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Colum McCann s Let the Great World Spin is a novel which captures the spirit of an age 1974, Nixon is about to resign, soldiers are home from Vietnam, the oil crisis is at its peak, and the technology of computers is on the horizon. It is also a reflection of the times we live in now with its examination of faith, art, love and belonging. With assured, empathetic, and energetic writing, this is a brilliantly crafted and engaging book.
The novel begins in August 1974 as a tightrope walker makes his way through the dawn light across the World Trade Center towers, stunning thousands of watchers below. Using the true story of Philippe Petit as a pull-through metaphor, McCann crafts a portrait of the city and a people. There s Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, who struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn the sons who died in Vietnam they soon discover how much divides them even in their grief. Further uptown, Tillie, a 38-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenaged daughter, determined not only to take care of her babies but to prove her own worth.
Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann s powerful allegory of 9/11 comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the tightrope walker s artistic crime of the century. McCann s most ambitious work to date, Let the Great World Spin has already been described as a triumphant American novel.
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The novel begins in August 1974 as a tightrope walker makes his way through the dawn light across the World Trade Center towers, stunning thousands of watchers below. Using the true story of Philippe Petit as a pull-through metaphor, McCann crafts a portrait of the city and a people. There s Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, who struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn the sons who died in Vietnam they soon discover how much divides them even in their grief. Further uptown, Tillie, a 38-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenaged daughter, determined not only to take care of her babies but to prove her own worth.
Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann s powerful allegory of 9/11 comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the tightrope walker s artistic crime of the century. McCann s most ambitious work to date, Let the Great World Spin has already been described as a triumphant American novel.
"
408 pages, Hardcover
First published June 16, 2009
4871 people are currently reading
78925 people want to read
About the author
Colum McCann
79 books4,512 followersSign up for Colum's newsletter: http://bit.ly/mccannsignup
Colum McCann is the author of three collections of short stories and six novels, including "Apeirogon," published in Spring 2020. His other books include "TransAtlantic," "Let the Great World Spin," "This Side of Brightness,""Dancer" and “Zoli,” all of which were international best-sellers.
His newest book, American Mother, written with Diane Foley, is due to be published in March 2024.
American Mother takes us deep into the story of Diane Foley; whose son Jim, a freelance journalist, was held captive by ISIS before being beheaded in the Syrian desert.
Diane’s voice is channeled into searing reality by Colum, who brings us on a journey of strength, resilience, and radical empathy.
"American Mother is a book that will shake your soul out," says Sting.
Apeirogon (2020) became a best-seller on four continent.
“Let the Great World Spin” won the National Book Award in 2009. His fiction has been published in over 40 languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Paris Review and other places. He has written for numerous publications including The Irish Times, Die Zeit, La Republicca, Paris Match, The New York Times, the Guardian and the Independent.
In December 2023 Colum (as co-founder of Narrative 4) was the 2023 Humanitarian Award nominee, awarded by the United Nations delegations at the Ambassador's Ball in New York City.
Colum has won numerous international awards. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Irish association of artists, Aosdana. He has also received a Chevalier des Artes et des Lettres from the French government. He is the cofounder of the global non-profit story exchange organisation Narrative 4.
In 2003 Colum was named Esquire magazine's "Writer of the Year." Other awards and honors include a Pushcart Prize, the Rooney Prize, the Irish Independent Hughes and Hughes/Sunday Independent Novel of the Year 2003, and the 2002 Ireland Fund of Monaco Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award. He was recently inducted into the Hennessy Hall of Fame for Irish Literature.
His short film "Everything in this Country Must," directed by Gary McKendry, was nominated for an Academy Award Oscar in 2005.
Colum was born in Dublin in 1965 and began his career as a journalist in The Irish Press. In the early 1980's he took a bicycle across North America and then worked as a wilderness guide in a program for juvenile delinquents in Texas. After a year and a half in Japan, he and his wife Allison moved to New York where they currently live with their three children, Isabella, John Michael and Christian.
Colum teaches in Hunter College in New York, in the Creative Writing program, with fellow novelists Peter Carey and Tea Obreht.
Colum has completed his new novel, "Apeirogon." Crafted out of a universe of fictional and nonfictional material, McCann tells the story of Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan. One is Israeli. One is Palestinian. Both are fathers. Both have lost their daughters to the conflict. When Bassam and Rami learn of each other's stories they recognize the loss that connects them, and they begin to use their grief as a weapon for peace.
In the novel McCann crosses centuries and continents. He stitches together time, art, history, nature and politics in a tale both heartbreaking and hopeful. Musical, cinematic, muscular, delicate and soaring, Apeirogon is a novel for our times.
It is scheduled for release in the U.S in February 2020.
Advance copies will be available here on GoodReads!!!!
Colum McCann is the author of three collections of short stories and six novels, including "Apeirogon," published in Spring 2020. His other books include "TransAtlantic," "Let the Great World Spin," "This Side of Brightness,""Dancer" and “Zoli,” all of which were international best-sellers.
His newest book, American Mother, written with Diane Foley, is due to be published in March 2024.
American Mother takes us deep into the story of Diane Foley; whose son Jim, a freelance journalist, was held captive by ISIS before being beheaded in the Syrian desert.
Diane’s voice is channeled into searing reality by Colum, who brings us on a journey of strength, resilience, and radical empathy.
"American Mother is a book that will shake your soul out," says Sting.
Apeirogon (2020) became a best-seller on four continent.
“Let the Great World Spin” won the National Book Award in 2009. His fiction has been published in over 40 languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Paris Review and other places. He has written for numerous publications including The Irish Times, Die Zeit, La Republicca, Paris Match, The New York Times, the Guardian and the Independent.
In December 2023 Colum (as co-founder of Narrative 4) was the 2023 Humanitarian Award nominee, awarded by the United Nations delegations at the Ambassador's Ball in New York City.
Colum has won numerous international awards. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Irish association of artists, Aosdana. He has also received a Chevalier des Artes et des Lettres from the French government. He is the cofounder of the global non-profit story exchange organisation Narrative 4.
In 2003 Colum was named Esquire magazine's "Writer of the Year." Other awards and honors include a Pushcart Prize, the Rooney Prize, the Irish Independent Hughes and Hughes/Sunday Independent Novel of the Year 2003, and the 2002 Ireland Fund of Monaco Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award. He was recently inducted into the Hennessy Hall of Fame for Irish Literature.
His short film "Everything in this Country Must," directed by Gary McKendry, was nominated for an Academy Award Oscar in 2005.
Colum was born in Dublin in 1965 and began his career as a journalist in The Irish Press. In the early 1980's he took a bicycle across North America and then worked as a wilderness guide in a program for juvenile delinquents in Texas. After a year and a half in Japan, he and his wife Allison moved to New York where they currently live with their three children, Isabella, John Michael and Christian.
Colum teaches in Hunter College in New York, in the Creative Writing program, with fellow novelists Peter Carey and Tea Obreht.
Colum has completed his new novel, "Apeirogon." Crafted out of a universe of fictional and nonfictional material, McCann tells the story of Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan. One is Israeli. One is Palestinian. Both are fathers. Both have lost their daughters to the conflict. When Bassam and Rami learn of each other's stories they recognize the loss that connects them, and they begin to use their grief as a weapon for peace.
In the novel McCann crosses centuries and continents. He stitches together time, art, history, nature and politics in a tale both heartbreaking and hopeful. Musical, cinematic, muscular, delicate and soaring, Apeirogon is a novel for our times.
It is scheduled for release in the U.S in February 2020.
Advance copies will be available here on GoodReads!!!!
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 10,421 reviews
December 20, 2019
In my classification system, there are books that are readers’ books (they tell an engaging story); there are books that are writers’ books (they are creative in their prose and technically sound); and then there are GREAT books that tell a good story through solid prose. Let the Great World Spin (the 2009 National Book Award winner) is such a book.
