struggle of his homeland to be its ownself. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, is in Ireland to raise money for Abolition in the USA. Isn't that a nice cause for turn-about, with the IRA raising money in the USA for its militancy?

Webb took him out onto the verandah by the elbow and said: But Frederick, you cannot bite the hand that feeds.

The stars collandered the Wexford night. He knew Webb was right. There would always be an alignment. There were so many sides to every horizon. He could only choose one. No single mind could hold it all at once. Truth, justice, reality, contradiction. Misunderstandings could arise. He had one cause only. He must cleave to it.

He paced the verandah. A cold wind whipped off the water.

The water, the recurring use of the water, the wind off the water, being in the water, all of it the Atlantic, all of it marking transformation and immersion in the moment of transformation for each character...that's lovely.

The toughness and surivorhood of Ireland's women is a major part of the story. So is the deep-seated need of the Irish to Be Irish.

She stood at the window. It was her one hundred twenty-eighth day of watching men die. They came down the road in wagons pulled by horses. She had never seen such a bath of killing before. The wheels screeched. The line of wagons stretched down the path, into the trees. The trees themselves stretched off into the war.

She came down the stairs, through the open doors, into the wide heat...The men had exhausted their shouts. They were left with small whimperings, tiny gasps of pain...One soldier wore sergeant's stripes on his sleeve, and a gold harp stitched on his lapel. An Irishman. She had tended to so many of them.

So is the quixotic character of men, pushing boundaries that separate them (in their minds) from Glory. (The transAtlantic flight of the title...so very male in its pointless bravado, and in its gauntlet-flinging results of commonplace transAtlantic air travel.)

It was that time of the century when the idea of a gentleman had almost become a myth. The Great War had concussed the world. The unbearable news of sixteen million deaths rolled off the great metal drums of the newspapers. Europe was a crucible of bones.

That's plain old-fashioned beautiful phrase-making.

But in the end, the story large and small is about the strength of women to carry on. The struggles of men against the futility of their existence, a mere accident of evolution's need to stir the pot to keep the soup of life boiling merrily instead of burning irretrievably, are as ever and as always propped up, supported, allowed to exist, by women, evolution's one essential ingredient, carriers of whatever life the planet holds and makers of whatever future the men leave alone in their ceaseless tinkering.

The tap of his cane on the floor. The clank of the water pipes. She is wary of making too much of a fuss. Doesn't want to embarrass him, but he's certainly slowing up these weathers. What she dreads is a thump on the floor, or a falling against the banisters, or worse still a tumble down the stairs. She climbs the stairs before {he} emerges from the bathroom. A quick wrench of worry when there is no sound, but he emerges with a slightly bewildered look on his face. He has left a little shaving foam on the side of his chin, and his shirt is haphazardly buttoned.

...The ancient days of the Grand Opera House, the Hippodrome, the Curzon, the Albert Memorial Clock. The two of them out tripping the light fantastic. So young then. The smell of his tweeds. The Turkish tobacco he used to favor. The charity balls in Belfast, her gown rustling on the steps, {her husband} beside her, bow-tied, brilliantined, tipsy.

Worry for the present...nostalgia for the past...awareness of the short horizon of the future. She will bear it all. He will be borne to his bourn-side bier on the shoulders of this woman.

And the wonder of it is...it goes on.

[Blaine DeSantis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eight years, yes, eight years ago I purchased this book and it has been sitting looking at me from my library shelf all that time. I have read many other books and yet this book kept waiting for me to pick it up. Finally I did and I cannot figure out what took me so long. This is a marvelous work by Colum McCann and one that is divided into 3 sections. The first section takes a look at three different trips from America to Ireland. The first by aviators in 1919, the two gentlemen that were first fly nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean. The next was a look at the 1846 trip by Frederick Douglass and what he encountered while in Ireland. The final trip is that of George Mitchell, the former U S Senator became the lead peace negotiator for what is now known as the Good Friday agreements. These are well written fictional accounts of actual events and I thought it gave a deep look into the minds of these gentlemen during their trips and while they were in Ireland.
The second portion of the book is about 3 generations of women and how their lives intersected the lives of these gentlemen in the first portion. We see the overlap in their stories, and we also learn much more about these women’s lives. The first was a servant in Ireland who eventually made it to America and faced sadness and difficulties as well as finding a new level of respect in this country. The second was her daughter who, due to no fault of her own, was unable to secure a job in America as a journalist, and instead moved to Canada where she raised her small daughter, and was present when those aviators flew over to Ireland in 1919, and who goes back to Europe in her old age to interview the one survivor of that flight. While there her daughter meets the man who will become her husband and she is the third story we follow. She loved tennis, it was from that love of tennis that she has a very brief encounter with George Mitchell but her life was so much more than that an encapsulates the hopes and dreams of Ireland.
The third section is about the final generation of women from the family, and the anguish that she felt when her son was taken from her when he was 19.
You can feel the pain and loss and heartache that this woman has suffered from as she is now the last of this family of women, there are no other heirs. But it is a resilient group of ladies who I think make up the best portion of this book.
This is a well written book, containing some beautiful language and some absolutely wonderful descriptive portions. On the whole I felt that the book was a very smooth read with the only real slow part being a portion of the Frederick Douglass trip. But despite those slow pages, this is a solid 5***** effort.

[Zoeytron · Rating 4 out of 5]

The weight of words, and the appreciation of the meaning they bear.  The ironies of life, and the small comforts.  Where the 'intrusion of the ordinary' plays out in the 'miracle of the actual'. 

Threads from four generations of women are taken up and braided together to form a plaited whole.  'The conspiracy of women.  We are in it together, make no mistake.'

I feared the subject matter was not going to hold my interest, but the writing itself had me hooked before I could do anything about it. I was completely taken with this author's Thirteen Ways of Looking, and mentioned in my review that I wanted to read more from him.  TransAtlantic was recommended to me by Roger Brunyate.  Thank you, sir, for a fine read.

[Brina · Rating 4 out of 5]

The world that we inhabit is a small place, and that has been as evident as ever in 2020. The ability to travel large distances in a short amount of time can be both a blessing and a curse. With the click of a button aided by technological applications, a person can talk to those on the other side of the world, not having to leave one’s house. One hundred years ago, the idea of traveling large distances in a short matter of time was still in its infancy. Crossing oceans by steamship or newly created airplanes needed to be carefully planned out or run the risk of meeting one’s watery death. The idea of bettering one’s life by moving to a different place- city, state, country- has long been part of the human experience. Gifted prose writer Colum McCann delves into the concept of human migration across large distances as he focuses on people, both real and fictional, as he showcases how and why people have traveled.

History, McCann notes in his author interview at the end of Transatlantic, has largely been written by men. In the first part of his thought provoking novel, McCann focuses on three real men from different eras of history: Frederick Douglass, aviators Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown, and Senator George Mitchell. Irish by birth, by the time McCann wrote Transatlantic he had never focused on Ireland in his writing even though he knows that the nation is his home. The descriptions of the Emerald Isle are the most vivid in the book, as though McCann had been waiting to write about Ireland for his entire career. Douglass traveled to Ireland in 1845 at the onset of the potato famine, which eventually lead to a mass immigration to United States soil. Douglass’ trip is a little known footnote in history, with the abolitionist garnering most of his notoriety upon his return to his homeland. For Douglass, however, he experienced freedom for the first time in Europe, traveling to Ireland on a speaking tour to promote his book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which in turn allowed him to buy his freedom on his return to the United States. As McCann expertly weaves fact and fiction, he points out that Douglass true sense of self and belonging is tied to Ireland because in that nation he was not chained to slavery, and, yet, he had the longing to return to home to his family, a voyage to freedom across a vast ocean.

