A Gypsy Melody

ZOLI

A Novel

By Colum McCann

Random House. 333 pp. $24.95

Zoli, a beautifully written novel by Colum McCann, is loosely based on the life of the Polish Gypsy poet "Papusza," who lived through most of the 20th century. McCann's writing is so convincingly, quietly passionate that one can only imagine how he immersed himself in Roma culture while inventing a story of love and betrayal, exile and survival.

In the 1930s, Zoli is a young girl, part of a kumpanija, a band of families that moves about the countryside of what was then Czechoslovakia, never staying too long in one place. Raised by her beloved but strict grandfather after most of her family is murdered by fascists, she is taught to read and write, though these acts are considered by the Roma to be dangerous, especially for a woman. Books, even radio, carry the words of outsiders. But Zoli is gifted; she has a voice that sings and a mind that invents and remembers. She and her grandfather escape death and flee to join a group of caravans, a community of cousins, of harpists, a society with music and rules and laws of its own.

"They said to me: Zoli, what did I sing? And I would say: They broke, they broke my little brown arm, now my father he cries like the rain. Or I would say: I have two husbands, one of them sober, one of them drunk, but each one I love the same."

The recalled child voice, which relates part of the novel, is crisp and accurate, yet dispassionate while narrating the most terrible of events. McCann moves the story through time and place -- present-day Slovakia, 1930s Czechoslovakia, England, Northern Italy, Paris, Hungary, Austria -- reflecting the movement of the Roma people themselves. This is one of the most satisfying aspects of the novel; the point of view keeps shifting. What we learn depends upon who is telling the story.

It begins in 2003 with a Slovakian journalist seeking information about Zoli, then moves to Zoli's first-person recollections of the 1930s (addressed, in part, to her daughter), and then on to Swann, an English expatriate who is part Irish, part Slovakian and one of the men Zoli loves. In this way, her tale encompasses the story of Eastern Europe, shifting politics and borders, banishment and exile, the hatred and the murders and then the attempts, under socialism, to "rescue" the Roma from their nomadic ways.

No matter who is telling the story, each path leads back to Zoli. As a gifted poet, she is "discovered" by a printer and publisher who also befriends the expatriate Swann. Zoli receives permission from the elders to have her poems published in the outside world. But the very work that is celebrated and makes her famous also leads to her unraveling. She finds, too late, that she has been used. "Soon her tapes were being played on the radio and she was talked about in the corridors of power. She was a new sort of Czechoslovakian woman, taken out of the margins to illustrate . . . steps forward under socialism." But new laws enable the rounding up and resettlement of her people. Banished by the Roma and blamed for their fate, she finds that she belongs to neither socialist nor Roma society.

After the formal act of banishment, she returns to the Danube, to the vicinity of the apartment blocks on the outskirts of Bratislava, where the kumpanija has been forcibly moved. They have ripped out the floorboards of their apartments to build campfires; the wheels from their wagons have been removed, yet they still gather and live outdoors. One night, hidden yet watchful, Zoli "longs to . . . stride into the camp, but she is as separate from them now as she can ever be. She watches the flickering campfires, the cigarettes traveling at mouth level, a rimless wheel of red light moving. I would, she thinks, set fire to all my words just to travel that air once more."

Zoli is loved by many, but only when her songs and poems are in favor. Her true loves turn out to be a loyal few. The tone of the novel is one of dignified sadness; there is a sense of mourning throughout, not only for the poet but for the fate of the Roma. Beautifully conceived, wonderfully told, the story is proof of an indomitable spirit. The elusive character of Zoli, the brilliant artist, is unforgettable.

-- Frances Itani, whose novel "Deafening" won a Commonwealth Award and was shortlisted

for the 2005 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award