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The Book Review
Colum McCann on Undersea Cables and His New Novel "Twist"
00:37:26
In his new novel, “Twist,” the National Book Award-winning Irish writer Colum McCann tells the story of a journalist deep at sea in more ways then one: A man adrift, he accepts a magazine assignment to write about the crews who maintain and repair the undersea cables that transmit all of the world’s information. Naturally, the assignment becomes more treacherous and psychologically fraught than he had anticipated. On this week’s episode, McCann tells host Gilbert Cruz how he became interested in the topic of information cables and why the story resonated for him at multiple levels.
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- [00:00]
Film Announcer
Don't miss the Friend, a new film from Bleecker street starring Naomi Watts and Bill Murray, based on the New York Times bestseller Iris. World is turned upside down when her late friend Walter leaves her his Great Dane, Apollo. Yet as Iris bonds with him, she begins to come to terms with her own life. Also starring Ann Dowd, Sarah Pidgeon, and introducing Bing, the Great Dane. Deadline calls the Friend a quintessential New York movie, moving, funny, humane and quite unforgettable. Now playing nationwide.
- [00:38]
Gilbert Cruz
I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review podcast. This week I'm joined by Colin McCann, the National Book Award winning author of more than a dozen books. His latest Twist is about an Irish writer who, a little at loose ends, takes on a magazine assignment to write about a cable repair boat. That is the large ship and its crew. This one based in South Africa, which heads out into the ocean whenever a repair is needed. On one of the undersea cables that transmits most of the world's information between nations and continents, this rider finds himself in an uneasy relationship with the head of the boat's crew, a man named Conway, who has quite a mysterious past. Column It's a pleasure to have you.
- [01:26]
Colin McCann
It's such a pleasure to be here.
- [01:34]
Gilbert Cruz
When one hears underwater cables that carry much of the world's information, it can't help but inspire, I think, all sorts of scenarios for me, primarily like espionage based, to be honest, with this book, with twist, which came first, the cables or the characters?
- [01:51]
Colin McCann
Cables came first. And if you think of turning our world upside down and with Mount Everest down there and with all these cliffs and all these crags and all these canyons, these tubes which carry 95% of the world's information, they snake along the bottom of the floor. But we tend to think that it's a level sea floor. It's not. And sometimes I'm amazed by the fact that they carry so much other information. There's only about 450 of them, but sometimes they snap when way down there in the deep darkness.
- [02:24]
Gilbert Cruz
And what happens when they snap?
- [02:25]
Colin McCann
You gotta repair them because you can't put out. To put out a new cable would probably cost about $4 billion. These cables are owned by Meta, they're owned by Google, they're owned by Microsoft. All the big tech companies own them. And so a crew has got to go out there to repair them. Now, if it's close to shore, you can send down a diver. If it's a little bit further out from shore, up to, say, a kilometer, a kilometer and a half. You can send down what's called an ro, which is basically a robot. But after that, all bets are off because you're going down into the abyssal zone. And basically what you do is you throw out a rope with a grappling hook, which you would have done 150 years ago, and you search for a needle in a haystack for the snapped tube, which could be under layers and layers of debris underwater.
- [03:15]
Gilbert Cruz
This sounds very retro. It is the modern era. We're talking about cables that transmit everything, the Internet, text messages, all this stuff. And you have to throw a grappling hook miles down into the ocean or whatever it is, in order to find the broken spot.