The book shares the lives of seemingly random New Yorkers in 1974, and how their lives intertwine. At the surface, they seem connected by what happens in their lives in and around August 7, 1974 when a man walked a tightrope strung between the two towers of the World Trade Center. However, as the book progresses, we find out how their lives connect on much deeper levels. This book rewards patient readers. Impatient readers will find the first few chapters disjointed, with too many unconnected plot threads. Patient readers will get to see how all these threads come together; and come together they do, and beautifully so, in a way that reminded me of Cunningham’s The Hours. It’s one of the reasons that, if I had to choose one word to describe this book, it would be “well-crafted”.
Patience also pays off for the reader in how the novel ends. For me, the first half of the book felt very dark: characters die, depressing lives remain depressing, and sorrows remain unredeemed. But in the last half of this book, there is this growing sense of hope and strength. And McCann’s story about the connectedness of life and the audacity of living despite the hardness of life completes itself.
From a prose perspective, McCann has a writing style that was fluid enough to change its voice as it drifted from character to character, but was still able to retain its structure and feel. Sentences are sharp and concise and scene descriptions always had this energy behind it. Beautifully written, and perfectly crafted. Highly recommended.
The book shares the lives of seemingly random New Yorkers in 1974, and how their lives intertwine. At the surface, they seem connected by what happens in their lives in and around August 7, 1974 when a man walked a tightrope strung between the two towers of the World Trade Center. However, as the book progresses, we find out how their lives connect on much deeper levels. This book rewards patient readers. Impatient readers will find the first few chapters disjointed, with too many unconnected plot threads. Patient readers will get to see how all these threads come together; and come together they do, and beautifully so, in a way that reminded me of Cunningham’s The Hours. It’s one of the reasons that, if I had to choose one word to describe this book, it would be “well-crafted”.
Patience also pays off for the reader in how the novel ends. For me, the first half of the book felt very dark: characters die, depressing lives remain depressing, and sorrows remain unredeemed. But in the last half of this book, there is this growing sense of hope and strength. And McCann’s story about the connectedness of life and the audacity of living despite the hardness of life completes itself.
From a prose perspective, McCann has a writing style that was fluid enough to change its voice as it drifted from character to character, but was still able to retain its structure and feel. Sentences are sharp and concise and scene descriptions always had this energy behind it. Beautifully written, and perfectly crafted. Highly recommended.
June 20, 2011
This really may be the first truly profound novel to connect itself with September 11, 2001 and New York City, if only because it does so in such an understated, oblique, and poetically suggestive way. It's also a novel that may take over a hundred pages to truly capture your imagination, but once it does, and once the connective tissue of the disparate group of characters starts to reveal itself, the novel attains a kind of hypnotic and edgy grace for its duration. So richly and deeply are McCann's various characters drawn that one finally must marvel at how much he accomplishes in his 350 pages (i.e., it would take lesser writers at least another 100 pages to render these many lives as convincingly as he does). It's a novel about unlikely (and often unknown) linkages between people, and because some of these characters represent types who are most invisible and disenfranchised in our society it's a novel that enlarges our sympathies and our compassion (or at least it should). It's also a novel about those "two towering beacons high in the clouds," the World Trade Center towers in their infancy, in a more innocent time, when they could be confronted by bravery, elan, and artistry rather than by terrorism. When the pedestrians look up to the buildings' peaks to see a tightrope walker making his way between them, their eyes cannot believe what they see -- and we reflect on the buildings' more recent history, when our eyes also could not believe what they saw, and when the notion of falling from the sky took on all those horrible shadings. When, on the novel's last page, one of McCann's characters reflects that, as humans, "we stumble on ... [we] bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves" and concludes that "it is almost enough," we feel all of the power this novel has been so patiently and inexorably building up.
January 30, 2022
Historias que se entrecruzan acerca de una serie de personas que rondan al equilibrista francés Philippe Petit en su camino por el cable que tendió entre las dos torres gemelas del World Trade Center en 1974.
No es mal libro, aunque me ha parecido un tanto irregular. Hay capítulos que me han gustado mucho, otros que prometían bastante más e incluso alguno que me sobra. Y no es que las vidas de estas personas no sean interesantes, es simplemente que su relato, con demasiada frecuencia, me ha dejado indiferente. Y eso es algo que quizás debería preocuparme porque todas las críticas ponían unánimemente el acento en su carga emotiva.
Por destacar dos historias, me gustaron mucho la de Tillie (mi preferida) y la de unos "artistas" vanguardistas envueltos en un accidente de tráfico.
Esta última creo que es emblemática de uno de los grandes temas que saqué del libro: el contraste entre la banalidad de algunas acciones y la tremenda y dura realidad de otras. En ella, una pareja que se tienen por grandes artistas y que tienen la obligación de actuar como tales -mucha droga, mucha liberalidad, muchas excentricidades-, tienen un accidente mortal y se dan a la fuga. A ella, el choque con la realidad, perdonen el fácil juego de palabras, que le supone el accidente le afecta sobremanera. Él, en cambio, está más preocupado por el estado de unos cuadros que se quedaron a la intemperie durante el incidente y que la lluvia estropeó. Un problema para el que pronto idea una gran solución: la reinterpretación de los cuadros modificados por la lluvia. Serían los primeros en hacer algo así, serían supermegaoriginales… lo que me da pie para expresar mi rechazo a ese concepto de la originalidad en el arte, algo que me supera, sobre todo cuando ese concepto de la originalidad, de ser el primero en hacer ese algo, es su única virtud.
En este sentido, siempre viene a mi mente la parodia que Trueba hace de este concepto en una escena de su oscarizada película “Belle Époque” en la que el personaje encarnado por Fernando Fernán Gómez enseña su obra cumbre y última a su invitado, un jovencísimo Jorge Sanz, un cuadro totalmente en blanco, que, como él mismo resalta, se basa en el respeto al lienzo (su mujer que es muy burra opina que lo que pasa es que es muy vago, pero, claro, es que es muy burra esta mujer). El pintor está quejoso de que ya se lo hubiera copiado un ruso, un tal Malevich, y, orgulloso, señala a su invitado la esquina inferior derecha del cuadro donde, al lado de su firma, se recoge la fecha en la que fue pintando: un año antes que el ruso.
Pero nada, lo importante es que el vasto mundo siga girando, ¿no? Bueno, eso y tener salud.
September 27, 2015
This won the national book award
Which didn’t stop me from becoming bored
Instead of this you could try a
Documentary called Man on a Wire
It’s also about Philippe Petit’s act
(Against which the cards were surely stacked)
To walk in the air between the two towers
For approximately 0.75 hours
On 7th August 1974.
By doing so he broke the law
But the DA for once did the right thing
And he wasn’t sent to Rikers or Sing Sing
Where PP’s feat was one of funambulism
Colum McCann’s is more like somnambulism
Smack-head hookers, radical priests
Mothers of Vietnam vets, deceased
Not so much New York as Cliché City
And lachrymose where it should be gritty
Sorry to say Let the Great World Spin
Is the 12th novel this year to end up in the bin
Which didn’t stop me from becoming bored
Instead of this you could try a
Documentary called Man on a Wire
It’s also about Philippe Petit’s act
(Against which the cards were surely stacked)
To walk in the air between the two towers
For approximately 0.75 hours
On 7th August 1974.