Seventy five years after Douglass traveled to Ireland, aviators Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown flew from Newfoundland to Northern Ireland in a propeller plane. The plane had been elevated to freedom having been rescued from war, and the flight itself brought fame to the pilots who relied on a network of stars to blindly navigate the skies, flying because they loved the feeling of freedom not for glory. Alcock and Brown crossed the ocean in fifteen hours, and this time would only become shorter over the years. By the turn of the 21st century, George Mitchell crossed the Atlantic Ocean every few days in a matter of hours traveling from New York to London to Dublin to Belfast to Washington to New York, attempting to broker peace on an otherwise serene island. Travel became second nature for Mitchell as he was on a first name basis with airline personnel in multiple countries, memorizing the menus and accoutrements provided to him for his enjoyment. Despite having the luxury of easy travel, Mitchell appeared of all the characters the least free, coming out of retirement to assist others in gaining peace at the expense of spending time with his son. Mitchell is fortunate to live at an era in history where such travel is possible, whereas in Douglass’ era, the Senator might have rarely known his son, showcasing that the world has indeed gotten smaller over time.

While the men who have written history are on display in this novel, the stars of this book are four generations of women who have woven their own family’s history as a web of time and place. Lily Duggan is inspired by Douglass’ talks and immigrates to New York. From there she travels by train to St Louis where she works as a nurse during the Civil War, finding love and marrying Jon Ehrlich, a simple man who sells ice for a living. The Ehrlichs have six children, the youngest of whom Emily is emblematic of the United States’ growth as a nation in the second half of the 19th century. Emily chooses a career as a newspaper reporter yet has to write under the byline of her publisher, much to her own consternation, having given so much of herself to her job. At the turn of the 20th century, women are still not full citizens, and Emily is clearly ahead of her time. A single mother to young Lottie, Emily chooses to immigrate, first to her brother in Toronto and then to Newfoundland, where she takes up residence in the Cochrane Hotel and finds employment at a forward thinking newspaper. It is at the Cochrane Hotel that the lives of the Ehrlich family intersect with Alcock and Brown, weaving fact and fiction together seamlessly, setting a stage for a meeting between the families later on in another time and place.

The stars of the book in my eyes are Lottie Tuttle nee Ehrlich and her daughter Hannah. Lottie and Emily travel to Europe aboard steamship in 1929 in a carefully planned journey to see the continent. Their first stop is Northern Ireland to meet with Brown and his family, and it is there that Lottie finds true love, allowing her to put her roots down in the Emerald Isle, her family’s original home. As a ninety year old, she encounters Senator Mitchell and tells him that he should work on his tennis game. Here, Lottie Tuttle seems as real as George Mitchell even though she is a fictional character. Thirteen years later, her daughter Hannah completes the story of the family history. She tells the tale of her great grandmother Lily Duggan’s journey to America in 1845 and reminisces about the struggles and memories that came next, making readers believe that perhaps Hannah has been the narrator all along. Lottie did not make it to one hundred years old but she lived long enough to see George Mitchell broker peace in Ireland, making Northern Ireland a safer place to live for future generations. As the book is about to draw to a close, Hannah meets David and Aiobhanne Manyaki and their children, a family with roots on two continents, characters carefully drawn out and playing a large role in the novel even though they only make an experience in the final chapters. The Manyakis demonstrate how time and distance have grown smaller over the decades, their lives intersecting with the Duggan/Ehrlich/Tuttle family, who has crossed the ocean multiple times in search of the spot that the family can truthfully call home.

In an author interview with Elizabeth Strout, Colum McCann adroitly notes that his fictional characters are as real as the factual ones. He notes that a Tom Joad or Scout Finch are real in that they help explain history to today’s readers even though they are made up characters. This is the blending of fact and fiction and shows that Colum McCann is a leading historical fiction writer of today, melding carefully crafted characters with real historical people and events to allow readers an insight into history. Transatlantic brought many discussion points about time, place, distance, human migration, and family. McCann’s always expert prose made for enjoyable fast reading, allowing me to savor his words, giving me much to look forward to the next time I pick up one of his deftly crafted novels.

4+ stars

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 5 out of 5]

As in LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN, McCann's new novel begins with a real event in the air, and uses the opening narrative as a camera lens, tilting this way and that and keeping us off balance while images assemble to create a defining scene. British aviators John Alcock and Arthur (Teddy) Whitten Brown are up in the air in their WW 1 Vickers Vimy at the start of this tale, the pair who made the historical transatlantic journey from Newfoundland to Ireland in 1919. It could be said that the novel begins in media res, and the reader is installed in an already evolving story that takes place from 1845 to the present. It is told through a non-linear progress of evolving images, events, and generations of people.

But, wait, I need to go back to the image in the prologue--to a house, and a woman listening to the sounds that define the house's character. By the time we make the symmetrical return to the house at the end of the book, its image has been altered and given much gravitas by the external events that precede it. The whole of the novel is most elegantly the sum of its parts. This isn't evident for a while, because the separate generations' stories are rendered with zoomed-in effect, and the camera gradually pulls out to connect the different stories together. Later, as the varying threads and initially unrelated perspectives go back and forth a few times, we see the integration of stories and generations into a panoramic whole. The factual characters and events heighten the poignancy of the fictional ones.

The graceful symmetry of the novel's harmonious and measured structure is one of the elements of this genre-blurring fiction that McCann is so noted for. He seamlessly weaves biographical people and events with the ordinary characters that populate the story. As McCann re-examines and speculates on them, he creates adjoining tunnels into their lives, illuminating the predominant theme of the novel, which is beautifully distilled in this quote:

"We return to the lives before us, a perplexing möbius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves."

That line, which deepens every time I read it, became the defining image for me, and tied the different threads and four generations of narrative voices together into a beautiful, astonishing, immaculate masterpiece. The mixture of biographical facts and speculative truth-- of Alcock and Brown transforming a bomber plane into a navigational vehicle to fly a landmark journey; freed slave and statesman Frederick Douglass' eye-opening visit to Ireland in 1845; Senator George Mitchell's historic flight to Ireland that led to the Belfast Peace Agreement on Good Friday 1998; the words of great leaders and journalists; and the transportation of ice all seamlessly weave into the fabric of the four generations of women.

A letter written by the novel's journalist Emily Ehrlich, and given to aviator Brown, becomes the most enigmatic and recurring signifier of all, a dispatch that is both a symbol and a subtly dramatic connection between the generations.

"We prefigure our futures by imagining our pasts. We go back and forth. Across the waters. The past, the present, the elusive future. A nation. Everything constantly shifted by the present. The taut elastic of time."

