This Side of Brightness [Anglais] [Broché]

This Side of Brightness weaves historical fact with fictional truth, creating a remarkable tale of death, racism, homelessness--and yes, love--spanning four generations. Two characters dominate Colum McCann's narrative: Treefrog, a homeless man with a dark and shameful secret, and Nathan Walker, a black man who came north in the early years of the century to work as a "sandhog," digging the subway tunnels beneath Manhattan. Tunneling is perhaps the most dangerous occupation a man could have; in the close, dark, and dangerous pits far beneath the city streets, differences such as color or ethnic background cease to matter, and Walker soon becomes friends with his crewmates: two Irishmen and an Italian. Then an explosion in one of the tunnels literally blows Walker and three other men up through the earth and into the East River. Walker survives, but his best friend Con O'Leary is never found. Leary leaves behind a wife and young daughter whom Walker marries many years later.

Walker's tale is told in alternating chapters with Treefrog's, who, before his slide into homelessness, chose a hazardous profession--this one high up in the bright sunlight--as a construction worker building skyscrapers. But madness has brought Treefrog out of the light and back to the tunnels that Walker helped dig as he scrapes out a meager existence among the drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, and petty criminals that make up the homeless community. But the grimness of McCann's tale is leavened by the beauty of his prose and the intimations all through the book that, even on this side of darkness, redemption is possible. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Called "New York's most visible up-and-coming Irish writer" by the New York Times, McCann skillfully evokes early 20th-century New York, where Irish mixed with African Americans and Italians to dig the tunnel under the East River.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

No one can slide a note of terror into a narrator's voice quite like an Irishman. In recent years, they've given us some particularly unnerving performances, including Patrick McCabe's excursion into the mind of a psychopath, The Butcher Boy, and Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.... Now right up there with them in its dazzling blend of menace and heartbreak is the voice of the central character in This Side of Brightness, by Colum McCann, a young Irish writer currently living in New York City.... --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

It is partly a story of the men who dug and blasted New York's tunnels and of the high-steel workers who turned horizontal astonishment upon its vertical end, balancing hundreds of teetery feet above the streets to subdue the swinging girders and bolt them together into skyscrapers. Told with gripping realism and subtle detail, the facts--history researched--glow like jewels. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

McCann's writing rises above the earthbound and soars. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

It is 1916, and somewhere under the East River in New York, the sandhogs and other workers labor through mud and muck and darkness to build a transit system for a fledgling metropolis. The sandhogs, the men out front who burrow through the earth, are the physically strong and mentally tenacious among the working poor; many of them once labored in mines. The earth is close in life and death; but they take pride in their work, which allows them a livable wage at the cost of their health. On this side of brightness, it is anathema to play the petty game of race that sports itself on earth's surface. Nathan Walker, a young black from Georgia, handsome, well formed, and generous, who reminds one of Melville's lovely Billy Budd, comes to New York with love in his heart for his home near the Okefenokee swamp and will build a bond with his fellow sandhogs--two Irishmen, Conn O'Leary and Sean Power, and an Italian, Rudy "Rhubard" Vanucci. Their bond is cemented in a way they could not have dreamed of when a small hole in the tunnel wall results in a spectacular river blowout. The tragedy shapes Walker's life in a story that spans generations. McCann is a fine and bold writer, as his previous books prove (Songdogs, 1995, and Fishing the Sloe-Black River, 1996). So it's not surprising to find him tackling the peculiar, unexplored, and violent nexus between the downtrodden and persecuted Irish and African American in a flawed promise land; but one is jolted by the level of understanding he conveys about the needs and compunctions of human existence. Bonnie Smothers --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

An ambitious, idiosyncratic, moving saga of immigrant life by Irish expatriate McCann (stories: Fishing the Sloe-black River, 1996; Songdogs, 1994, etc.). Writing in a prose of considerable allusive power, McCann ingeniously uses the NYC subway as a central symbol. In 1916, the excavation of subway tunnels gives immigrant Con O'Leary a chance at a decent job, otherwise denied to recent Irish arrivals. Among his fellow ``sandhogs'' is Nathan Walker, a young black man also determined to secure some part of the alluring American Dream. When O'Leary dies in one of the frequent cave-ins afflicting the massive project, Walker elects to help his devastated widow and young daughter. Over the succeeding years, a complex affection draws Nathan and Con's daughter Eleanor together, and eventually, despite the considerable risks involved, they marry. In a brisk narrative spanning eight decades, McCann finds in the struggles and fates of Eleanor and Nathan's descendants a vivid outline of the experiences of outcasts and immigrants in American society. In a sharply ironic touch the subway tunnels that had been, for Con and Nathan, a way into the mainstream have become, by the 1980's, a home for those on society's far fringes. Treefrog, a homeless man who's taken shelter beneath Riverside Park, has been so worn down by his social exile that he's uncertain of his past and his own name. McCann further stresses the increasing harshness of modern life by juxtaposing his depiction of Treefrog's impoverished, hallucinatory existence against some transcendent images of the natural world, including, most memorably, a recurrent image of a flock of cranes. A poet's version of a family saga, mingling original and persuasive imagery with a story of great dramatic impactand an angry, convincing criticism of the manner in which American society has repeatedly frustrated the attempts of outsiders to make a home. A haunting novel, by a writer emerging as a major talent (First printing of 35,000; Book-of-the-Month alternate selection; author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

"A rarity in this cool era-the urban saga with a social conscience, employing the large canvas once used by Steinbeck and Algren."

"As luminescent as its name, resplendent with dignity, this is one of the few novels in recent memory that I mourned even as I read."

"Disturbingly beautiful . . . A dazzling blend of menace and heartbreak."

Hailed for its "shining prose" (The Philadelphia Inquirer) and "gripping realism" (Newsday), This Side of Brightness is a powerful blend of imagination and history set in underground Manhattan. At the turn of the century, New York's sandhogs burrowed beneath the East River, digging the tunnels that would link Brooklyn to Manhattan; many decades later, those same tunnels offer refuge to the desperate and homeless. Spanning seventy years, Colum McCann's acclaimed novel tells the story of three generations bound to the tunnels by ill-fated loves, unintended crimes, and social taboos. Haunting and lyrical, This Side of Brightness delivers a tale of family, race, and redemption as bold and fabulous as New York City itself.

Hailed for its "shining prose" ("The Philadelphia Inquirer") and "gripping realism" ("Newsday"), "This Side of Brightness" is a powerful blend of imagination and history set in underground Manhattan.

Colum McCann is the author of Songdogs (Picador, 0-3121-4741-4) and Fishing the Sloe-Black River (Owl Books, 0-8050-4107-9, $12.00). Born in Dublin, he lives in New York with his wife and daughter.