By doing so he broke the law
But the DA for once did the right thing
And he wasn’t sent to Rikers or Sing Sing
Where PP’s feat was one of funambulism
Colum McCann’s is more like somnambulism
Smack-head hookers, radical priests
Mothers of Vietnam vets, deceased
Not so much New York as Cliché City
And lachrymose where it should be gritty
Sorry to say Let the Great World Spin
Is the 12th novel this year to end up in the bin
January 16, 2010
For a book that's solely supposed to be about characters....I thought all of these characters were amazingly one-dimensional. The self-sacrificing wanna-be priest? The smarter-than-she-looks hooker? The rich lonely Park Ave housewife? Nothing unique or original in there.
Reading it didn't suck really hard, because it's an easy enough read, and there are little splotches of nice writing and insight throughout....but all in all, I didn't get it.
I also didn't get the whole "NYC in the '70s" thing from the book either. But that might be because I'm inured to the supposed grittiness of the city back then by now. It all sounds so cliched.
What I did like about the book - it made me close my eyes and imagine the Twin Towers and wonder and marvel what it would've been like to watch a man dance in the air so high up, alongside thousands of other amazed New Yorkers. RIP WTC.
Reading it didn't suck really hard, because it's an easy enough read, and there are little splotches of nice writing and insight throughout....but all in all, I didn't get it.
I also didn't get the whole "NYC in the '70s" thing from the book either. But that might be because I'm inured to the supposed grittiness of the city back then by now. It all sounds so cliched.
What I did like about the book - it made me close my eyes and imagine the Twin Towers and wonder and marvel what it would've been like to watch a man dance in the air so high up, alongside thousands of other amazed New Yorkers. RIP WTC.
January 29, 2015
I used to really enjoy short story collections. I used to read scary ones in elementary school, depressing ones in high school, and I even read trippy ones in college (thinking I was cool). But sometime during my post-college years, my interest in them began to wane. I don’t know whether this can be ascribed to getting older, but I do know that I now get frustrated with short stories. The time I invest in the setting and the characters, acclimating to the storytelling style and pacing—well, there’s not enough return on my investment. I just don’t have time for it anymore.
Thankfully, this book is not a collection of short stories. Rather, it is a single story told in a collection, and the collection holds together nicely. Let the Great World Spin is actually the story of a particular place and time: New York City, August 1974. It is about the lawlessness and drudgery of the city’s inhabitants, it is about the angst of war, but it is also about those shining moments of hope and human achievement that pierce the angst and shred the drudgery to pieces. It is about two characters in particular, one real and one fictional, who serve as a sort of lamppost for a city steeped in darkness and self-loathing. Interestingly, both characters are outsiders—new arrivals from foreign soil—as if pulled in by a city that needs just a little bit of light, please.
There is plenty to like about this book, too: its coherency, its writing style, its characters. But once again, I expose myself as a sucker for imagery. McCann uses metaphor like nobody’s business and I fricken loved it. I ended up reading this for our new book club on Goodreads, which I started with a bunch of friends as an excuse to squeeze even more books onto my reading list. And I have to admit, this was an excellent first pick.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/man_o...
Thankfully, this book is not a collection of short stories. Rather, it is a single story told in a collection, and the collection holds together nicely. Let the Great World Spin is actually the story of a particular place and time: New York City, August 1974. It is about the lawlessness and drudgery of the city’s inhabitants, it is about the angst of war, but it is also about those shining moments of hope and human achievement that pierce the angst and shred the drudgery to pieces. It is about two characters in particular, one real and one fictional, who serve as a sort of lamppost for a city steeped in darkness and self-loathing. Interestingly, both characters are outsiders—new arrivals from foreign soil—as if pulled in by a city that needs just a little bit of light, please.
There is plenty to like about this book, too: its coherency, its writing style, its characters. But once again, I expose myself as a sucker for imagery. McCann uses metaphor like nobody’s business and I fricken loved it. I ended up reading this for our new book club on Goodreads, which I started with a bunch of friends as an excuse to squeeze even more books onto my reading list. And I have to admit, this was an excellent first pick.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/man_o...
June 5, 2013
Reviews, in my opinion, aren't the right place for book reports, nor for nosegays of fanboy gush. I'm supposed to let the reader know why he or she should, could, or would want to read a title.
You should, could, AND would want to read this National Book Award-winning novel of grief, sadness, and loss because it's so damned easy to love and cherish these characters. The Catholic monk whose vocation is to bring a whisper of compassion, in its ancient and literal meaning of "shared pain", to the least and the last of people, the whores, drunks, druggies that we (most of us, anyway) do our damnedest to ignore; the wealthy mother of a Vietnam war casualty, one of the Army's computer guys, a geek whose interest in computers led him to help develop ARPANET, whose grandchild you and I are using right now; the tightrope-walking oddball whose main claim to an entry in the Akashic Records is walking between the World Trade Center's towers.
I love them all, and more besides...Tillie, the whoring mother and grandmother, whose entire world-view centers on making it all just a little, weentsy bit better than it has to be, Gloria whose losses mount and mount and still mount but whose sense of life is that it's here, so's she, so what's a girl to do but laugh? And Jaslyn. Oh, so much hinges on Jaslyn, Claire's niece of the heart. So much comes to its final, painful, joyous fruition with her arrival...and truly, ladies and gentlemen, at last here the great world spins.
Really, nothing I say can impact your personal decision to read the book or not. I can, and do, recommend it. Millions of the maniacs on a mission who have already read it are doing just that. I can only encourage you to support a writer who can create a character who says of her dead daughter's attempted savior:
"They told me {he} smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. Well at least in Heaven his...chick'll be able to reach in and grab his heart."
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
You should, could, AND would want to read this National Book Award-winning novel of grief, sadness, and loss because it's so damned easy to love and cherish these characters. The Catholic monk whose vocation is to bring a whisper of compassion, in its ancient and literal meaning of "shared pain", to the least and the last of people, the whores, drunks, druggies that we (most of us, anyway) do our damnedest to ignore; the wealthy mother of a Vietnam war casualty, one of the Army's computer guys, a geek whose interest in computers led him to help develop ARPANET, whose grandchild you and I are using right now; the tightrope-walking oddball whose main claim to an entry in the Akashic Records is walking between the World Trade Center's towers.
I love them all, and more besides...Tillie, the whoring mother and grandmother, whose entire world-view centers on making it all just a little, weentsy bit better than it has to be, Gloria whose losses mount and mount and still mount but whose sense of life is that it's here, so's she, so what's a girl to do but laugh? And Jaslyn. Oh, so much hinges on Jaslyn, Claire's niece of the heart. So much comes to its final, painful, joyous fruition with her arrival...and truly, ladies and gentlemen, at last here the great world spins.
Really, nothing I say can impact your personal decision to read the book or not. I can, and do, recommend it. Millions of the maniacs on a mission who have already read it are doing just that. I can only encourage you to support a writer who can create a character who says of her dead daughter's attempted savior:
"They told me {he} smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. Well at least in Heaven his...chick'll be able to reach in and grab his heart."
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
May 31, 2016
Oh god, don’t make me look up! I was only looking at words in a book, but the image gives me instant vertigo! And I’m NOT kidding! There’s a crazy guy doing gymnastics on a tightrope between the Twin Towers, a million feet up in the air. All the other people can look up (and are obsessed with looking up, in fact, which is totally beyond my comprehension since I have to stare intently at my feet), so what’s with me? I’m afraid of heights, so I just can’t look. I just can’t. But how can just reading about this bizarre and incredible feat affect me physically, make me dizzy and nauseous? The power of books. Just blows me away.
This book is cool. It starts with a chapter about people looking up at the madman in the sky. The story is based on the real 1970s event of a guy who walked on a wire between the two insanely tall buildings. (Sort of eerie reading about these buildings that no longer exist.) Despite my vertigo, the story pulled me right in.