McCann's exquisite, transcendent use of language is a joy to read, peerless prose that is at once timeless and still--quiescent but vital, and fuses the past, the present, and the future into one of those adjoining tunnels that link and span the generations and themes. Language, as McCann describes it in the novel, is a tool to express ideas and also a challenge to conquer. It is the bridge, but sometimes the fence, between generations and nations.

"...how very odd it is to be abandoned by language, how the future demands what should have been asked in the past, how words can escape us with such ease, and we are left, then, only with the pursuit."

This book braids Ireland's struggle with humanity's struggle to free itself from the chains of the past, while acknowledging that those chains annex our future. It is a sublime, extraordinary tale that gradually, very gradually becomes an intimate story about four individual, ordinary women framed by the historic figures that have contributed to big world changes. By the end, it was these four generations of women that moved me most of all. Their stories are seared into my heart. I don't need to tell you anything about them in my review. As you read, I am confident that you will agree. This will go down as one of my fifty greatest novels of all time.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trite but true, all good things must come to an end. I so wanted to keep reading the wonderful prose, the settings that let one think they are part of the story, and the wonderful characters that this novel contains. McCann has the knack of illuminating the everyday things of a person's life, hidden pride, glowing praise, love for country family and children. Everyday items, inconsequential things assume a meaning that often in apparent only in hindsight. Taking real historical characters and mixing them with characters of his own invention, and making the story realistic takes a very great talent. Covering the pure amount of history in a little more than 250 pgs. fills one with wonder. It is very important to pay attention to the prologue, also the small events that keep reappearing in different places. The first part of the book is not linear, the second part covers some wonderfully strong woman characters, and like a master weaver he threads them throughout history and combines them to make a cohesive and finished piece. It is also a homage to Ireland, their fight and quest for freedom, intermingled with America and slavery. This is a book that contain so many wonderful quotes one could quote indefinitely, but this is one of my favorites and a good way to end this review. "There isn't a story in the world that isn't in part at least, addressed to the past. And so it goes.

ARC from publisher.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was enchanting to me. Three immersions in historical events and people that involve a crossing of the Atlantic between Ireland and North America. They happen to be male: two British airmen making the first crossing after World War 1; Frederick Douglass on a speaking tour of Ireland in 1845, and the former Maine Senator, George Mitchell, helping negotiate the Northern Ireland peace accord between 1995 and-1998. These disparate events have links though time by three generations of fictional women bound up in human eddies in the wake of the passage of historical figures.

The narrative weaves all this into a wonderful braid that bridges continents. A young girl in Irish immigrant family in Newfoundland gets to meet the British flyers and photographs them for her father’s newspaper story. There is a family connection between her backward to a woman who Douglass has significant interactions with in Ireland and a forward connection to people in Mitchell’s experience during his time in Ireland. This kind of construction is fun to experience and not too far from the pleasures of David Mitchell’s creations. The inscription from Galeano that starts the book tells us that: “Despite deafness and ignorance, the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is.”

The independent stories are fascinating to get embedded in while we wait to find any connection with each other. Our time machine starts with the flyers Alcott and Brown being motivated to do something positive with their bomber plane and experiences of the war. Part two goes back in time with Douglass, for whom time’s arrow points forward toward the Civil War in America and, for his hosts, the incipient famine and violent strife over Irish independence. With the Mitchell section, we spin far forward, but the burden of his task is to somehow put closure on the smoldering conflict over the fate of Northern Ireland with a history extending far back in time.

The mutual fascination between the Irish and Douglass was great to see come to life with McCann’s mastery of perception, speech, and personalities. The Irish saw him as a hero to aspire to, a freed slave who pulled himself up by his bootstraps and garnered respect from peoples high and low by the power of his words. In turn Douglass identified with their struggles for rights as an underclass virtually enslaved by the wealthy. You can’t help but wonder how his arguments for a pathway to a just society took roots there or how his seeing the struggles of the Irish energized his fight against slavery.

I loved the section on Mitchell, whom I admire as a former Senate Majority Leader from my state of Maine. It was pretty audacious for McCann to make a living figure a fictional character. Being the son of an ethnic Irish father, who was a janitor, and a Lebanese immigrant mother, who was a textile worker, he makes for an appropriate figure to recognize the power of people to change and bridge differences. I was moved over coverage in this story of his trepidation over taking up the task given him by Clinton as a Special Envoy and of his personal sacrifice in leaving his new young wife and infant son for so long. Accepting Sinn Féin at the table was critical to the three-year process leading to the Belfast Peace Accord of 1998 (and really only achieving fruition with the relinquishment of arms by the IRA in 2005).

A lot of friends who are fans of history books get affronted by fictional versions of significant historical figures. I think a lot of truth can be revealed in a particular version of a figure, a theory if you will, is given life in fictional narrative, replete with dialog and access to their internal emotions. On this topic, I like what McCann said in an interview in the back of the book:

I suppose one of the reasons for writing TransAtlantic is that I wanted to question the gulf between what is “real” and what is “imagined.” Is there any difference at all? Can the imagined be considered real? And vice versa? Is Tom Joad not “real” because he was imagined by Steinbeck?
…
A story is a story whether it is based on real-life characters or not. A “real” person should be as fully fleshed as an “invented”. I have a duty to all my characters. And I want to braid the tapestry together so that “fiction” and “nonfiction” get confused.

I loved this tapestry and look forward to reading more from McCann, having only read his “Zoli”.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Colum McCann is a talented writer. He can say in six words what most people can't say in 60. I really enjoyed this, his latest novel.

First of all, he has a way of making me interested in topics in which I had little or no interest prior. The first transatlantic flight, for instance. Sure, it's useful to know when it happened, and who accomplished it, but did I really care? Nah. Enter Colum McCann.

In a few paragraphs, you'll feel as though you understand the essence of who those two pilots are. He puts you there in the plane with them. You feel the wind and the weather on your face, and the disorientation of the clouds.

He breathes air into Frederick Douglass, too. We know he was an American hero, but you'll learn about his passions, what made him tick. You'll feel his presence as he comes off the page. You'll see him as the Irish did in 1845. And you'll be sickened, perhaps as never before, by the fact that human beings were bought and sold, branded and whipped here in the good old USA as though they were cattle for over 200 years. If you stop and think about it, it'll blow your mind. McCann brings the experience home to you.

****If you've not read the book, you might want to stop here. I don't consider the following a spoiler if you've read the GR blurb, but you might.****

History books mention only the major players: the speakers, the senators, the pilots (most of whom are men). Perhaps the thing I appreciate most about this book is that McCann's novel is really about a family sitting in the background of these events, primarily its maternal line. It's in this collection of strong, intelligent women that the novel really sparkles. A few quotes:

The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small.

Hannah's hands have aged a little. Thirty-eight years old now, half her life a mother herself. A tilework to her skin. A braid of veins at the base of her wrist. Such a curious thing, to watch your daughter grow older. That odd inheritance.

She is still in her dressing gown as she watches them go. A regiment. The marks of their bootprints in the mud. The dogs loping patiently behind them. They disappear around the red gatepost and the sky rises up as they grow small.

And my favorite, encompassing a major theme of the novel:

There isn't a story in the world that isn't in part, at least, addressed to the past.