- [03:34]
Colin McCann
It does sound retro in the sense that the first cables were laid down in, believe it or not, the 1860s, okay, phone cables. They were telegraphic cables. Telegraph cables, and then came the phone cables. But at that stage, if they broke underwater, they had to do the same thing. Put down a rope, grappling hook, pick it up, and then attach it again at the ends. That's basically what they do. However, these cables, as you say, are like part of a larger world right now. And the whole world of espionage is very interesting since the Russians are cutting cables in the Baltic Sea, the Houthis are cutting cables in the Red Sea. Everybody knows that the control of information is the control of the mind, which is control of desires and passions and wars. And in fact, I talked recently to a British admiral who said the next war will not begin in the air like they did last century and even this century, but they will begin underwater. We will see all the cables being clipped and all these countries cut off. And that's why it sounds conspiratorial. It could be, but that's why the Russians are out right now cutting, testing cables. That's why the Chinese are out right now. That's why the rest of the world is looking at this and a little bit scared about what's going on. Now, I don't know if the novel is prescient in any way, but I wanted to talk about repair and end up. As far when I got deep into the subject, I did talk about repair, which is human repair or actual repair of a cable. But I also ended up talking about sabotage, too. And the sabotage of these cables is something that has to be on our minds.
- [05:13]
Gilbert Cruz
I have questions about the boat, I have questions about the crew. But tell me about the cables. Describe for me and for our listeners what these are. How big are they? How Thick, are they? What's in them?
- [05:23]
Colin McCann
Guess what? They are no bigger than a garden hose. Or an even better metaphor is, you know those pipes that you have at the back of your toilet?
- [05:30]
Gilbert Cruz
Sure.
- [05:31]
Colin McCann
They are exactly that size. And inside you have layers of Kevlar to protect them. You have copper to conduct some of the electricity. You have other layers of different protection. But the most important thing are the tiny fibers that run through the middle of them. And they all work concentrically. And these tiny fibers, they're no bigger than your eyelash. So when next time your eyelash falls on your cheek or falls on a piece of paper in front of you, pick it up and look at it. Because that is the width of the thing that carries all of our hopes and dreams. And it's all carried, believe it or not. Let there be light in flashes. Billions of of pulses of light per second going through those tiny tubes.
- [06:17]
Gilbert Cruz
So when I send in an email to my friend in England, it's a flash of light through an eyelash is.
- [06:24]
Colin McCann
What you're telling me. It goes from our microphones down into a black box that is here. The New York Times shoots outside, down in fiber optic cables, goes down to 60 Hudson street, where it gets parsed in 60 Hudson street, shoots out, then either to Long island or New Jersey, depending on the traffic, to the landing stations, then goes under the beach into the sea, and then into that cable that we said was no bigger than a hose, then goes all the way to Cornwall and then goes by fiber optic cable to London, where it gets into a black box, all in 0.0006 of a second or less. Sometimes it's traveling close to the speed of light because when you do a WhatsApp or whatever, the person sounds like they're actually there.
- [07:11]
Gilbert Cruz
Absolutely.
- [07:12]
Colin McCann
It's a tiny fraction of a second taken together. Now, this is confounding, confusing, but also miraculous. And I think the wonder of it all is something that attracted me. How the hell does my voice and my email get to Dublin, get to London, get to South Africa in basically no time? And what sort of world are we living in? And what does it mean? And does that hurt us, or is it good for us? All of these questions are really interesting.
- [07:43]
Gilbert Cruz
I have a section here from your book. I would love if you could read it. Is you writing about in your mind or in the mind of your narrator, all of the things that pass through one of these cables?
- [07:55]
Colin McCann
And very important to say it's in the mind of the narrator, because I am not the narrator, because It's a novel. And because this guy is different to me, even though he's Irish, that was one of the important things about the novel.
- [08:06]
Gilbert Cruz
What is his name?
- [08:07]
Colin McCann
His name is Anthony Fennon. And this is what he says. Who knows what it was that the cable was carrying at the time? All the love notes, all the algorithms, all the financial dealings, the solicitations, the prescriptions, the solutions, the insinuations, the theories, the chess games, the sea charts, the histories, the contracts, the divorce papers, the computer hacks, the wild lies, the voices, the terror, the nonsense, the known, the unknown, the promises, the porn, the Alphabet of flesh, the sing song of skin, the million wisps of disinformation, the flotsam of our longings, the jetsam of our truths, all of it all suspended in a series of wet tubes at the bottom of the ocean floor.