But now I have to go directly to my complaint board. Because even though I was so damn happy to get away from the crazy man in the sky, I wasn’t so happy with where the author led me next—to a small town in Ireland. Who says I want to hang out with two brothers in Ireland? The contrast was too fast. You know I love New York, and even though I wanted to avoid the guy on the wire, I didn’t say I wanted to go overseas right then.
The brothers bored me to tears and I felt no connection to them. They ended up in New York, and one of them was a priest who helped hookers. I usually like reading about squalor and down-and-outers, but for some reason their story left me cold. What a downer, after the excitement of the first chapter. But never fear, the next story had me mesmerized and mostly I liked all the other stories.
Notice that I’m calling them stories. That’s complaint number 2. I signed up for a novel, but for a long while it read like a collections of short stories, too independent. I wanted dependence, I wanted connection, damn it. It took a while for the stories to meld. Finally, a little later than I liked, the stories were woven into a nice tapestry; in fact, a beautiful tapestry.
All the sudden I was in love with the book. The language is to die for, lyrical and intense. The story so juicy meaty, the characters so interesting and complex. The interwoven plot is intense and heart-wrenching. And McCann is so damn profound, I was highlighting text like mad—sometimes whole paragraphs, in fact.
A cool thing is that McCann is able to use different styles of writing, and they all work. There’s stream-of-consciousness, there’s a cool monologue by a hooker who has a fantastic voice that is wise, funny, and sad. And then there’s just plain eloquent and jazzy text that flows so well, I was just in heaven.
Here are a few quotes. It was hard to pick among the zillion gems.
From the hooker’s monologue:
They got businessmen come in for a day. Whiteys. In tighteys. They lift up their shirts, you can smell the husband panic off them, like their wife is gonna come out of the TV set.
From a Park Avenue woman whose son died in the Vietnam War:
No newspapers big enough to paste him back together in Saigon. She takes another long haul, lets the smoke settle in her lungs—she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry. The body too busy dealing with the poison. No wonder they gave them out free to the soldiers. Lucky Strikes.
One of McCann’s many wise comments:
Afterward, Gloria said to her that it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.
I read McCann's short stories last year, Thirteen Ways of Looking. I loved it too, which led me to this book. I want to read more more more of his stuff. Absolutely.
So even though I got bored occasionally with a character who left me cold, mostly I loved this book to pieces. It’s about love and grief and bravery, and it really affected me. And it’s one of those books that inspires me to write, makes me want to play with words. I do think it’s a true masterpiece.
And it’s not McCann’s fault that I got dizzy—though next time I’d prefer it if he kept things lower, more like ground level.
This book is cool. It starts with a chapter about people looking up at the madman in the sky. The story is based on the real 1970s event of a guy who walked on a wire between the two insanely tall buildings. (Sort of eerie reading about these buildings that no longer exist.) Despite my vertigo, the story pulled me right in.
But now I have to go directly to my complaint board. Because even though I was so damn happy to get away from the crazy man in the sky, I wasn’t so happy with where the author led me next—to a small town in Ireland. Who says I want to hang out with two brothers in Ireland? The contrast was too fast. You know I love New York, and even though I wanted to avoid the guy on the wire, I didn’t say I wanted to go overseas right then.
The brothers bored me to tears and I felt no connection to them. They ended up in New York, and one of them was a priest who helped hookers. I usually like reading about squalor and down-and-outers, but for some reason their story left me cold. What a downer, after the excitement of the first chapter. But never fear, the next story had me mesmerized and mostly I liked all the other stories.
Notice that I’m calling them stories. That’s complaint number 2. I signed up for a novel, but for a long while it read like a collections of short stories, too independent. I wanted dependence, I wanted connection, damn it. It took a while for the stories to meld. Finally, a little later than I liked, the stories were woven into a nice tapestry; in fact, a beautiful tapestry.
All the sudden I was in love with the book. The language is to die for, lyrical and intense. The story so juicy meaty, the characters so interesting and complex. The interwoven plot is intense and heart-wrenching. And McCann is so damn profound, I was highlighting text like mad—sometimes whole paragraphs, in fact.
A cool thing is that McCann is able to use different styles of writing, and they all work. There’s stream-of-consciousness, there’s a cool monologue by a hooker who has a fantastic voice that is wise, funny, and sad. And then there’s just plain eloquent and jazzy text that flows so well, I was just in heaven.
Here are a few quotes. It was hard to pick among the zillion gems.
From the hooker’s monologue:
They got businessmen come in for a day. Whiteys. In tighteys. They lift up their shirts, you can smell the husband panic off them, like their wife is gonna come out of the TV set.
From a Park Avenue woman whose son died in the Vietnam War:
No newspapers big enough to paste him back together in Saigon. She takes another long haul, lets the smoke settle in her lungs—she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry. The body too busy dealing with the poison. No wonder they gave them out free to the soldiers. Lucky Strikes.
One of McCann’s many wise comments:
Afterward, Gloria said to her that it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.
I read McCann's short stories last year, Thirteen Ways of Looking. I loved it too, which led me to this book. I want to read more more more of his stuff. Absolutely.
So even though I got bored occasionally with a character who left me cold, mostly I loved this book to pieces. It’s about love and grief and bravery, and it really affected me. And it’s one of those books that inspires me to write, makes me want to play with words. I do think it’s a true masterpiece.
And it’s not McCann’s fault that I got dizzy—though next time I’d prefer it if he kept things lower, more like ground level.
September 17, 2014
Have you ever heard Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue'? That first low note of the clarinet that increasingly vibrates on the ground before it jumps high, high to land with a soft boom of drums and a smooth backdrop of horns, a building for the clarinet to continue on with trills and soars, till finally the zenith is reached and the horn sounds its own quavering, the robust tone completing that architecture first sounded by the leaping thrills of the lone clarinet.
I am hardly the first to see this piece as a musical caricature of New York, but it is certainly a first for me to be reading and find my mind setting down notes as quickly as my eyes can scan in words. In addition, I have never even been to New York. So, what does it mean when an author is able to convey through simple prose the pulse of a city by appealing to a piece of work that, while in a separate sensory dominion, is as evocative as that far off metropolis whose sheer force of character gives it more personality than can sometimes be believed? It means they have a rare talent indeed.
But, in my mind, this book is better than the music, and that's not just my heavy inclination towards literature talking. Gershwin certainly conjures up the city, but it is New York at her best and brightest, just as it was masterfully portrayed in Fantasia 2000's animated rendition. As cheering and catchy as that sort of persona is, it is not nearly all of New York. I may have never walked the streets, but I believe that the author created each character that does with thoughtful consideration, and more importantly, empathy.
Vagabond priest, graffiti connoisseur, prodigy computer, mathematician griever, tortured artist in the least cliché sense of the phrase, the very embodiment of the words 'doomed by forces beyond one's control', and so many others. All drawn together by the wire-keeper, the sky-walker, the acrobat that took a city by storm and followed a passion that, as whimsical as its beginnings, had by its end reverberated its way through the hearts of millions and the pages of history books. This event may be the cornerstone, ferocious in its freedom and exuberant in its sheer existence, but the archway that encompasses it is filled with others whose raisons d'être are no less complex or beautiful in their individual craftships.
While the tightrope artist's story is inspiring, it is also a single side to the jewel of New York. It takes the stories of all those caught up with the single event to showcase all the other emotions and turns of fate that the city has at its disposal. Love, loss, pursuit of the broken dream, denial of the empty fate, conforming to ones lot life in every second that passes, judging others with every breath and not even the bare minimum of context. Finding, despite all that, a small measure of closure, one that the author neither saturates for emotional impact, nor biases in order to pass along personal prejudices.
