Songdogs: A Novel [Paperback]

Colum McCann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 1996

With unreliable memories and scraps of photographs as his only clues, Conor Lyons follows in the tracks of his father, a rootless photographer, as he moved from war-torn Spain, to the barren plains of Mexico, where he met and married Conor's mother, to the American West, and finally back to Ireland, where the marriage and the story reach their heartrending climax. As the narratives of Conor's quest and his parents' lives twine and untwine, Collum McCann creates a mesmerizing evocation of the gulf between memory and imagination, love and loss, past and present.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Irish writer McCann's first novel is a powerful, sometimes mesmerizing commentary on the nature of family and identity, memory and loss. The story opens with 23-year-old narrator Conor Lyons, just returned to Ireland after a five-year trip abroad, spying on his father fly-fishing in a polluted river. The narrative goes on to detail the young man's week-long visit home, a sojourn that proves important primarily in how it relates to, and evokes, the past?beginning with a reconstruction of the father's life as a photographer and adventurer wandering first through war-wracked Spain and then through Mexico, where he meets and marries Conor's mother. The couple moves to the U.S. and on to Ireland, where the narrator is born. Conor's parents have a turbulent marriage, ending in the mother's mysterious disappearance when Conor is 12; it was to retrace his parents' travels, hoping to find his missing mother, that Conor left his homeland. Focusing on remembrance, McCann links events by mood as much as by date, employing prose of a poetic logic and musical cadence that binds transitions of character, time and place into a cogent melody and pattern. Toward novel's end, we begin to see that Conor's search for his mother in the territory of the past is as futile as his father's quest for a giant fish in a dead river. In a moving climax, the author illustrates that it is the quest for, rather than the attainment of, personal grails that defines and redeems us as individuals.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This first novel by a young Irish writer living in America is a sad, even grim tale of a boy's search for an explanation for the disintegration of his family. Conor Lyons goes to Ireland as a young adult and stays for a time with his father, who now lives in dreary, unkempt circumstances. He tries to discover why his Mam left the family when he was a boy. Part of the mystery seems to lie in the erotic images his father, a wandering photographer, had made of Mam when she was young. The awkward, painful understanding between father and son is the best part of the novel, which, despite almost unrelieved wretchedness, shows considerable promise. For larger collections.
Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Picador (October 15, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312147414
• ISBN-13: 978-0312147419
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #303,245 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Colum McCann is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness, and Songdogs, as well as two critically acclaimed story collections. His fiction has been published in thirty languages. He has been a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was the inaugural winner of the Ireland Fund of Monaco Literary Award in Memory of Princess Grace. He has been named one of Esquire's "Best and Brightest," and his short film Everything in This Country Must was nominated for an Oscar in 2005. A contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Paris Review, he teaches in the Hunter College MFA Creative Writing Program. He lives in New York City with his wife and their three children.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, May 27, 1999

By 

Mr. Dean Fenley "Dean in Decatur" (Georgia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Songdogs: A Novel (Paperback)

One of the best I've read in years. Hums with a dreamy atmosphere--glimpses of reality in a fog of rememberance. Writing is wonderful, story absorbing, characters real and more. A great companion to "So Long, See You Tommorrow," by Wm.Maxwell. Similar to "All the Pretty Horses," but better, I think. Few books make me want to push them onto friends--this one did.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A remarkable achievement, August 16, 2005

By 

HORAK (Zug, Switzerland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Songdogs: A Novel (Paperback)

Mr McCann portrays a young man, Conor Lyons, visiting his ageing father Michael during six days in Mayo, Ireland. During these six days - they seem like the days of the Creation indeed - Conor retraces his father's epic life from his early childhood after the first World War when he was just a bundle of abandoned skin and rescued by two Protestant ladies who raised him. Later, when the ladies died, Michael sold their property and developed a strong passion for photography. He sold his prints to various newspapers. In 1939 he went to Madrid and subsequently to Mexico where he married Juanita. Obsessed with the beauty of her body, Michael took hundreds of pictures of her in various stages of nudity. These photos became a strong point of discord between them in later years and they're the probable cause for Juanita's vanishing 11 years before Conor's account. After that they moved to California, Wyoming and New York before finally returning back to Ireland.
It is the impressive tale of a son retracing his parents' long journey in order to try to find his mother again. It is also the story of a son witnessing the physical decay of his old father rotting in his own dirt and whose sole preoccupation in old age is fishing. A formidable novel by the best contemporary Irish novelist.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An interesting journey, October 5, 2000

By 

M. Phillips (Austin, TX United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Songdogs: A Novel (Paperback)

I enjoyed this book. It is not your typical book with conflict and tension leading to a climax and then resolution. If you go in expecting that of Songdogs, you'll be sorely disappointed. Instead, go into this book looking for a journey and then sit back and enjoy the journey Songdogs takes you through. The characters and images are very well put together. The writing is so evocative at times, that I could smell the dust and feel the sun on my back as they built the wall. The writing is excellent. Colum has a wonderful gift for transporting you into the lives of his characters. This book will give you a nice introduction to Colum and his writing.