- [08:59]
Gilbert Cruz
Now, when you're writing a passage like that, how many times you swapping out phrases and words and how do you know when that paragraph is perfectly balanced?
- [09:12]
Colin McCann
You do exactly that. You read it aloud. Like I walk around my house and my grown children, when they're back, they say, there goes daddy saying the F word again. Or we want to get the rhythm. So to me, the music is more important than the meaning. So you suggest the meaning through the music of what's happening. But you also have to be aware of what your narrator knows and what she or he or they. So you got to be also in the mind of your narrator at that particular time. If it was an engineer, it would be a different passage. If it was a chaplain, it would be a different passage. He happens to be a journalist out at sea, and he's trying to figure out all the things that are happening around. His life is also broken. He's one of these lonely men in shirt sleeves hanging out of windows, as he would have been in the 20th century T. S. Eliot poem Love Song in jail for Prufrock. In fact, a lot of it is. There's a lot of mentions of Prufrock and other books in the book, but you try to get your narrator to talk to you.
- [10:09]
Gilbert Cruz
Now, you spoke a few minutes ago about how you want to write a story about repair. I think as soon as anyone starts reading this book, they see that the plot, as it were, and that metaphor are intertwined. The narrator says he's looking for a story about repair. Obviously, it's the repair of this wire that he is hoping to serve as the foundation for as a magazine story, but it's also about self repair. And it was reminiscent of another line that you wrote in your Letters to a Young Writer, which is a book they wrote years ago in which you have all these short chapters which you're talking to young writers. You are a writing teacher. And so it's something that you know how to do. You wrote, be an explorer, not a tourist. Go somewhere nobody else has gone. Fight for repair. Why has this been on your mind? And why was this the story through which to tell that?
- [11:01]
Colin McCann
I'm thankful for that question. And the book started after the pandemic, and I was about six months into the pandemic, and I thought to myself, what is the theme now? What are we looking for? What will we be looking for in a couple of years? And thought, okay, it's gonna be healing. Now, I don't mean this to be up there in the air or anything like that, but healing might be the thing. And then maybe it's gonna be repair. And I was for a story for about repair, and I found a story about a ship that goes out to sea and repairs cables. And I was like, what the hell? What does that mean? I thought everything went up in the air and was parsed out by satellites. And turned out that it wasn't. But also, interestingly, in that book, Letters to a Young Writer that you quote, I also said that plot is juvenile. Now, guess what? Always say, get ready to say something and laugh at yourself a year or two later. Because this is a very plot driven novel for me. It's one narrator, it's chronological. He tells you from the very beginning, more or less, what's gonna happen. And then you spend a lot of the time trying to figure out what he knows, what he doesn't know. And the big thing for me was the aftertaste of this novel. So for me, the repair actually comes, hopefully for a reader, after the novel, because it presents a lot of different questions, but it doesn't try to answer anything. And I also believe that's what we should be doing as novelists, as poets, even as journal, presenting the world as it seems to be so that our readers can go in there and question and not be entirely certain about what it is that you want to say.
- [12:44]
Gilbert Cruz
You say that you started thinking about this book when you came across a ship. Tell me about that ship.
- [12:50]
Colin McCann
That ship was the Leon Thevenin, and that is based in Cape Town in South Africa, and it patrols the Atlantic, and there are plenty of breaks in the cables around the Atlantic, in particular around the Congo and in the northern half of Africa. So in this particular case, I Follow basically a true story about the Congo flooding. So instead of the boats going upriver, the Congo sort of has its own inherent revenge and everything gets swept out to sea. The unfortunate thing about the Congo flooding is, of course, it relates to climate change and it relates to all these things that we are doing to ourselves and to one another. The consequences of our actions are extraordinary. So there's a huge landslide in the Congo river that can go up to 800 kilometers out to sea. It is truly extraordinary. If one of these landslides happened in New York City, would be wiped away. So at the bottom of this particular pathway is that tiny cable. And guess what? It's gonna rupture. Who ruptures it? We rupture it.