Before I end this, I must admit that I didn't expect all this from a book highly lauded by the public eye. Shows how much I know. In fact, this book easily fits the bill as a gateway drug for the more esoterically architectured pieces of literature, the ones with endless streams of sentences and many plots scurrying around a story that is more concerned with structure and themes, and yet still has time to lovingly craft the characters sailing along the lines of print. So, if you have an eye on those larger-than-life tomes but are hesitant on committing to them too soon, try this one. Chances are, it will sing out in a joyous harmony for you as much as it did for me.
I am hardly the first to see this piece as a musical caricature of New York, but it is certainly a first for me to be reading and find my mind setting down notes as quickly as my eyes can scan in words. In addition, I have never even been to New York. So, what does it mean when an author is able to convey through simple prose the pulse of a city by appealing to a piece of work that, while in a separate sensory dominion, is as evocative as that far off metropolis whose sheer force of character gives it more personality than can sometimes be believed? It means they have a rare talent indeed.
But, in my mind, this book is better than the music, and that's not just my heavy inclination towards literature talking. Gershwin certainly conjures up the city, but it is New York at her best and brightest, just as it was masterfully portrayed in Fantasia 2000's animated rendition. As cheering and catchy as that sort of persona is, it is not nearly all of New York. I may have never walked the streets, but I believe that the author created each character that does with thoughtful consideration, and more importantly, empathy.
Vagabond priest, graffiti connoisseur, prodigy computer, mathematician griever, tortured artist in the least cliché sense of the phrase, the very embodiment of the words 'doomed by forces beyond one's control', and so many others. All drawn together by the wire-keeper, the sky-walker, the acrobat that took a city by storm and followed a passion that, as whimsical as its beginnings, had by its end reverberated its way through the hearts of millions and the pages of history books. This event may be the cornerstone, ferocious in its freedom and exuberant in its sheer existence, but the archway that encompasses it is filled with others whose raisons d'être are no less complex or beautiful in their individual craftships.
While the tightrope artist's story is inspiring, it is also a single side to the jewel of New York. It takes the stories of all those caught up with the single event to showcase all the other emotions and turns of fate that the city has at its disposal. Love, loss, pursuit of the broken dream, denial of the empty fate, conforming to ones lot life in every second that passes, judging others with every breath and not even the bare minimum of context. Finding, despite all that, a small measure of closure, one that the author neither saturates for emotional impact, nor biases in order to pass along personal prejudices.
Before I end this, I must admit that I didn't expect all this from a book highly lauded by the public eye. Shows how much I know. In fact, this book easily fits the bill as a gateway drug for the more esoterically architectured pieces of literature, the ones with endless streams of sentences and many plots scurrying around a story that is more concerned with structure and themes, and yet still has time to lovingly craft the characters sailing along the lines of print. So, if you have an eye on those larger-than-life tomes but are hesitant on committing to them too soon, try this one. Chances are, it will sing out in a joyous harmony for you as much as it did for me.
The core reason for it all was beauty. Walking was a divine delight. Everything was rewritten when he was up in the air. New things were possible with the human form. It went beyond equilibrium.
He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.
November 9, 2019
A city with so much life in it that just a sliver of a fleeting moment--a man atop a wire suspended between ill-fated twin building--suffices to display the budding emotion of the general populace. And not one emotion but a hundred. & important to these people, for the while, in a very democratic piece of literature. A true valentine to NYC--a jisgaw puzzle of faces that come from different places. They all look up in awe; we look down in equal amazement at the power of this grand American epic.
June 3, 2011
A tightrope walker about to pull off one of the biggest stunts ever performed. A committed priest too busy looking out for the downtrodden to take care of himself. A pair of prostitutes who are also mother and daughter. A rich woman crippled by grief and her stoic judge husband. A couple of artists who fled the New York night life. Computer hackers. A brutal car wreck. Slums. Penthouses. Robbery. Charity.
It’s either another day in New York, or it’s the shittiest circus ever.
In 1974, a French acrobat named Philippe Petit made even jaded NewYorkers take notice when he illegally rigged a tightrope between the not-quite-finished World Trade Center towers and then spent the better part of an hour walking it over 1300 feet in the air. In fact, he didn’t just walk the tightrope, he danced, hopped and ran across it as well as laying down on the wire on his back at one point.
Petit’s stunt momentarily captivated the city, and Colm McCann uses that event as the center of a web of intriguing stories about a group of people from all walks of life find themselves unknowingly impacting each other. McCann shifts to a variety of different perspectives, even switching from first person to third person. Whether the narrator is a male Irish immigrant or a black female hooker or a Hispanic single mother, all the voices seem authentic and unique and all of them offer up differing world views that still share a common theme of trying to cling to what they love.
My favorite parts are the interludes where McCann describes Petit’s preparations and the walk itself. Petit was no Jackass-style daredevil. He spent over a year of careful planning and practicing for the moment when he and his crew could sneak to the top of the towers and rig the tightrope. The descriptions of the calm that fell over Petit as he stepped out on the wire and then proceeded to put on a show for the New Yorkers watching far below is almost enough to give a reader vertigo just trying to picture it. And of course, the shadow of 9/11 hangs over the book with the reader knowing that Petit practically walked on air at an incredible height between two objects that don’t even exist any more.
This is some top notch writing with a powerful story of how one man’s desire for a transcendent moment can spin off into more directions than anyone can possibly imagine.
It’s either another day in New York, or it’s the shittiest circus ever.
In 1974, a French acrobat named Philippe Petit made even jaded NewYorkers take notice when he illegally rigged a tightrope between the not-quite-finished World Trade Center towers and then spent the better part of an hour walking it over 1300 feet in the air. In fact, he didn’t just walk the tightrope, he danced, hopped and ran across it as well as laying down on the wire on his back at one point.
Petit’s stunt momentarily captivated the city, and Colm McCann uses that event as the center of a web of intriguing stories about a group of people from all walks of life find themselves unknowingly impacting each other. McCann shifts to a variety of different perspectives, even switching from first person to third person. Whether the narrator is a male Irish immigrant or a black female hooker or a Hispanic single mother, all the voices seem authentic and unique and all of them offer up differing world views that still share a common theme of trying to cling to what they love.
My favorite parts are the interludes where McCann describes Petit’s preparations and the walk itself. Petit was no Jackass-style daredevil. He spent over a year of careful planning and practicing for the moment when he and his crew could sneak to the top of the towers and rig the tightrope. The descriptions of the calm that fell over Petit as he stepped out on the wire and then proceeded to put on a show for the New Yorkers watching far below is almost enough to give a reader vertigo just trying to picture it. And of course, the shadow of 9/11 hangs over the book with the reader knowing that Petit practically walked on air at an incredible height between two objects that don’t even exist any more.
This is some top notch writing with a powerful story of how one man’s desire for a transcendent moment can spin off into more directions than anyone can possibly imagine.
August 26, 2020
One of my favorite photographs I have of my mom is on a family trip to New York in 1994. We are on a boat going to Ellis Island and she is smiling, giddy, the Manhattan skyline in the background. A native New Yorker, this was our first trip back to New York in over ten years. The twin towers are prominent in the background, and little did she, or any of us, know that less than ten years later they would be gone, destroyed, obliterated in a puff of smoke. These images had not entered the fabric of our collective conscience in 1994; my mom was just another New Yorker happy to be home for a week. I know that my parents were not present in the gritty world that was New York City of 1974. They had just moved back from Israel and were moving on with their lives toward adulthood, their personal worlds spinning forward to another time and place.