I so enjoy a writer whose words leave me in awe. There is pain in the story, and death, and loss. But the prose is so beautiful, and a few sentences almost made me catch my breath. I especially loved the way he closed the story. The last page had me in tears, not due to its sadness, but its beauty. It made me sad, too, that there were no more pages to turn. This is a book not to be missed.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

This review is going to be mostly about me.

Surprise!

Colum McCann is an Irish writer who in 2009 wrote that book about Philippe Petit, which turns out to have been as much about Philippe Petit as, say, To Kill a Mockingbird is about Boo Radley. The book merely uses Petit’s performance art as an anchoring point around which the book’s different stories of life in 1970s New York City are tethered. And in spite of the fact that the short story form is not generally my bag, I actually found it surprisingly coherent.

TransAtlantic tries to do something similar here, but in this case the anchor’s weight is supplied by a generational line of women, female descendants of Ireland, and it is Irish history that weaves through and around them—history including the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic, Frederick Douglass’s tour of Ireland following the publishing of his first autobiography, the Great Irish Famine, the approval of the Good Friday Agreement, and The Troubles in Belfast. And while I liked this book (though not as much Let the Great World Spin), I don’t believe it would have been as successful in the hands of another writer. In other words, I don’t think there’s anything particularly great about this book, but there is something great about McCann himself. Over lunch the other day, Steve Hotopp said it’s the “Irish” in him, and I don’t know how to explain that other than to say that he has a certain flair for imagery and for setting and for establishing time and place. His characters move about without a lot of fuss but are solid characters nonetheless. And here’s where we start to talk about me. I think it might have to do with the fact that McCann’s writing makes me feel as though I’m somehow back in Ireland—back in Dublin, crossing the Liffey into the poorer northern sections, back in Dalkey Village or walking the beaches of Sandymount, back amidst the hustle and bustle of the Dún Laoghaire docks (I WANT TO TEACH YOU HOW TO SAY DÚN LAOGHAIRE!), and even back in the north, back in Belfast along the Malone Road where I lived, or on the Stranmillis, or at Queens where I went to school, or at the Europa on Great Victoria, the entire city a weird mix of Anglo and Irish influence; take a wrong turn and BOOM, you’d better have the right last name. It made me miss all those places I haven’t thought about in years, which is probably not at all what this book is supposed to do for its readership, but this is what I’m trying to tell you: that is the effect it had on me.

Me, me, me.

[Larry Coleman · Rating 1 out of 5]

I can understand why this book's rating is on the high side, and that's because as "artists" such as James Joyce, Jackson Pollock, John Cage, and pretty much everyone who's ever had a film in the Sundance festival demonstrate, there are a lot--a LOT--of people who can't tell the difference between high art and pretentious nonsense.

Reading this book (and I really tried, but after just over 100 pages, I just couldn't take it anymore) is painfully like being the designated driver on karaoke night at the bar and having to sit through people who can't sing but are too drunk to realize it, so they think that their rendition of "I Will Always Love You" caused Whitney Houston to die of an overdose of jealousy.

Speaking of drinking, if you want a not-particularly-fun drinking game, have a shot every time McCann uses the phrase "as if...". You'll be dead of alcohol poisoning before the end of the first section. Notice that I said "section" and not "chapter", because organizing a book into chapters is for sissies and the bourgeoisie who don't appreciate the high art involved in just plopping whatever pops into the High Artist's head down on to paper. Dripping paint all over and passing it off as art worked for Jackson Pollock, so why can't it work for McCann?

McCann writes "as if" he were a lead balloon. As if he wished to say something, but the words, ephemeral sausages, get lodged. A pinball machine. Dusty and livid in the corner. Played before, not today. Pickles and mattress springs purple. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. [Oh, wait, can't include that one because it's actually a fully-formed sentence.] Because kittens. Three hundred pages wet. Want to shoot self.

I'm afraid to continue with that parody of McCann because I'm afraid of getting sued for plagiarism. Just imagine an entire book written like that last paragraph and you'll get the gist of it without the cost of several hours of your life.

[Cherisa B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful historical mashup of three real events:
The first non-stop cross-Atlantic flight, by the WWI flyers Alcock and Brown, which landed in Ireland; the visit to Ireland by Frederick Douglass to champion Irish support for abolition in the States; and the peace process led by former US senator George Mitchell culminating in the Good Friday Agreement.

The thread that weaves them together are the women of one family through the generations. Lily Dugan works as a drudge backstairs maid in the home that hosted Douglass, and she is inspired by him and his quest for freedom. She took the courageous step to claim her supposed freedom of movement and immigrated to America.

There is so much goodness in these pages it's hard to single any one thing out, but kindness and generosity of spirit and action are replete and stand out. The title notes the action of the people of the story and links between the nations.

I've yet to encounter a McCann story I've not loved fully.

[Jessica J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I was in graduate school, I wrote a paper on women's memoirs. One of the points that kept popping up in research is that, historically, memoirs were only written by Important People and, historically, Important People only included men. The result is that we often have to use less direct methods to discern what life was like for the women: unless we can read their diaries, letters and the like, the only stories we are left with have been filtered through men's lenses and only reflect the small roles women played in men's stories.

That's what I kept thinking about while reading TransAtlantic.

Like he did in Let the Great World Spin Colum McCann explores multiple stories using a common thread to connect them. In Spin, it was Philippe Petite's tightrope walk, a single event that each character witnessed in some way. Here, the stories are spread over the course of 150 years and are connected by the titular theme of transatlantic crossings and four generations of women from the same family.

The first half of the book tells the men's side of history, which is certainly the more famous half: the first men to fly nonstop from Canada to Ireland, Frederick Douglass' trip to Ireland at the outset of the potato famine, and an American politician sent to negotiate the Good Friday Agreement. The second half looks at how these important events affect and are affected by women. The women's stories plumb greater depths, often spanning lifetimes of struggle or experience as opposed to a single event. The two halves are not necessarily direct responses to each other -- the women's stories typically took place a number of years before or after the men's -- and I'm not sure I ever got a firm grasp on what it was that McCann was trying to say about the roles men and women have played in history.

McCann is a master of prose, though. I don't think it would be a stretch to say that a lot of people read him for his way with words more than for the plot. I enjoyed his writing here, for the most part, though the stories ultimately had less resonance for me. I attributed that to the fact that he was exploring ideas and techniques so similar to Spin, simply on a broader scale. I'd recommend this for fans, but I don't think it'll stick with me.

Thanks to Random House for the advanced review copy!

[Mari Anne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finished this one... but just barely, and only because it was for book club. This felt more like a book of short stories, with the last one just barely pulling them all together. It felt contrived and was quite frankly a bit confusing. In the last section I was still not quite sure who the lady was and what all the fuss was about the letter. Due to the "short story" feel of this book there is little to no character or plot development, which I found very problematic. I have also decided that I cannot abide the way Colum McCann writes. There were so many fragments in this story, it was like somebody shot it up. Writers should know how to craft a full sentence, and in my book, fragments should be used sparingly and not slathered on like paste. Really did not care for this one and only gave it two stars because I finished it.

[Britany · Rating 4 out of 5]

I delved right into this one without going back and reading the summary description on GR. I stopped halfway through because I was confused. Three narratives regarding three different men that didn't seem to connect. Once I went back and read the summary it all came together. The first half is comprised of more historical writing based on famous men including Frederick Douglass. The second half weaves a fictional narrative back through these three men's lives. One woman- Lily Duggan, and her descendants are interspersed through these men's lives and may have shaped pieces of their lives. I was immediately drawn in by the writing that seemed to flow through like smoke coming off of a cloud.