- [14:07]
Gilbert Cruz
I thought it was interesting when I was reading about this ship, that this was the ship that was dispatched to use its submersible to recover the flight recorder from a flight that exploded off the coast of Ireland in 1985. Something that I had never heard of before. It's incredible. That ship is still out there 30 years later or more, operating, doing underwater repair.
- [14:29]
Colin McCann
This particular ship has done the most underwater repairs of any ship in the world, but it also has to capture other things. So if there's a flight that goes down, it has to go in and it has to figure out exactly where the black box happens to be. And while the bodies were not able to be recovered, we could recover the black box, which is haunting to me. And I thought that the people on these ships must be very interesting. As it turns out, yeah, I went out on the Leon Thevin only for a very short time, but they were an amazing crew. You had high tech guys who would bring. Who would use these fusion boxes to bring the cables together. Then you had the engine room people. Then you had the people who were in charge of the remotely operated vehicles, the chefs. The chefs kind of loved me. They called me. They called me the book guy. And whenever I had a meal that was. It was covered in cellophane. If I was late or whatever, they'd write across it, the book guy. And they were so happy to talk. Do you get this? Do you find that people are really happy to talk about subjects that fascinate them and they want to get the story out into the world?
- [15:34]
Gilbert Cruz
Absolutely. People. I've been journalists for several decades. Early in one's journalistic career, you're a little dubious of going out and just talking to people because you think people don't. People just want to be left alone. People don't normally want to be left alone. They want to talk to you. They want to tell you their story. So it doesn't surprise me at all that's it's wonderful for a writer or a journalist when you come across the path of someone who's just ready, they're ready to talk.
- [15:59]
Colin McCann
I think everyone's ready. I think the world is held together with stories. I think it is. I've said this before, but I do think it is our inherent democracy that these stories can go, and they're equal. They can go across borders and different boundaries. Everybody has a story to tell. Everybody actually wants to tell a story. But the beauty of it is, if you're a writer, is that you can step into a world that you probably maybe haven't seen before, and you can introduce it then to other people. But telling somebody else's story while they tell yours back to you, which is part of Narrative 4, an organization I co founded many years ago. I think that is one of the most elegant and democratic and powerful things to do.
- [16:43]
Gilbert Cruz
When you say telling someone your story and having them tell it back to you, what does that actually mean?
- [16:49]
Colin McCann
That's the inherent fundamental backbone of this organization, Narrative 4, where we bring young people together to tell one another's stories. And the quickest way to explain it to you is that we might get young people from, say, the South Bronx to exchange stories with kids from eastern Kentucky. Now, just parse that for a second. The South Bronx and Eastern Kentucky. And immediately we think, wow, they're very different. These kids are black and. Or immigrant. These kids are white and or Cherokee. These kids are urban. These kids are rural. These kids are come from a blue political background. These kids come from a red political background. And you get them together in a room, and guess what? They are completely terrified of one another. Terrified almost to tears until they get a chance to tell a story, a personal story to one another, maybe about repair. Or it could be the repair of a bicycle tube, could be the repair of a relationship, could be the repair of a country, whatever else it happened to be. And then they suddenly realize that they're so much more alike than they are different. And the young girl who wears the hijab in South Bronx actually has AirPods, and she's listening to Beyonce. The guy down in. In Kentucky in the holler, driving his red truck along, is also listening to Beyonce. And he suddenly realized, oh, she is so much more alike than I ever thought. And I do think that these stories bridge the gaps, and they're particularly important in today's world. That's why the cables were important to me. What are these cables carrying? How do they carry and how do they actually affect us?
- [18:19]
Gilbert Cruz
We'll be right back.
- [18:38]
Film Announcer
Don't miss the Friend, a new film from Bleecker street starring Naomi Watts and Bill Murray, based on the New York Times bestseller Iris. World is turned upside down when her late friend Walter leaves her his Great Dane Apollo. Yet as Iris bonds with him, she begins to come to terms with her own life. Also starring Ann Dowd, Sarah Pidgeon, and introducing Bing, the Great Dane. Deadline calls the Friend a quintessential New York movie. Moving, funny, humane and quite unforgettable. Now playing nationwide.