A few times in a generation, the world produces writers so gifted that they are beyond compare. One of these writers in the early 21st century is Colum McCann. His prose is like no other, and I have been reading through his novels every few months to space them out and savor their words. McCann was not present in 1974 New York either. Born in Dublin, he has called New York home for many years and writes about the city with as much care and love as he does about Ireland. He lived in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, and his father-in-law escaped the Twin Towers and successfully arrived at the McCann’s apartment. His loafers remained in McCann’s bedroom closet for years, a reminder of the towers that were and the resilient New York that would rebuild itself from the rubble. Let the Great World Spin is McCann’s opus that won the National Book Award in 2009. Although set on August 7, 1974, the novel, which features the Twin Towers front and center, is McCann’s way of grieving the terrorist attacks of 9-11. The great world of New York City spun before 9-11 and would keep spinning afterward. This National Book Award winning novel is New York transplant McCann’s take on the grittiness that comprised New York during the 1970s.
Somnambulist Philippe Petit crossed the Twin Towers on a tightrope on August 7, 1974. Midtown Manhattan stopped spinning during his walk because they could not believe that there was a man in the sky. Books had been written about Petit before and McCann does feature him in the novel, but Let the Great World Spin is an ode to New York and what occurred there on that day while Petit transversed the sky. A theme of 1970s New York is that the Bronx was burning because government officials had let the borough go to pot. In 1974, the area above the Deegan Expressway was home to prostitutes and dilapidated project apartments. John Corrigan, known as Corrigan or Corrie, is a pseudo priest and member of an order that attempts to save the destitute of society from themselves. He has moved from Dublin to New York and made the prostitutes of the Bronx his own personal project. He chose to live among what others would call scum and opened his apartment to the hookers so that they could have a clean bathroom and cups of coffee during the night. The women of the night, a mother-daughter team named Tillie and Jazzlyn especially, loved Corrie, and he remained loyal to them, even when society had given up on them. He believed with love and perhaps a small dose of religion that even the prostitutes, good girls who had gone down the wrong path, could be redeemed by society.
In August of 1974, Corrie’s brother Ciaran has just arrived from Dublin in hopes of making a new life for himself in New York. He finds Corrie’s station in life to be despicable and urges him to find a better place to live or to at least keep the prostitutes out of the apartment. Ciaran even comes with Corrie to his day job, driving a nursing home van, and witnesses the tender loving care that he gives to each resident. At the nursing home, Corrie is smitten with Guatemalan refugee and widow, a nurse named Adelita, who he playfully calls Adie to match his Corrie. Corrie’s core principles come to a nexus, much like Father Ralph in Coleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds, as the priest is forced to choose between his vows and the one love of his life. Ciaran can feel the tension in his brother and hopes that for his sake that G-D will send a sign to make the choice for him. Ciaran is resigned to the fact that Corrie’s world spins around its own axis; he is happy living assisting the scum of society as life in New York moves on without him. Ciaran realizes that the Bronx is not the Manhattan that never sleeps that he has seen in images and, unlike Corrie, knows that Dublin is his home.
While the Bronx prepares to burn three years later, grieving mothers of Vietnam soldiers converge to meet at a rap session at the Park Avenue apartment of one its members. Claire’s son Joshua was not your typical Vietnam conscript. An precursor to those who created Silicon Valley a generation later, Joshua was a Stanford graduate, computer genius and piano prodigy, who was asked by the government to hack into Saigon’s computers. Because this was in 1974 and not the 21st century, Joshua had to be stationed in a computer room in Saigon, until a detonated grenade cut his life short while he dined at a coffee house with army officers. Claire’s world felt as though it stopped spinning until she answered an ad to join the grieving mothers group, a group of middle class women in awe of her station in life that largely shut her out. Claire rationalizes her feelings to these women by noting that their boys must have been friends in Vietnam and are cavorting together in heaven. The only African American woman in the group, a lady from the Bronx named Gloria, lost all three of her sons to the war. She knows that her sons and Joshua probably never crossed paths but appreciates Claire’s gesture in a way the other women do not. Gloria goes against her better judgment and chooses to be Claire’s friend even though after August 7, 1974, the other ladies from distinct stations in life will probably never meet again; their world’s will keep spinning forward.
One other storyline transverses the novel in Blaine and Lara, a post hippie, artist couple who decide to live in the 1920s and move off the grid to a lake side cabin in Poughkeepsie. Other than the grief group women, Blaine is about the least likable character for me; yet, their story is necessary in that is both far fetched, even for the 1970s, and it helps to bring the other storylines together. After writing this opus, McCann developed a formula that worked for him: dividing a novel into three or four sections, flushing out distinct characters and events in the first two parts, only to have everyone come together as the book reaches its denouement. Although formulaic, McCann’s prose is superior and his novels distinct stories, that this format does not seem trite. The world has to spin toward a point in time where people pick up their lives from the ashes: the hookers, the hippies, the early computer hackers, the grieving mothers. August 7, 1974 may have been a turning point in all of their lives, but eventually life has to go on, or it will stop at a standstill. At the book’s conclusion as characters from all of McCann’s storylines come together in a post 9-11 world to reveal how the world spun on from that one point in time and will keep spinning as the world exists.
My edition of Let The Great World Spin contains an author interview with Colum McCann. Readers get an insight into his writing process as we learn that this novel was his ode to the resiliency of post 9-11 New York even though it was set in the past. McCann got his title from an Alfred Tennyson poem who got his idea from a 6th century epic poem by Arabic writer Mu’allaquat. Whether one is a hooker or nursing home worker from 1970s New York, a former New Yorker returning on a visit in 1990s New York, or a Dubliner who makes Manhattan home in 21st century New York, the city is comprised of resilient people who will continue to rebuild the city from tragedy. The world and its people will spin on through time.
✨ 5 star 🌎 read ✨
A few times in a generation, the world produces writers so gifted that they are beyond compare. One of these writers in the early 21st century is Colum McCann. His prose is like no other, and I have been reading through his novels every few months to space them out and savor their words. McCann was not present in 1974 New York either. Born in Dublin, he has called New York home for many years and writes about the city with as much care and love as he does about Ireland. He lived in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, and his father-in-law escaped the Twin Towers and successfully arrived at the McCann’s apartment. His loafers remained in McCann’s bedroom closet for years, a reminder of the towers that were and the resilient New York that would rebuild itself from the rubble. Let the Great World Spin is McCann’s opus that won the National Book Award in 2009. Although set on August 7, 1974, the novel, which features the Twin Towers front and center, is McCann’s way of grieving the terrorist attacks of 9-11. The great world of New York City spun before 9-11 and would keep spinning afterward. This National Book Award winning novel is New York transplant McCann’s take on the grittiness that comprised New York during the 1970s.
Somnambulist Philippe Petit crossed the Twin Towers on a tightrope on August 7, 1974. Midtown Manhattan stopped spinning during his walk because they could not believe that there was a man in the sky. Books had been written about Petit before and McCann does feature him in the novel, but Let the Great World Spin is an ode to New York and what occurred there on that day while Petit transversed the sky. A theme of 1970s New York is that the Bronx was burning because government officials had let the borough go to pot. In 1974, the area above the Deegan Expressway was home to prostitutes and dilapidated project apartments. John Corrigan, known as Corrigan or Corrie, is a pseudo priest and member of an order that attempts to save the destitute of society from themselves. He has moved from Dublin to New York and made the prostitutes of the Bronx his own personal project. He chose to live among what others would call scum and opened his apartment to the hookers so that they could have a clean bathroom and cups of coffee during the night. The women of the night, a mother-daughter team named Tillie and Jazzlyn especially, loved Corrie, and he remained loyal to them, even when society had given up on them. He believed with love and perhaps a small dose of religion that even the prostitutes, good girls who had gone down the wrong path, could be redeemed by society.
