Thirteen Ways of Looking
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Thirteen Ways of Looking
Narrated by:
Colum McCann
Buy Now for £12.23
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Narrated by:
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Colum McCann
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By:
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Colum McCann
From the National Book Award-winning and bestselling author of Let the Great World Spin and TransAtlantic, comes a novella and three stories of immediate power and grace
'A superbly crafted and deeply moving collection of fiction…underscores [McCann’s] reputation as a contemporary master' Kirkus
'Separate and together, these four works prove McCann a master with a poet’s ear, a psychologist’s understanding, and a humanitarian’s conscience' Publishers Weekly
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A story in this collection has been longlisted for the Sunday Times EFG short story award
As it was, it was like being set down in the best of poems, carried into a cold landscape, blindfolded, turned around, unblindfolded, forced, then, to invent new ways of seeing.
It is a cold day in January when J. Mendelssohn wakes in his Upper East Side apartment. Old and frail, he is entirely reliant on the help of his paid carer, and as he waits for the heating to come on, the clacking of the pipes stirs memories of the past; of his childhood in Lithuania and Dublin, of his distinguished career as a judge, and of his late wife, Eileen. Later he leaves the house to meet his son Elliot for lunch, and when Eliot departs mid-meal, Mendelssohn continues eating alone as the snow falls heavily outside.
Moments after he leaves the restaurant he is brutally attacked. The detectives working on the case search through the footage of Mendelssohn’s movements, captured by cameras in his home and on the street. Their work is like that of a poet: the search for a random word that, included at the right instance, will suddenly make sense of everything.
Told from a multitude of perspectives, in lyrical, hypnotic prose, Thirteen Ways of Looking is a ground-breaking novella of true resonance. Accompanied by three equally powerful stories set in Afghanistan, Galway and London, this is a tribute to humanity’s search for meaning and grace, from a writer at the height of his form, capable of imagining immensities even in the smallest corners of our lives.©2015 Colum McCann (P)2015 Penguin Random House LLC
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Critic reviews
A superbly crafted and deeply moving collection of fiction…underscores [McCann’s] reputation as a contemporary master
Separate and together, these four works prove McCann a master with a poet’s ear, a psychologist’s understanding, and a humanitarian’s conscience
Quite simply one of the best, most sustained pieces of fiction I’ve read in some time ... A novel of true resonance and power
Beautifully hypnotic … Those who can't see the point of historical novels will find their answer here (Emma Donoghue, author of Room)
Expertly constructed ... The prose is poetically vivid
Colum McCann is a very gifted, charming writer; in full, rhapsodic-onrush mode, he is hard to resist ... TransAtlantic is deft, well crafted, and broad in its imaginative range
Crime and violence shadow the accompanying stories, told from viewpoints including those of a nun recalling the man who raped and tortured her in South America decades earlier, and an author trying to write about a female soldier in Afghanistan
Like all the best books, Colum McCann’s latest … is about time. Over the course of a novella and three short stories he probes our shifting relationship with it …It’s in the flawless opening novella, which gives the collection its title, that McCann really lets loose … Thirteen Ways of Looking is a detective story turned inside out … “Sometimes it seems to me,” he says in a note at the end, “that we are writing our lives in advance, but at other times we can only ever look back.” In this superlative collection, which surely ranks among his finest work, he manages to express both possibilities at once
Such is McCann’s command of rhythm in this short spark that you could open Thirteen Ways at any page and fall under its spell … Rich with his trademark lyrical, melancholic, ever so ex-pat Irish prose … It is going to resonate in your mulling head for days
I had been enjoying the fairground thrill of being willingly rattled by the fictional menace and mortality in these pages that, combined with the energy and playfulness of McCann’s writing, made for good reading about bad things. Then the blow of the author’s end note, with the spectre of reality (and autobiography) jostling its way into the fiction I had just read. Now I was rattled in a different way (Arifa Akbar)
A rich, poetic monologue, where memories, words and worlds collide … You wouldn’t necessarily think that an account of a single day in the life of a frail old man could be so entrancing … McCann, who comes from Dublin, is an intensely literary writer, and his prose thrums with echoes of Beckett, Yeats and Joyce … What emerges from this rich, linguistic mix is a poignant and beautiful glimpse into the end of a life
Holds your interest throughout.
Compassion for the characters brings you truly into their world.
You become one with the protagonist
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