- [19:08]
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- [19:34]
Gilbert Cruz
Welcome back. This is the Book Review podcast and I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm here this week with the writer Colin McCann and we're talking about his new book Twist column. In that book of writing, we just referenced that book of writing advice. You also wrote research is the bedrock of nearly all good writing, even poetry. You must find the divine detail. And the more specific the detail, the better. I'm curious if there was a divine detail or some of the divine details that you came across in the research for this particular book, which I imagine was pretty research heavy.
- [20:07]
Colin McCann
Yeah, most of my books are research heavy. I enjoy going into a world. It generally takes me about three or four years to write a novel, whether that be Paragon, which was in Israel, Palestine, whether that be Transatlantic, which was about the Irish peace process in general. But this book, which takes place on the sea, was full of those extraordinary details, including that one we mentioned earlier about all the information being in a tube, in a fiber optic cable the size of an eyelash. The idea that they were going out to sea and searching for a needle in a haystack. And then the more I began to study it, the more I began to realize that how this stuff was owned. And some of the novel, and not to give too much away, but some of it takes place in Alexandria, Egypt. And that is a nexus point for a lot of the world's information. Cause it's coming from Africa, coming from Europe, coming from Asia. And guess what? If you blow some of those cables or if you sabotage some of those cables, you can take out a great portion of the world's Internet or even slow it down. Now there are certain areas in the world where if you take out one cable, you will leave people completely isolated. This is very scary. In Africa, for instance, you take out one of the cables on the west coast, everything is turned around because the Internet is self healing. Everything goes to the east coast. But if you decide, or if there's a group out there, or maybe a state actor, but generally a non state actor that wants to take out both cables, you can isolate Africa very easily. And in fact, I've talked to people experts much more than me, cause I'm a bit of a Luddite, but they told me that they believe that they could take down the world's Internet. The world's Internet with six boats, a crew of divers and an online crew of about a half dozen. Now these are people who know what's going on, if that's not scary. I have been to the landing stations here in New York, New Jersey, and I've stood over the manhole covers that carry the world's Internet.
- [22:08]
Gilbert Cruz
Describe for our listeners what a landing station is.
- [22:11]
Colin McCann
A landing station is where these big these cables come into our countries and then they get parsed out again and they shoot down the different wires. But basically they look like this. They're small, squat bungalow type buildings. And you will recognize them because there might be a little bit of a chain link fence around them. And there'll probably be a tiny camera in the corners of the eaves, but they will have no windows and they have flat roofs and they have. Outside, they will have large generators that will be humming because you've got to keep the place cool. So inside you have all these wires. Generally maybe one person at any one time, maybe two people, and the place hums. The heat that comes out of the, out of these landing stations, which are literally just off the beach, is extraordinary. But you could be laying on your towel or put down your umbrella at a point in the beach where the cable is literally going four feet under your butt. And the fact that we're so vulnerable is really extraordinary.
- [23:12]
Gilbert Cruz
There's a section early in the book where the Internet goes out. The cable is cut. It precipitates the narrator and the crew going out on the boat. And your narrator. Fennell says, we were like stunned birds. We had flown into the glass. We had to check ourselves for damage. We stood up, the uncertainty hummed, we tried to brush ourselves off. We were all hitting refreshed. And it made me wonder if you remember any situations where you Found yourself unexpectedly without Internet access. How do people act when that happens? How did you act?