In August of 1974, Corrie’s brother Ciaran has just arrived from Dublin in hopes of making a new life for himself in New York. He finds Corrie’s station in life to be despicable and urges him to find a better place to live or to at least keep the prostitutes out of the apartment. Ciaran even comes with Corrie to his day job, driving a nursing home van, and witnesses the tender loving care that he gives to each resident. At the nursing home, Corrie is smitten with Guatemalan refugee and widow, a nurse named Adelita, who he playfully calls Adie to match his Corrie. Corrie’s core principles come to a nexus, much like Father Ralph in Coleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds, as the priest is forced to choose between his vows and the one love of his life. Ciaran can feel the tension in his brother and hopes that for his sake that G-D will send a sign to make the choice for him. Ciaran is resigned to the fact that Corrie’s world spins around its own axis; he is happy living assisting the scum of society as life in New York moves on without him. Ciaran realizes that the Bronx is not the Manhattan that never sleeps that he has seen in images and, unlike Corrie, knows that Dublin is his home.
While the Bronx prepares to burn three years later, grieving mothers of Vietnam soldiers converge to meet at a rap session at the Park Avenue apartment of one its members. Claire’s son Joshua was not your typical Vietnam conscript. An precursor to those who created Silicon Valley a generation later, Joshua was a Stanford graduate, computer genius and piano prodigy, who was asked by the government to hack into Saigon’s computers. Because this was in 1974 and not the 21st century, Joshua had to be stationed in a computer room in Saigon, until a detonated grenade cut his life short while he dined at a coffee house with army officers. Claire’s world felt as though it stopped spinning until she answered an ad to join the grieving mothers group, a group of middle class women in awe of her station in life that largely shut her out. Claire rationalizes her feelings to these women by noting that their boys must have been friends in Vietnam and are cavorting together in heaven. The only African American woman in the group, a lady from the Bronx named Gloria, lost all three of her sons to the war. She knows that her sons and Joshua probably never crossed paths but appreciates Claire’s gesture in a way the other women do not. Gloria goes against her better judgment and chooses to be Claire’s friend even though after August 7, 1974, the other ladies from distinct stations in life will probably never meet again; their world’s will keep spinning forward.
One other storyline transverses the novel in Blaine and Lara, a post hippie, artist couple who decide to live in the 1920s and move off the grid to a lake side cabin in Poughkeepsie. Other than the grief group women, Blaine is about the least likable character for me; yet, their story is necessary in that is both far fetched, even for the 1970s, and it helps to bring the other storylines together. After writing this opus, McCann developed a formula that worked for him: dividing a novel into three or four sections, flushing out distinct characters and events in the first two parts, only to have everyone come together as the book reaches its denouement. Although formulaic, McCann’s prose is superior and his novels distinct stories, that this format does not seem trite. The world has to spin toward a point in time where people pick up their lives from the ashes: the hookers, the hippies, the early computer hackers, the grieving mothers. August 7, 1974 may have been a turning point in all of their lives, but eventually life has to go on, or it will stop at a standstill. At the book’s conclusion as characters from all of McCann’s storylines come together in a post 9-11 world to reveal how the world spun on from that one point in time and will keep spinning as the world exists.
My edition of Let The Great World Spin contains an author interview with Colum McCann. Readers get an insight into his writing process as we learn that this novel was his ode to the resiliency of post 9-11 New York even though it was set in the past. McCann got his title from an Alfred Tennyson poem who got his idea from a 6th century epic poem by Arabic writer Mu’allaquat. Whether one is a hooker or nursing home worker from 1970s New York, a former New Yorker returning on a visit in 1990s New York, or a Dubliner who makes Manhattan home in 21st century New York, the city is comprised of resilient people who will continue to rebuild the city from tragedy. The world and its people will spin on through time.
✨ 5 star 🌎 read ✨
January 27, 2021
This sucked me in at the beginning, with a colorful cast of fascinating characters from far different walks of life. About halfway, the vast list of characters telling their own chapters got a bit much, and I found myself not connecting or caring as much for each one, mostly since there had been SO MANY. The end tied up where everyone ended up in life, which I appreciated. I simply felt that the middle got a bit rambling and overambitious.
April 26, 2016
"Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting."
-- Karl Wallenda, of the Flying Wallendas.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 are almost ten years old, and yet, the wound is still very raw (for those not directly involved, I mean; for those that were there, the wound is forever). Books and films that have dared touch the subject have done so in one of two ways: with near-stultifying decorum and gravity, which makes art into some kind of vague, patriotic duty; or with obliqueness, in which an artist makes a post 9/11 point without even mentioning 9/11. There's a good reason for this: any film or book that attempts to incorporate those events into "entertainment" are instantly condoned. Thus, nearly a decade on, the best works about 9/11 include two Spielberg films (Munich and War of the Worlds) and a television show (Lost). These have nothing to do with the actual events, yet have everything to do with the actual events.
Let the Great World Spin is a 9/11 book that takes place in August 1974. It is a collection of interlocking stories strung together (natch!) by Philippe Petit's walk across a wire strung between the Twin Towers. This event had been mostly forgotten until the Towers fell, when suddenly Petit's walk became unbelievably poignant. Though author Colum McCann's story takes place long before the ghastly events of 9/11, before hijacked airliners, fireballs, and clouds of ash, and before Orange Alerts and the TSA and shoe-bombers and butt-bombers and all the rest, it is undeniably haunted by the future. This is made clear right at the start, when McCann describes the tumult caused by the wire-walker:
It's almost as though he was describing something else... And if the point isn't hammered home enough, McCann later includes a photo of the wire-walker suspended between the Towers, with an airplane in the background. Yeah, it's not too subtle.
But I'm not really sure what to make of the allusion, just as I'm not really sure what to make of the book. My enjoyment - and my internal Goodreads star-meter - ebbed and flowed as I made my way through.
The book is designed to frustrate in this manner. In a way, it's more a collection of short stories than a novel. Each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character, utilizing first person and third person storytelling, and even a little second person for good measure. Among the various characters are Irish brothers Ciaran and John "Corrie" Corrigan, who live among the prostitutes of New York City; Claire and her husband Solomon, an upper middle class couple who have lost a son in Vietnam (Claire spends time with a support group, while Solomon is the Judge who arraigns an unnamed Philippe Petit); a South American nurse who's in love with Corrie; a black prostitute whom Corrie attempts to save; a young white girl named Lara who left her privileged upbringing to make time with a too-serious artist; and so forth.
Petit shows up a couple times, in chapters that end the first two sections of the novel.
The structure of this novel is nothing, well, novel. It employs the kind of set up utilized by any number of cut-rate books and movies (I'm looking askance at you, the Academy Award-winning Crash). Unsurprisingly, many of these characters meet and intertwine, in ways that are meant to surprise and enlighten; others share only a passing connection, perhaps as ephemeral as having both witnessed Petit's wire-walk. I'm not trying to be too down, here, because great care is taken in assembling thsi mosaic. Indeed, one of the enjoyments of the book is meeting a character, and later seeing that person through another character's eyes.
I'm not a big short story guy, so that should factor into the relevance of this review. I prefer three acts and full arcs, rather than the precious snippets of illumination short stories ostensibly provide. As such, I was prone to frustration with Let the Great World Spin. Just as I was getting into a character (and actually figuring out who they were) the chapter would end and you'd jump into someone else's life. Often times, you never go back, and many character threads are left dangling forever. And, as with any short story collection, there is good and bad. Some chapters were really powerful, others felt like padding. (And the ending, which flashes forward to 2006, for a blah-blah-blah epilogue, is particularly bad. Joshua Ferris got smacked down for this in Then We Came to the End, yet McCann seems to have gotten a pass. He also won the National Book Award, while Ferris was only a finalist, so go figure).