The fact that McCann can voice both male and female characters seamlessly speaks to how brilliant of a writer he is. I really enjoyed the different narratives and at times, found myself engrossed in the stories with the bigger novel.

[Chrissie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Close your eyes and picture me smiling.

That is me after finishing this book. I was so very satisfied, pleased, happy. I think this book is fantastic.

McCann has perfect dialogs, be they set centuries earlier or two years ago. His books do demand that you pay close attention, but they deliver a message that is worth the reader's effort. He skillfully interweaves historical events into fiction. His characters come alive. Every single sentence has a purpose. His ability to put the reader in another time or place cannot be improved upon. I absolutely love his writing.

You may choose this book to learn about the Abolitionist and Suffragist Movement or the Good Friday Accords or transatlantic navigation or to understand how "there isn't a story in the world that isn't addressed to the past." What does that tell us in how we should live our own lives?


I listened to the audiobook narration by Geraldine Hughes. Me, I love the Irish dialect. Perfect.

[Paul Blaney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly, I struggled a little to finish this. The writing is beautifully crafted and I found the first two sections (Alcock & Brown's transatlantic flight and Frederic Douglass's visit to Famine-plagued Ireland) engaging, but after that the book lost its way. The third (Senator Mitchell/Good Friday Agreement) section lacked resonance somehow; it felt like an exercise, albeit one expertly pulled off.

I understand that McCann isn't that interested in plot but I wanted more to hold this together, more than the family story that wasn't too compelling and the vague theme of continuity, how history remains present.

I think something got lost her in the broad historical sweep. I might have been happy to read a novel focused on any one or two of these characters, but as they multiplied and failed to return, I felt frustrated and lost interest somewhat. The word that springs to mind here is disparate. I get what McCann is trying to achieve here but there's nothing to get your teeth into in terms of plot or characters, or even the prose. What I'm left with is some spare, beautiful writing and an elaborate structure that seems like less than the sum of its parts.

[☮Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Men of history make up the beginning chapters, and then four generations  of fictional women, their stories woven into a beautiful braid,  complete it.  Indeed, I felt a part of their story even if I am not Irish.  It has a strong relevance to Ireland's history, while linking it to America's as well; and McCann's handling of the female voice was expert.

I have to admit to a general confusion throughout my reading, due to the time shifts mostly, and trying to keep track of which female we were on each time it shifted. I read an ARC, alternating with listening to the audio. The final chapter I read and listened concurrently. This helped clarify some of the Irish pronunciations for me, and I could also easily see what changes were made in the final edit. Some sentences gave me pause, rereading them to get the full effect of their perfect construction. Perfectly lovely.

[Laima · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not finish this book.
I do not want to finish this book.

I don't know, maybe it's just me but I found the writing to be very choppy, staccato-like.
Each time I started reading I just couldn't get into it. The writing didn't flow smoothly and I found myself reading lines over and over again. It wasn't enjoyable so I just returned this book to the library.

C'est la vie.

[Lorna · Rating 5 out of 5]

TransAtlantic was a sweeping historical fiction novel by Colum McCann similar to his wonderful Let the Great World Spin in that the book begins with a true event, this being the Transatlantic flight in 1919 by two British aviators, Jack Alcott and Arthur Brown, as they set their course from Newfoundland to Ireland. Inherent in their attempt to be the first to fly nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean in a modified Vickers Vimy bomber, is an effort to heal their wounds from the Great War and reestablish the joy of flight rather than being an instrument of war. The book goes back to 1845 and 1846 when Frederick Douglass was in Ireland in the midst of their troubles as a guest and frequent speaker around the country speaking about abolition and finding the Irish people very receptive. This is also at the beginning of what we would all come to know as the potato famine in Ireland resulting in countless deaths throughout the country. And the final section in Book One features former Senator George Mitchell, now United States Special Envoy to Northern Ireland. In 1998, Mitchell is attempting to broker a peace agreement becoming known as the Good Friday Agreement under President Bill Clinton. The epigraph was stunning:

"No history is mute. No matter how 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

These three legendary crossings form the backdrop of the second part of the book as we meet generations of women, each connected in some way to these historic events as their fictional life stories unfold in America, Britain and Ireland. The multiple plot lines are held together by one family involved in several of the events, such as a Newfoundland reporter and her photographer daughter present at the airfield in advance of the first attempted transatlantic flight slipping the Alcock and Brown a letter to carry across being the first airmail. The fate of that letter is resolved in the final chapters of the book. I also loved all of the thematic connections resonating throughout the book.

The prose is lyrical throughout this book, and I was enthralled as all of the connections fell into place. Colum McCann has become one of my favorite Irish authors and I am enjoying making my way through his body of work.

"There isn't a story in the world that isn't in part, at least, addressed to the past."

[Alena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another triumph from the gifted story-teller Colum McCann.

In TransAtlantic, he deftly weaves a tale of family, courage, home and hope using historically significant events as his key ingredients. For the first third of the novel, I couldn’t figure out how he would tie together the first transatlantic flight, Frederick Douglas’ tour of Ireland and the Good Friday Peace Accords, but he does it masterfully. I was transfixed by the individuals and the larger themes.

McCann is not an easy read. Like with Let the Great World Spin, he shifts narrators, travels back and forth through time and switches continents. It’s as if he’s scattering the seeds of the story, forcing readers to peck around, until they all somehow blend into something beautiful.

The inner lives and vulnerabilities he imagines for his key characters bring historic heroes to three-dimensional life. I have such admiration for authors who can inspire me to want to go out and learn more about history. I certainly feel that for Alcock & Brown, Douglas and George Mitchell. I have no interest in aviation history until I read lines like these:

“The exhaustion of theirs. Always avoiding cloud. Creating any horizon possible. The brain inviting phantom turns. The inner ear balancing the angles until the only thing that can truly be trusted is the dream of getting there."

But what’s even more impressive is the life McCann breathes into his female characters – the ones who really hold this book together as a novel. The female characters are strong, determined, intelligent and driven who also happen to lend emotional heart to the story. If I had to choose a favorite, I’d go with Emily for this single passage:

"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 sudden weight and she raised the word, then delved down into the emptiness once more."

I did not want this book to end.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

 
Our Stories Will Outlast Us

It is largely coincidental, but this was a book that seemed almost to have been written for me personally at thst particular moment in time.* But I am also convinced that this magnificent achievement should appeal to anyone whose expectations of a novel are flexible enough to embrace what is really a strikingly original structure. I enjoyed a lot of the individual sections in McCann's National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin, but did not feel that they held together as a single story. This one, by contrast, makes no claim on unity of time, but jumps around from 1845 to 2011. It starts with three separate moments of history—famous people, celebrated events—but then goes on to show the history behind the history, the stories of ordinary people, forming a seamless web of living on which the great moments rest.

