Dublin Opinion

Here at Dublin Opinion we get a lot of visitors interested in finding video footage of travellers having b*re knu**le f*st f**hts with each other. Dr. Ben posted an article about what turns out to be the most popular Google searches in Ireland using Google Trends and it’s been getting hits from f*g*t fans ever since.

So, it’s interesting that Colum McCann (who’s latest novel, “Zoli,” an account of a Romani poet in Slovakia is to be published this month) is writing in Salon about a growing body of literature attibuted to those Central European Travellers, the Romani.

Actually, it was this vivid description that got my attention.

“The boy sat near the bridge, at the edge of the Gypsy camp, rolling a cigarette. The bridge was an elegant garbage heap. It was put together with planks, aluminum siding, rope, tree trunks, sodden cardboard, tires. The boy himself looked part of the bridge as he sat, cross-legged, carefully sprinkling the tobacco onto the paper. He had torn a page from a book in order to roll the cigarette. When he lit it, the paper flared a moment, and he smoked the tobacco in quick sharp bursts. When he was finished, he tore the remaining pages from the book and stuffed them in the pocket of his jeans. He threw down the cover and it landed at the foot of the bridge. The cover was too stiff for rolling tobacco. When he walked off toward a ramshackle shed, leaving the book on the ground, I strolled across to see what he had just smoked — a Slovak translation of the Romanian writer Emile Cioran. Nothing goes without saying. The boy had taken the page down into his lungs.”

Once, when I worked in a bookshop, I impressed a customer by leading her directly to an edition of one of Cioran’s philosophical works (I forget which one) that had been misplaced in the Fiction section. At the time I attributed her look of surprise to my knowing who Cioran was. However, it could have been a reaction to the fact that before I handed over the book I wrote the number for the local Samaritans in the inside cover.

Edit
I must admit, that’s a very weak joke and it’s easy to spot as a lie too. Of course, I didn’t write the number of the Samaritans in the inside cover.

However, I don’t feel bad about this because I suspect that Colum McCann lied too. It’s just too convenient that the Romani sitting in a Gypsy camp is skinning up a fat one using a page from a book written by one of Romania’s most famous intellectuals. It’s a literary conceit too far.

Also, to back me up, I read this over the weekend:

“Somewhere between the novelists who turn out not to be writing fiction, and the poets who enjoy this suspicious ability to express the most extreme emotions, we find those purveyors of “creative non-fiction” - memoirists, travel-writers and so forth - who swear blind that what they are telling us is true, but whom we suspect of having embellished and rearranged the facts, bringing to their books the shaping spirit of the novelist.