- [23:49]
Colin McCann
I personally get freaked out. I used to be very proud of the fact that I only had a flip phone, and now I'm fully connected. But whenever I lose my. Like everybody else, whenever I misplace my phone, I'm completely lost. But it's wonderful to disconnect yourself. And if you walk down the street today, 90% of people are looking into their phones. And then we're not looking at each other, we're not looking at the world. And we've put all these GPS coordinates on our days, on our imagination, even on our memories. And I wonder what would happen if we decided, say, as a group, as a nation, to say we'll have one day off where we just get entirely away from this. Now, obviously, there's some essential services, hospitals and so on, that will absolutely need the Internet. I'm not talking about cutting off the Internet, but cutting off our relationship with this phone. Now, the phone is not the problem. The phone is made of plastic and it's made of wires, sand, silicon, and a few other bits and bobs. It's our relationship to the phone. And when we start to think about that, and it's also our relationship to the mythical men behind the curtain. Cause there are men behind the curtain who are deciding what the algorithms are deciding. And they're almost like they've got little drop bottles of dopamine and they drop a squirt of dopamine down into our brains, and we go down and down and down and further into these rabbit holes, and then we wonder, how did I get here? And why did I get here? Now, the technology's not bad, right? I'm not one of these people who thinks, three legs good, two legs bad, whatever. But it is our relationship to technology. Technology is not necessarily good either. So, like that Niels Bohr notion that you can have a truth, a really essential human truth, and at the far end, the opposite end of that truth, an opposable end, is another truth which is equally true. And I like this notion because it says to us that there's not one single way technology is good. Technology is bad, for instance. But it's something that we have to carry in ourselves. A lot of what I think about these days is our inability to hold opposable ideas, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once said. But I think a lot of Whitman, and when he said, do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes, and I do believe that this multitudinous aspect of the human character is being lost a tiny bit or our recognition of our multitudinousness. We're always being characterized as only one thing. You are only Irish, you are only Muslim, you are only gay, you are only this, that and the other. But you can be all of those things all at once. And I think if we begin to branch out with our relationships to technology is good, technology is bad, and begin to find that complicated inner middle, we might become better, you know.
- [26:59]
Gilbert Cruz
The character in your book that I think contains the most multitudes is Conway. This character who's the second lead of the book. He's not the captain of the Cairo parachute, but he runs the crew who are responsible for doing the actual fixing. And you just brought up Fitzgerald. And of course Conway struck me and at least a few reviews as somewhat Gatsby esque. He has this mysterious past. He's the object of this gimlet eyed affection by the narrator a little bit. We are in April 2025, which marks the 100th anniversary of the Great Gatsby. There definitely are echoes of that book in here. I was wondering if you could talk about the relationship in your mind between your book and Gatsby or Conway and Gatsby. It just struck me very deeply.
- [27:44]
Colin McCann
Yeah. And it's absolutely true. And there is that gimlet eyed nostalgic. The narrator. My narrator has a little bit of the tone of Nick Carrey in my younger, more vulnerable years. My father told me something and he has that same sort of tone. He's also in pursuit of a mysterious man. There also happens to be a romantic relationship that's at the edges of this romantic man. He happens to said in the first page that he loses his life or his life is gone, as is Gatsby. So there are many overtones of Gatsby. And I was actually conscious of them. I was more conscious of the Gatsby overtones than I was the Heart of Darkness overtones which are also there. Or the Prufrock overtones or some Dilillo that happens to be there too. We get our voice from the voices of others. This is not like me trying to echo something. I'm not doing a tape recorder of this stuff, but I'm doing and hopefully doing a new investigation of these things, of these. Because these are ancient stories. The stories that we have are generally love stories. The narrator even says that at one stage, which might be true or maybe not true. I'm not sure if I personally believe. But he says at one stories all stories are love stories. And I'm not sure that I would personally say that. I think I would. I would probably say all stories are almost love stories, or could be love stories. But Gatsby, for me, one of the great novels, along with Ulysses and there are a few others. And in fact, I would venture to say that Underworld by Don DeLillo is one of the other great novels of the 20th century.
- [29:28]
Gilbert Cruz
You say that your narrator says at one point, all stories are love stories. You, Colin McCann, are not sure if that's true, if your narrator is full of bs. It's very funny. I understand the act of writing, obviously, but it's very funny to imagine you disagreeing with the person that you are writing into your book.