So many writers of Irish blood—Frank McCourt, Sebastian Barry, Colm Tóibín—have told the story of westward crossings of the Atlantic, generally by impoverished Irish people seeking a second chance. The first thing that sets McCann's book apart is that all but one of the crossings are eastward, and involve well-known people. We have Alcock and Brown's 1919 flight from Newfoundland to the west coast of Ireland. Then Frederick Douglass visiting Dublin in 1845 to raise money for the abolition of slavery. And finally Senator George Mitchell shuttling between Washington, Belfast, London, and Dublin in 1994, finally bringing home the Good Friday peace accords. Each of these three stories could stand on its own, as a lightly fictionalized, but utterly human and brilliantly imagined account of an historical event.

In each of them, there is a minor female character, who appears for a moment and then moves on: a maid in the household of Douglass's hosts, a feisty newspaper reporter in Newfoundland, a tennis-playing dowager in Belfast. In the second part of the book, it is their stories that are developed, as commonalities between them emerge. They too are shown in interesting times: at a battlefield hospital in the Civil War, sailing back East just before the 1929 crash, enmeshed in the Belfast Troubles. But the individuals would have no place in history had not Colum McCann chosen to write about them. What makes them interesting is that they feel real, they share a family strength and refusal to be patronized by anyone, and they live in the same world as the rest of us. As one of them says: "We seldom know what echo our actions may find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us."

I originally thought of entitling my review "The Points and the Picture." From an aerial view of history, Douglass, Alcock and Brown, and Mitchell would be the peaks that break through the cloud cover forming isolated points in time. But the story of the various women represent the landscape beneath, the broad picture. However, I was also thinking of McCann's manner of writing, which is almost pointillist in style; the following is an extreme, but not unusual example:

Moments later Kathleen came in again, left Emily with a black lacquered tray of tea and biscuits. A pattern on a saucer. A circularity. No beginning, no end. Striding across the fields of St. John's ten years ago. Sleeves of ice on the grass. The practice runs at night. The sound of the Vimy throttling in. The rattleroar. The catch of it on the grass. The small spray of muck in the air.

There are times when this kind of writing can get very exciting, as when Alcock and Brown run into problems late in their flight. But to make it work for the long haul, you need to step back, as you would from a Seurat, and look at the flow of the images rather than the individual dots. There are several clips on YouTube in which McCann does just that, reading a chapter or two from this book. Listen to the music he makes from the short phrases, then read the rest of it with his voice in your ear, and the novel will emerge as the lyric masterpiece that it truly is.

======

*
I am Irish-born myself, and made the westward journey many years ago (though not from poverty). I opened the book, reading about Alcock and Brown, at the time my own jetliner was flying over Newfoundland, on its way over Ireland to Scotland, where I wrote my original review. Unlike most American books dealing with Ireland, this one is extraordinarily fair-minded in dealing with the North, where I grew up. And uniquely in my experience, the last chapter of the book is set within a few miles of my birthplace, with one section of it two blocks away from my parents' house in Bangor, Co. Down.

[Tracey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enid Blyton, Charles Dickens, Haruki Murakami and now Colum McCann, these are all authors that over the years have set my reading world alight. Enid for being the author that nurtured my childhood bookishness, Charles for showing me that classic literature is nothing to be scared of, Haruki for letting me in on a huge secret that modern fiction can be breathtaking and now Colum who has gently but firmly lead not shown me the way through this wonderful book.
The opening chapters of Transatlantic are three 'vignettes' the first tells of the first air flight by Allcock and Brown from Newfoundland to Ireland, the next the story of black American slave Fredrick Douglass who has come to Ireland for help from the abolishionist movement, and the third is the story of George Mitchell an American senator who is criss crossing the world in his attempts to garner a peace in Northern Ireland between governments and terrorists.
McCann had me with his opening lines, his descriptive almost poetic, lyrical writing when Allcock and Brown are in the aeroplane had me holding my breath.
Part two is told from the POV of 3 strong fabulous women who I grew to love.
There is not an area of this book that doesn't hold up to scrutiny, it's not sentimental though it evokes emotions, it's full of historical facts and memories although it's a novel, his characters are brilliantly drawn developed and will become your friends, and I loved it.

[Katya]

O que têm em comum os aviadores e pilotos de guerra Alcock e Brown, o abolicionista Frederick Douglass ou o senador George Mitchell? Muito mais coisas do que seria de esperar. Mas esta é a história oficial: Alcock e Brown fazem o primeiro voo transatlântico sem paragens da história num bombardeiro modificado; a mesma Irlanda que Douglass havia visitado durante a Grande Fome para promover a sua primeira obra e a adesão à sua causa (acabando monopolizado pelos poderes políticos); ainda a mesma Irlanda fragmentada pela guerra civil que Mitchell procura (e consegue), de forma absolutamente idealista e surpreendente, apaziguar no século seguinte.
A bravata masculina marca o registo histórico que não se faz sem ela, mas Transatlântico é um livro que vai mais além e procura, ao invés de imortalizar as façanhas históricas, antes evidenciar o discurso do engenho e da força matriarcal que, nos bastidores destas grandes cenas, se desenrola silencioso, anónimo e constante.
Assim, a voz é dada a quem participa como mero figurante destas aventuras icónicas, destes encontros entre dois mundos (continentes) num contraponto ficcional às histórias e personagens factuais que, regra geral, habitam o discurso oficial:

"Dois homens estão a voar sem escalas através do Atlântico para chegar com uma sacola de correio um pequeno saco de linho branco com 197 cartas, com selos especiais, e se o conseguirem, será o primeiro correio aéreo a cruzar do Novo Mundo para o Velho". Um pensamento novo em folha: "Correio aéreo transatlântico. Ela experimenta a frase, arranhando-a no papel, uma e outra vez, "transatlântico, trans atlas, trans ântico". A distância finalmente vencida.

Ligando o velho continente e o novo, oferece paisagens variadas onde se movem personagens marcantes responsáveis por fazer avançar a história, sobretudo, a história de uma terra e de um povo comuns a todos os intervenientes. Um hino de louvor à Irlanda, Transatlântico capta momentos e gentes que, de outra forma, jamais entrariam nos anais. Histórias pessoais de perda, ambição, coragem, pequenos apontamentos que passam despercebidos à historiografia dos grandes feitos da humanidade:

Mataram Tomas a tiro quando estava a puxar o barco para terra em outubro de 1978. Dezanove anos de idade. Ainda na universidade, no seu segundo ano, probabilidade avançada. Ainda não tenho a certeza se foram a UVF ou o IRA ou os UFF ou o INLA ou qualquer outra espécie de idiotas que à época existiam. Na verdade, tenho uma ideia razoável mas já pouco interessa. Os nossos velhos ódios não merecem letras maiúsculas.

Espoletando a ação, uma jovem criada irlandesa, Lily Duggan, que parte rumo à América influenciada pelos ideais de liberdade de Frederick Douglass. As gerações seguintes, sejam elas mulheres pioneiras no jornalismo que se cruzam com os grandes vultos ocidentais ou apenas mulheres solitárias a mãos com a sua vida perfeitamente banal, serão peças fundamentais no xadrez da vida, seja em terras do novo mundo ou já de regresso à Irlanda onde fecharão um ciclo de vivências que, de uma ou outra forma, legitimam o discorrer da narrativa histórica:

Os túneis das nossas vidas ligam-se uns aos outros, aparecendo à luz do dia quando menos se espera e depois mergulhando-nos outra vez na escuridão. Voltamos às vidas dos que existiram antes de nós, uma desconcertante fita de Möbius, até regressarmos a casa, finalmente, para nós próprios.

