Compelling look at a Gypsy's life

By Colum McCann

Random House. 333 pp. $24.95

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Reviewed by Michael McHale

The eponymous Zoli of Colum McCann's astonishing fifth novel is a Gypsy poetess, singer, political pawn, and - eventually - cultural outcast. Her eventful early years were spent with her people as they guided their caravans and horses back and forth in and around the Carpathian foothills outside Bratislava, and endured life at the business end of Eastern Europe's mid-century social and political tumult.

As a child in the '30s, Zoli witnessed the icy extermination of her immediate family at the hands of needlessly brutal Hlinka Guards. Zoli's eccentric grandfather raised her among the camps of her people and, against all Roma traditions - traditions forged millennia ago when the Romani diaspora developed a deep suspicion of the outside world - taught the girl to read.

The Romani are a far more diverse people than stereotype suggests, and Zoli's subgroup represented something approximating Romani aristocracy, insofar as they made their way in life primarily as musicians. Their most valuable possessions were their harps, and Zoli distinguished herself early on as a singer of the traditional songs, as well as a composer and singer of new ones.

With a subtle and 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 stick around and warm up. Initially it seems an off-putting way of life - full of mud, deprivation, discomfort, superstition, conjurers, and badly behaved children. McCann gets the reader to look past all that and develop an appreciation for the Roma's relationship to the land, uncompromised by those untold industrial processes required by conventional life, which estrange us from any real appreciation of the root elements of our immediate environments.

For Zoli and her people, willow trees yield a wealth of fashion options; morning dew is prized for its numerous cleaning applications, and found, discarded objects are prized for repurposed use as jewelry, furniture or building material. Various do-gooders entering the camp for the Gypsies' own good inevitably leave exasperated by their intransigence. From the Gypsy perspective, respect for the old ways always trumps whatever convenience might be offered by the new.

As Zoli's reputation grows among her people, a new political wind blows in nearby Bratislava as the war ends and the Iron Curtain drops. At first, this seems like good news for the Roma. Communism deals the fascist Hlinka Guards their comeuppance as it equips Czechoslovakia's newly installed power brokers with an ideology calling for the lifting up of oppressed peoples. Whether or not those oppressed people wished to be lifted up or not is a question that gets scant consideration.

A Slovakian Communist intellectual, Slannsky, and his English protégé, Swann, hear about Zoli and see in her an opportunity to fold her marginalized culture into a new, truly egalitarian proletariat culture, which, by harnessing poetry's inherent power, they would help shape. They publish her songs as poetry, put her image on posters, and prop her up before adoring crowds. Zoli is a reluctant participant, moved to cooperate mainly for the prospect of stirring her forbidden passions for reading, writing and, eventually, Swann. In common with many grand undertakings based heavily on ideology and lightly on facts, it all goes horribly wrong as the political sands shift once again. With a gun to the head and an ax to the caravan wheel, the government eventually "liberates" the Roma by boxing them, literally, into dreary Soviet-style apartment blocks. Few cultures ostracize their own with a more unforgiving thoroughness than do the Roma, and Zoli, now deemed a traitor by the Roma elders, must continue her life's journey as wanderer and refugee, exquisitely alone.

Zoli is clearly the result of painstaking research and is loosely based on the life of a Polish Gypsy poetess named Papusza, whose svengalis led her to publish and (by banishment, eventually) perish in order to further their own political agendas. McCann deftly switches the narrative voice throughout the book, settling on a first-person account from a much older Zoli as she reflects on the new life in the West, and on all that went before. Zoli's half-Italian, half-Roma daughter, Francesca, inherits some of her mother's inquisitiveness and zest, and an academic conference on the Romani peoples she arranges provides McCann the opportunity to give some closure to Zoli's troubled past.

McCann wisely, I think, avoids much discussion of the systematic extermination of the Roma during the Holocaust, despite its proximity in time and place to the events of this novel. While a great deal of scholarship has been devoted to this subject in recent years, tackling it head-on here could easily have overwhelmed the jeweled, close-to-perfect core of Zoli: A carefully crafted and subtle portrait of one woman's rich and troubled relationship with her people, and with her own Gypsy heart.