Colum McCann - Zoli

PRAISE FOR Zoli

Soaring and stumbling over decades of midcentury Eastern Europe, Zoli is a riveting novel. [It has] an inner reality so authentic it could only have come fromthe matrix of the novelist's imagination. Colum McCann is blessed with an unlikely mix of an adventurer's spirit and an introvert's compassionate eye. His fictionreflects this sweet incongruity, roaming among life's dispossessed with heartfelt ease. [Zoli] gives us a tapestry of an entire culture, one shrouded and thenmarginalized into near extinction.

GAIL CALDWELL, Boston Sunday Globe

Beautifully written Beautifully conceived, wonderfully told, the story is proof of an indomitable spirit. The elusive character of Zoli, the brilliant artist, isunforgettable.

The Washington Post Book World

McCann affirms with Zoli, his fourth novel, that he is a writer with a method and a mission. The Roma hardships under the Nazis, their hopes and crueldisillusion under Communism, are grittily conveyed in scenes well researched and often grip ping.

Los Angeles Times

As Zoli sets off across Europe on foot, stripped of not only the potency of her Romany heritage but the promise of a Utopian future, each new encounter is chargedwith both futility and wonder.

The New Yorker

Lyrical as rich and sensuous as loamy, freshly turned soil McCann's research and lustrous prose bring Zoli vibrantly alive.

Entertainment Weekly

As assured as anything McCann has ever written, rich in vivid detail but wise, too, about the cruelty of the world McCann allows us to enter a world few of usknow anything about. his prose is just plain gorgeous.

San Francisco Chronicle

Astonishing a carefully crafted and subtle portrait of one woman's rich and troubled relationship with her people, and with her own Gypsy heart With a subtleand nuanced appreciation of a culture far different from his own, McCann offers us a place at the Gypsies campfire and gives us compelling reasons to stickaround and warm up.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

With a poet's language, McCann creates a haunting story about the pain of exile.

People

Mesmerizing McCann artfully weaves Romani traditions, superstitions and expressions into a vibrant tableau, vividly rendering Zoli's conflicting urges to fleeand stay.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

McCann vividly animates an insular culture different from our own. Full of dense descriptions of everything from the intri cately carved caravans to the Gypsywomen whose hair is sewn with gold coins, [he] tells a very convincing and very powerful story about the strength of community and the bur den of exile.

Booklist (starred review)

Fascinating and tragic. As in all of his books, McCann nails the hopes and quiet sadness of characters who've been displaced.

Time Out New York

A great book and a marvelously crafted story. I loved the different angles, the images and the depiction of the Roma. This is life without being sentimental ordefensive.

RODDY DOYLE

If a writer's highest calling is to imagine what it is to be other, then Colum McCann is a giant amonst usfearless, huge-hearted, a poet with every living breath.

PETER CAREY

I review a great many Roma-themed manuscripts for publishers, but none has ever moved me as profoundly as the haunting story of Zoli. With its stark imagery,it takes one deep into the heart of World War II Europe, and for many readers it will be their first introduction to the bleak reality of Romani life. Colum McCann hasanother winner.

I AN HANCOCK,director of the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin

Zoli is an assiduously crafted and beautifully haunting story of Europe from one of Ireland's very best novelists. Every book from Colum McCann extends hisrange and excavates new territories. He is an audacious and wonderfully skilled writer.

JOSEPH O'CONNOR

Also by Colum McCann

FISHING THE SLOE-BLACK RIVER

SONGDOGS

THIS SIDE OF BRIGHTNESS

EVERYTHING IN THIS COUNTRY MUST

DANCER

For Allison, Isabella, John Michael, and Christian

Much of this novel was written and esearched while I was a fellow at the orothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. It is dedicated to all ofthose at the library and to librarians everywhere: thank you.

If you keep quiet, you die. If you speak, you die. So speak and die.

Tahar Djaout

But in our century, when only evil and indifference are limitless, we cannot afford unnecessary questions; rather, we need to defend ourselves with whateverthere is to hand of certainty. I know that you remember.

John BergerAND OUR FACES, MY HEART, BRIEF AS PHOTOS

To get back before dark is the art of going.

Wendell BerryTHE COLLECTED POEMS OF WENDELL BERRY I957-I982

Slovakia

2003

HE DRIVES ALONGSIDE the smal streambed, and the terrible shitscape looms up by incrementsupturned buckets by the bend in the river, a broken baby carriage in the weeds, a petrol drum leaking out a dried tongue of rust, the carcass of a fridge in the brambles.

A dog, al bones and scars, noses out in front of the car, and within moments the dog has brought children, crowding up against the car windows.

He tries nonchalance as he snaps down the locks with his elbow. One boy is agile enough to jump onto the hood with hardly a noisehe grabs the windshield wipers and spreads himself out. A cheer goes up as two other kids take hold of the bumper and skate behind on the bare soles of their feet. Teenage girls jog alongside in their low-slung jeans. One of them points and laughs, but then stops, stil , silent. The boy slides off the hood and the skating kids let go of the bumper, and suddenly the river is in front of him, swirling, fast, brown, unexpected. He yanks the steering wheel hard.

Brambles scrape the windows. Tal grass crunches under the wheels. The car swerves back towards the mudtrack, and the children run alongside again in uproar.

On the far bank two old women stand up from where they're washing bedsheets using riverrock and lye. They shake their heads, half-smile, and stoop once more to their work.

He steers around another tight corner, towards a blind line of trees, past the remains of a shattered lettuce crate in the long grass, and there, across a rickety little joke of a bridge, is the gray Gypsy settlement, marooned on an island in the middle of the river, as if the water itself has changed its mind and flowed either side. Shanty houses. Windowless huts. Jagged pipes and mismatched wood. Thin scarves of smoke rising up from the chimneys. Each roof pockmarked with a satel ite dish and patched with scraps of corrugated iron. Far off in the distance a single blue coat flaps in the branches of a tree.