Por tudo isto, Transatlântico é um livro ao qual terei, forçosamente, de voltar numa outra altura. Sinto que há mais que esmiuçar e interiorizar numa fase posterior, e essa é uma grande promessa por parte de um grande livro.

Era uma vez, começou ela. Fiquei de pé à porta a ouvir. Não ha nenhuma história no mundo que não se dirija, pelo menos em parte, ao passado.

[Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hope this review won't be a bunch of blathering because I want to do this book justice. This was my first time reading anything by this author, so I had no idea what his writing would be like or if he would make history come alive for me, which is why I read historical fiction in the first place. If I had wanted dry facts, I'd read a history book or a nonfiction book on whatever subject interested me. So I was pleased to discover that there was nothing dry about this book. It was one of those rare books that lives and breathes.

But before I describe it in any detail, I want to begin by saying that Mr. McCann's writing simply blew me away. I was highlighting more passages than not, to the point that I thought I should just highlight the whole book and be done with it. It's the kind of writing that can be achieved not only by a technically skilled writer, but by a writer who uses control to be one hundred percentage present in his writing, while at the same time, lets go to lose himself in the characters, and in the time and place he creates. This total immersion by an author allows the reader to inhabit those characters and the story they tell. And it allows for something extraordinary to surface from the ordinary. This is what Mr. McCann achieved in this book.

This book is divided into three parts. Part One tells the stories of four real men who crossed the Atlantic Ocean to arrive in Ireland at various points in time, their trips being of historical importance. The purposes behind their journeys were varied, but all of them took courage and perseverance, either during the trip or upon reaching their destination.

The first story belongs to real life pioneer aviators Jack Alcott and Teddy Brown who in 1919 converted a bomber plane used for destruction during World War One into a plane that brought nations together, only a few years later. The second story belongs to Frederick Douglass in 1845-6, a slave who proclaimed himself free and went on to fight, not with weapons but with words, for the freedom of others like himself and for women hoping to have rights equal to those of men. The third story belongs to Senator George Mitchell who was instrumental in bringing about in 1998 the signing of The Good Friday Agreement, also known as the Belfast Agreement, marking the end of thirty years of civil war in Northern Ireland, despite it taking years of his life to do it, in contrast to the two weeks he had originally committed to devoting to it. But the middle story with Frederick Douglass at its center was the standout story for me in this section. I truly felt as if I came to know the essence of a man I had barely heard about in my history classes, with all his strengths and flaws on full display. I didn't want that story to end, though it led to the second part of this book which was, in a way, even better than the first.

Part Two of this book told the intimate stories of several women who had appeared in the first part, but on the edges, seen only from the corners of the readers' eyes. These women with their courageous and heartfelt stories took front and center in this section, which was no less compelling for being fictional. These are women you won't find in the history books, but their stories are just as important as any of those featuring the men who became famous. And these stories connected in ways I never could have imagined, to each other and to the stories in Part One. I won't go into how because it's a joy to see the connections unfold as the book progresses. Each section begins with the reader not knowing whose story it will be until a name or event is mentioned to spark recognition. Until then, it could be anyone's story, even your own.

Part Three wraps the book up with a very personal story that was one of the truest and most heartbreaking of stories that I have ever read in fiction. It also allowed the book to come full circle in a poignant way.

It would take pages for me to explain how real and deep the characterizations in this book are, and how much of the book is based on yearning to achieve something tangible in one's life that's enduring, though the characters are remarkably restrained, never overwrought, no matter how perilous the circumstances. But rather than spend more time describing the book and the writing, I'd rather include some samples of it to let the author do my talking for me. But before that, I just want to add that he has a great talent for portraying women in this book as human beings, independent of the fact that they are female. Though they are influenced in positive ways by their gender when playing important roles in their own personal histories that connect to a broader history of Mankind. This is how the author put it:

"I think we all know that women are so often excluded from the history books. As if guns and testosterone rule the world. In writing about the women, I felt like they were partly correcting a little corner of history. I wanted the women to own the novel. To say that their stories matter, not only to themselves but to history too."

And now, for the best part of this review--a few samples of McCann's writing that I found so compelling and beautiful:

From Frederick Douglass' section:

"There was a shyness about her, but whenever she entered the conversation she seemed to do so on the tip of a knife blade. She was quick to draw blood and then retreat."

"He came down the staircase, carrying a lit candle on a patterned saucer. The stub of candle threw his shadow askew. He saw himself in several forms: tall, short, long, looming. He slid lightly on the stairs. In the arc of stained glass above the front doorway he could see the stars."

"It was essential to hold his nerve. To summon things into being by the mysterious alchemy of language. Atlantic. Atlas. Aloft. He was holding the image of his own people up: sometimes it was weight enough to stagger under."

"He gazed out at them. The sort of men who had hung their swords above the fireplaces of their mind."

"Here, said Webb, offering the woman a coin. She did not take it. Bent her head instead. She seemed to recognize her own shame on the ground."

The following excerpts are from the second story in Part Two:

"It was September, but the day was delivered on a coattail of summer. Leaves skittered green on the trees. A flock of starlings harried the air."

"The lake was tidal. It seemed to stretch forever to the east, rising and falling like a breathing thing. A pair of geese went across the sky, their long necks craned. They soared in over the cottage and away. They looked as if they were pulling the color out of the sky. The movement of clouds shaped out the wind. The waves came in and applauded against the shore. The languid kelp rose and fell with the swells. She could be forgiven the thought that she was already stepping back towards the sea."

And toward the end of the book:

"The tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again. We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing möbius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves."

Never before have I heard history told in such lyrical and thought provoking language as this. I will definitely be reading more books by this author in the future.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

There isn’t a story in the world that isn’t in part, at least, addressed to the past.

This is a book about crossings. Alcock and Brown fly from Newfoundland to Ireland, landing unintentionally, but first, in a bog. Frederick Douglass journeys there to lecture to the predisposed, and, oh, to maybe sell a few books. Senator George Mitchell goes there, again and again, trying to forge a peace. Women cross, mostly in the other direction, but always as a literary glue, connecting the pieces and vignettes.

Good days those. Long ago, not far away.

Colum McCann has a reverence for history. He cradles it as a new father would, the hand firm and afraid at his baby’s head. It’s his template, which can work brilliantly as in Let the Great World Spin, but can also be tired, like Russo and Irving. It’s a bit tired here. (McCann needs to break form. He is one of the best writers working. If he asked me - he hasn’t - he should move next away from historical fiction.)

I winced the most at the section about George Mitchell. Something about the novelist’s rendering of a still-living, real character. But it was there that McCann could wax most lovingly of Ireland.

It is one of their beauties, the Irish, the way they crush and expand the language all at once.

And, Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war.