- [29:45]
Colin McCann
One of the things that I would like to invoke is actually say the love song of JL for Prufrock, which I think is really beautifully written. But, yes, Elliot is much smarter than Prufrock. He puts Prufrock into these positions. Do I dare to send a stair. I've seen a bald spot in the middle of my hair. He talks about the mermaids singing each to each. I do not think they will sing to me. He gives his narrator a poetry, or his protagonist, excuse me, a poetry. I give my narrator a poetry, but my narrator is limited. I was conscious of that. It's a difficult thing to do as a writer if you know that you're writing about a limited narrator. But I think my readers are smart enough to get that, to figure out that this narrator, oh, he's a little dodgy. Oh, maybe he doesn't know things. And at the end, things are left hazy, but I hope they're left in a beautiful haze. I hope it's a sort of fog that lifts for people and allows the sort of mourning to come through. I'm extending the metaphor too much. But basically what I'm saying is, I trust my readers. I like my readers. I think they're smarter than I am, and I think that they will complete the book for me.
- [30:53]
Gilbert Cruz
Speaking of Conway, there was a wonderful moment of poetry. There are many in the book. But your narrator says of Conway, he seemed relieved that I, too, hated the hotel. And he mentioned a little hole in the wall bar down in the Docklands where he said not a single moment cloned itself. It was an odd thing to say, I thought, but I was taken by it. I, too, as a reader, was taken by that line. What does that mean?
- [31:18]
Colin McCann
Not a single thing clones itself. Like, everything happens, and it always happens differently as time goes on. And even when you remember it, the brain that remembers is not the brain that did the remembering. The brain has changed. There've been proteins mo. And out of the brain, there'd be neurons shooting in different directions. So nothing is absolute. You cannot ever clone a single moment. You live in the moment and you happen to be there. And then when you remember it, you're remembering it slightly differently. I find that to be a really beautiful thing.
- [31:49]
Gilbert Cruz
I used to think of this when I was a little bit younger. And it freaked me out, actually. The idea that if you remembered a memory. If you actively remembered a memory too much, maybe you were changing the memory. And it made me not want to remember things. And I thought that was weird. But also I still wanted to do it.
- [32:07]
Colin McCann
I like that because it suggests that we can live in the pulse of the moment. I'm not suggesting that we should forget everything. Cause we have to learn from where we have come from. But being actively involved in the pulse of the moment, like living your life and living it out loud, I think is an important thing. Now, to be able to parse it and think about it and learn a lesson from it is incredibly important too. Especially when we talk about history and things going on in the world. And you think certain people are gonna be on the right side of history in the years to come. They might be suffering now, whether it be in the United States or whether it be in the west bank or Gaza, Whether it be in Ukraine, whether it be in Sudan. But history will eventually look at these things. And it will be remembered and looked at. Not that we can live in the pulse of the moment. But the beautiful thing about literature, I think. I don't know if you agree with this. Is that you can. A pulsing moment. That's different to, say, nonfiction, which steps aside from it. That you can actually put your reader, or certainly your narrator. Into a moment where it feels alive. And that you're living something as it happens.
- [33:17]
Gilbert Cruz
I think that is true. And I think it's one of the things that distinguishes literature from any other artistic medium. The thing that always strikes me as amazing about. About literature, and maybe this is true of Ulysses, your favorite book. Is how it can manipulate time in ways that even in film, just seem incredible to me.
- [33:37]
Colin McCann
And I do think if you didn't talk about Ulysses, it's 24 hours and walking around. That's the plot of the book. You walk around Dublin for 24 hours. A man who's cuckolded and whatever else. And yet it becomes a compendium of human experience. And so for me, one of the reasons, and I wrote in the New York Times about this many years ago. For me, one of the beautiful things is that my grandfather was alive on June 16, 1904. His father, my great grandfather, was actually the same age as Leopold Bloom in the novel. Now, I met my grandfather one time. I never met my great grandfather, but I know my great grandfather from Ulysses. So this act of creating fiction, of this imaginary act of creating Leopold Bloom, allows me to recognize within myself, within my own blood that's thumping through me right now what happened, say to my great grandfather or the streets that he walked on, or the politics that he lived through, all of these things. How beautiful is that I can have access to my own self, to my own history by virtue of a great novel. And I do think that's what great literature can do.