It is in Mitchell’s mind that McCann chooses to state his theme:

Some days he wishes that he could empty the chambers of the men, fill the halls instead with women: the short sharp shock of three thousand two hundred mothers. The ones who picked through the supermarket debris for pieces of their dead husbands. The ones who still laundered their gone son’s bed sheets by hand. The ones who kept an extra teacup at the end of the table, in case of miracles. The elegant ones, the angry ones, the clever ones, the ones in hairnets, the ones exhausted by all the dying. They carried their sorrow -- not with photos under their arms, or with public wailing, or by beating their chests, but with a weariness around the eyes. Mothers and daughters and children and grandmothers, too. They never fought the wars, but they suffered them, blood and bone. How many times has he heard it? How often were there two ways to say one thing? My son dies. His name was Seamus. My son died. His name was James. My son died. His name was Peader. My son died. His name was Pete. My son died. His name was Billy. My son died. His name was Liam. My son died. His name was Charles. My son died. His name was Cathal. My son’s name is Andrew.

That’s lovely writing. And not a little condescending. Go to a WWF show, Colum, and watch the women in the audience exhort violence. I could tell you many female motives to homicide. (Might even make a good novel.)

It’s Mitchell, patient, kind, very male Mitchell, who brokers a deal, and a peace that mostly holds.

“Some nuts, Senator?”, he is asked by a flight attendant. Oh, he thinks, if she only knew.

----- ----- ----- -----

I will read McCann’s next book. And the next, and on and on. I will read what’s come before. But oh the books he still has in him.

[Tania · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is no real anonymity in history

This was my first book by Colum McCann, but it won't be my last. He writes so incredibly beautiful, very different from anything I've read before. He uses short, concise yet powerfully descriptive sentences.
The children looked like remnants of themselves. Spectral. Some were naked to the waist. Many of them had sores on their faces. None had shoes. He could see the structure of them through their skin. The bony residue of their lives.

He also has the ability to tell a whole story in a few sentences. For instance:
Her father drank. Her mother drank. Sometimes it seemed that the rats drank, the doors drank, the lintels drank, the roof drank, too. She was brought into bed between them, mother and father. A tenement house. The bedboard rattled. She lost a child. Fourteen years old.

At first I could not figure out how the individual stories where connected. Luckily I found the following interview with the author. He explains that he uses the real life historical figures of Alcock and Brown, Douglas Frederick and George Mitchell as context for four generations of everyday, fictional stories. Although I enjoyed the whole book, I have to admit I was more emotionally involved in the stories of Lilly, Emily, Lottie and and Hannah.
Some days he wishes that he could empty the chambers of the men, fill the halls instead with women. Mothers and daughters and children and grandmothers, too. They never fought the wars, but they suffered them, blood and bone.

This book really got me thinking about how historical events affect our lives, and how everything is interconnected.

Transatlantic is also a beautiful ode to Ireland - it's landscape, people, language, problems and history.
Ireland. A beautiful country. A bit savage on a man all the same.

The story:1919. Emily Ehrlich watches as two young airmen, Alcock and Brown, emerge from the carnage of the First World War to pilot the very first non-stop transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to the west of Ireland. 1998. Senator George Mitchell criss-crosses the ocean in search of an elusive Irish peace. 1845. Frederick Douglass, a black American slave, lands in Ireland to champion ideas of democracy and freedom, only to find a famine unfurling at his feet. On his travels he inspires a young maid to go to New York to embrace a free world, but the land does not always fulfill its promises for her. From the violent battlefields of the Civil War to the ice lakes of northern Missouri, it is her youngest daughter Emily who eventually finds her way back to Ireland. How does the past shape the future?

[Dem · Rating 4 out of 5]

Transatlantic by Colum McCann is a page turning novel that brings together both real and fictional characters across different centuries.

This novel tells the story of 3 historical events. The author keeps close to the main facts while fictionalizing the anecdotes, thoughts and actions of his characters throughout the stories.
The first story is a vivid account of the Airmen Alcock and Brown who pilot the very first non-stop transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to the west of Ireland. I loved this story and had wished it was longer, I loved the vivid portraits that McCann paints of people and places and the author certainly demonstrates his skill as a storyteller.

I also enjoyed and was really interested in the story of Frederick Douglass and found myself goggling to find out more about this man.

As we turn the pages of this novel and got more absorbed in McCann`s storytelling, we begin to see how he links the three opening stories of Alcock and Brown, Frederick Douglas, and Senator George Mitchell, with the stories of Lilly, Emily, Lottie and Hannah.

I was disappointed with the story of Senator Mitchell, I understand that he played a major role in brokering the peace process, but for me his story in the book seems a little displaced and flat and I am not sure that it worked.

The writing is beautiful and descriptive and I thought the balance between fiction and nonfiction was excellent.

I think this novel would make a great discussion book for book clubs.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received my copy of TransAtlantic through a Goodreads giveaway.


Never having read McCann's previous book, Let The Great World Spin, I had no idea whether or not I would like TransAtlantic. To say I enjoyed it would be a vast understatement- his prose is beautiful, conjuring the moments portrayed perfectly. The story is intriguing and flows naturally. I so loved this book that upon finishing it I actually cried "no" when finding no more pages to turn! I'm off to get a copy McCann's earlier book today.

[Elaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

Transatlantic begins with a breathtaking, beautiful and utterly compelling account of the first transatlantic plane flight. Even though I knew this little corner of history, my heart was still in my mouth as McCann describes the perils and textures of early flight.

The next chapter is an equally compelling glimpse of history - this time, Frederick Douglass's visit to Ireland during the early days of the Great Famine. The overlapping currents of history are fascinating, but so is McCann's attempt to get in Douglass's mind, what would a former (and legally current) slave, treated as a gentleman by his wealthy and well-meaning Anglo-Irish hosts make of a land where the native poor live in conditions even worse than those Douglass knows from his own past?

These two chapters had me convinced that I was reading one of the best books of the year. Lyrical, compact - they left me hungering more for, eager to spend more time with the historical personages depicted, eager to experience more of McCann's glancing elusive prose.

And then things took a sharply disappointing turn, at least for me. That is not to say that the rest of the book uniformly is a let down - only that the episodes that follow were quite uneven, with some quite beautiful and moving chapters (Lily Duggan's story) and others that were simply flat (Hannah's descent into poverty - meant to show the modern Irish answer to the Great Famine, the economic collapse of the 2000s - didn't work for me - unlike any of her foremothers, Hannah's story felt contrived). Perhaps the weirdest chapter for me was the chapter narrated by George Mitchell, the former senator and broker of the Good Friday Agreement. It was odd to be so intimately inside the head of a living historical figure (we read about Mitchell taking a shower, yearning to be in bed with his .wife - intrusions of historical fiction usually visited liberally on the dead but not on the living), but despite the intimacy, the entire chapter feels muffled, and a bit disjointed. It certainly wasn't very gripping - despite the momentous context.

Roughly speaking, then, the more "historical" chapters fare better, have a keener edge, than do the most recent chapters. Perhaps the trauma of the Troubles is too fresh - but McCann pulls back a bit for the Northern Irish chapters, oddly and paradoxically, they lack the immediacy and the "realness" (fictive realness, obviously) of the Civil War scenes or famine scenes.

Nonetheless, despite these quibbles, McCann can write, and the book, although it lacks any real central plot or resolution, but is really a series of echoing stories - weaving back and forth through time and across the Atlantic - is a very involving and moving read. So because the early chapters were amazing, and the later chapters have some gems, I do recommend it.