- [34:55]
Gilbert Cruz
But what is the difference, you alluded to this briefly, between that and Ulysses, of course, does it as great as it's ever been done, and someone writing a history of early 1900s Dublin and saying, this is what people wore and this is what, this is what the politics were, this is what was on the front page.
- [35:12]
Colin McCann
I think that's very important that you have that. But it's about being conscious of the actual moment. Look, I think literature has a sort of active, non violent sense of communicating information. So in other words, you can go and you can read about something awful, whether it be the Irish famine or the Nakba or the Holocaust or whatever else it happens to be, and you can experience the pain, you can empathetically experience the pain of what's going on. If the literature really gets to the heart of the moment. And then yet you can come away, you can walk away and you're changed and your memories are changed, your body's changed, your brain has changed, your sense of history has changed, but you have not actually experienced the physical hunger or the violence or the racism or any of the things that were going on yet you know about. And this is something that I think verges on the miraculous in the same way that our communication lines verge on the miraculous, that we can shoot this bit of information from one place to the next. Do I know what it actually means? No, I wouldn't presume to say that. But I do think that it's my job to create some of it in whatever small way that I can.
- [36:31]
Gilbert Cruz
You brought it back to the cables. That was just a magnificent way to bring it all the way back around.
- [36:36]
Colin McCann
But it's all about the cables, man.
- [36:37]
Gilbert Cruz
All the way back around. I Want to end by asking you a somewhat foolish question. There's a part late in the book. It made me laugh. Our narrator is writing a new story about a fellow Irish writer. He says by way of describing him, a dandy. He wore a thin purple scarf. Even in the heat, I'm looking at you wearing a scarf. I've seen dozens of photos of you with all these different scarves. How many scarves do you have and when did you start wearing them?
- [37:02]
Colin McCann
There's no foolish question. I will tell you that. I took a bicycle across the United States when I was 21. So almost 40 years. It was an amazing journey. On the way, I wore bandanas every single day. Now, bandanas are important because, like, you use them to put them on your head, obviously to stop the heat. And then, you know, if you're picking up your saucepan and the saucepan's hot, and, you know, you're at a campfire or God forbid, you got a wound, you gotta clean it out, whatever. Bandanas were really important to me when I moved to New York. Then a few years later, I still tried to wear a bandana, but I realized, like, I was going to places and wearing a blue bandana or a red bandana. That's not getting into it.
- [37:38]
Gilbert Cruz
Different meanings depending on what. What years we're talking about here.
- [37:41]
Colin McCann
And then also in certain parts of New York, you wore bandana. You were experienced in different ways. So I started wearing scarves, and that was many years ago. I even have Frank McCourt's old scarves. I loved Frank. And Ellen, his widow, gave me all his scarves, and I wear them now and then. And, yeah, it's stupid, but I feel that. I did not say they're important. Listen, maybe it's affected. I don't know. But I like wearing. They're fun. And I also end up giving them out to people sometimes. There you go. And maybe it's a community. By the way, it was a community for me when I was in Texas and I graduated these kids through a wilderness program. I would always graduate them through with a bandana. So part of it is recognition of history, and part of it is vanity, and part of it is just fun.
- [38:25]
Gilbert Cruz
I think they look great.
- [38:26]
Colin McCann
Thank you.
- [38:27]
Gilbert Cruz
You're welcome. Thank you for being on the Book Review podcast.
- [38:29]
Colin McCann
Thank you so much for inviting me.
- [38:32]
Gilbert Cruz
That was my conversation with Colin McCann about his new novel Twist. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thanks for listening.
- [38:51]
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- [39:04]
Colin McCann
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