Maybe this is bitterness, but the book felt too perfect. To paraphrase Melville, I saw the author's foot on the treadle of the loom. There are times when you really notice the care taken with each word, but I don't mean this as a compliment. Despite having different characters narrate each chapter, all the voices sounded suspiciously the same: highly literate. This is a problem when you skip from an Irishman, to a prostitute, to a judge. Sure, there's an idiom here, and some slang there, and a little patois in the corner, but in general, everyone sounded the same. Moreover, McCann doesn't really play by his own rules. In one chapter, the narrator is describing his day at the beach, but then intercuts his story with a deadly car crash happening elsewhere. Now, this narrator wasn't in the car, so he wouldn't know what was happening, yet he describes the event as though he were in the passenger seat. Not only does he describe it, he describes it like National Book Award Winner Colum McCann: a sentence about the beach; a sentence about the car crash; a sentence about the beach; a sentence about the car crash. Back and forth like this. It's seamless and powerful writing, but it's supposedly coming from a guy who never made it far past high school.
It's a quibble, to be sure, but it speaks to the lingering sensation I had, with every page, that I was reading something "important." I guess that would make the book "self-important," which it really kind of is.
-- Karl Wallenda, of the Flying Wallendas.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 are almost ten years old, and yet, the wound is still very raw (for those not directly involved, I mean; for those that were there, the wound is forever). Books and films that have dared touch the subject have done so in one of two ways: with near-stultifying decorum and gravity, which makes art into some kind of vague, patriotic duty; or with obliqueness, in which an artist makes a post 9/11 point without even mentioning 9/11. There's a good reason for this: any film or book that attempts to incorporate those events into "entertainment" are instantly condoned. Thus, nearly a decade on, the best works about 9/11 include two Spielberg films (Munich and War of the Worlds) and a television show (Lost). These have nothing to do with the actual events, yet have everything to do with the actual events.
Let the Great World Spin is a 9/11 book that takes place in August 1974. It is a collection of interlocking stories strung together (natch!) by Philippe Petit's walk across a wire strung between the Twin Towers. This event had been mostly forgotten until the Towers fell, when suddenly Petit's walk became unbelievably poignant. Though author Colum McCann's story takes place long before the ghastly events of 9/11, before hijacked airliners, fireballs, and clouds of ash, and before Orange Alerts and the TSA and shoe-bombers and butt-bombers and all the rest, it is undeniably haunted by the future. This is made clear right at the start, when McCann describes the tumult caused by the wire-walker:
[T:]he rumors began again, a collision of curse and whisper, augmented by an increase in sirens, which got their hearts pumping even more, and the helicopter found a purchase near the west side of the towers, while down in the foyer of the World Trade Center the cops were sprinting across the marble floor, and the undercovers were whipping out badges from beneath their shirts, and the fire trucks were pulling into the plaza, and the redblue dazzled the glass...
It's almost as though he was describing something else... And if the point isn't hammered home enough, McCann later includes a photo of the wire-walker suspended between the Towers, with an airplane in the background. Yeah, it's not too subtle.
But I'm not really sure what to make of the allusion, just as I'm not really sure what to make of the book. My enjoyment - and my internal Goodreads star-meter - ebbed and flowed as I made my way through.
The book is designed to frustrate in this manner. In a way, it's more a collection of short stories than a novel. Each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character, utilizing first person and third person storytelling, and even a little second person for good measure. Among the various characters are Irish brothers Ciaran and John "Corrie" Corrigan, who live among the prostitutes of New York City; Claire and her husband Solomon, an upper middle class couple who have lost a son in Vietnam (Claire spends time with a support group, while Solomon is the Judge who arraigns an unnamed Philippe Petit); a South American nurse who's in love with Corrie; a black prostitute whom Corrie attempts to save; a young white girl named Lara who left her privileged upbringing to make time with a too-serious artist; and so forth.
Petit shows up a couple times, in chapters that end the first two sections of the novel.
Everything had purpose, signal, meaning. But in the end he knew that it all came down to the wire. Him and the cable. Two hundred and ten feet and the distance it bridged. The towers had been designed to sway a full three feet in a storm. A violent gust or even a sudden change in temperature would force the buildings to sway and the wire could tighten and bounce. It was one of the few things that came down to chance...
The structure of this novel is nothing, well, novel. It employs the kind of set up utilized by any number of cut-rate books and movies (I'm looking askance at you, the Academy Award-winning Crash). Unsurprisingly, many of these characters meet and intertwine, in ways that are meant to surprise and enlighten; others share only a passing connection, perhaps as ephemeral as having both witnessed Petit's wire-walk. I'm not trying to be too down, here, because great care is taken in assembling thsi mosaic. Indeed, one of the enjoyments of the book is meeting a character, and later seeing that person through another character's eyes.
I'm not a big short story guy, so that should factor into the relevance of this review. I prefer three acts and full arcs, rather than the precious snippets of illumination short stories ostensibly provide. As such, I was prone to frustration with Let the Great World Spin. Just as I was getting into a character (and actually figuring out who they were) the chapter would end and you'd jump into someone else's life. Often times, you never go back, and many character threads are left dangling forever. And, as with any short story collection, there is good and bad. Some chapters were really powerful, others felt like padding. (And the ending, which flashes forward to 2006, for a blah-blah-blah epilogue, is particularly bad. Joshua Ferris got smacked down for this in Then We Came to the End, yet McCann seems to have gotten a pass. He also won the National Book Award, while Ferris was only a finalist, so go figure).
Maybe this is bitterness, but the book felt too perfect. To paraphrase Melville, I saw the author's foot on the treadle of the loom. There are times when you really notice the care taken with each word, but I don't mean this as a compliment. Despite having different characters narrate each chapter, all the voices sounded suspiciously the same: highly literate. This is a problem when you skip from an Irishman, to a prostitute, to a judge. Sure, there's an idiom here, and some slang there, and a little patois in the corner, but in general, everyone sounded the same. Moreover, McCann doesn't really play by his own rules. In one chapter, the narrator is describing his day at the beach, but then intercuts his story with a deadly car crash happening elsewhere. Now, this narrator wasn't in the car, so he wouldn't know what was happening, yet he describes the event as though he were in the passenger seat. Not only does he describe it, he describes it like National Book Award Winner Colum McCann: a sentence about the beach; a sentence about the car crash; a sentence about the beach; a sentence about the car crash. Back and forth like this. It's seamless and powerful writing, but it's supposedly coming from a guy who never made it far past high school.
It's a quibble, to be sure, but it speaks to the lingering sensation I had, with every page, that I was reading something "important." I guess that would make the book "self-important," which it really kind of is.
February 13, 2014
This one never quite got off the page for me. Couple of reasons why: 1) The structure of the book--loosely connected novellas and stories--keeps the reader from getting to know any of the characters, constantly introducing new ones just when you get interested in the last, and totally abandoning a few who clearly have a lot more to say. 2) The component parts of the whole felt workshoppy--craft-wise, they're all a little too on the nose, and rarely did McCann offer any surprises to ameliorate how predictable all of it felt. 3) Many of the characters’ connections came off as forced vehicles to further the novel’s theme of inter-connectedness rather than as naturalistic development of plot or personality. 4) Not enough diversity of language to accommodate the diversity of the characters; at times, they all sounded alike and I would forget whose story I was reading.
February 3, 2011
Life is full of unexpected synchronicities. The kinds of things that occasionally make you feel that you are connected to a greater web of being, a little sign to let you know that you are not in this alone. Two days before I picked up Colum McCann's extraordinary novel "Let The Great World Spin," I watched the equally extraordinary documentary "Man on Wire" for the second time. Philippe Petit, more angel than human, strung a cable across the Twin Towers in 1974 and performed on it for over half an hour, walking, reclining, and literally dancing for the tiny human specks below and for the gods above (who could see him better, after all). It is a breathtaking sight, a man who has become art, who has made of himself something otherworldly and glorious. Like walking into a forest and seeing a unicorn or looking at the seashore and spotting a mermaid on a rock.
It is therefore no wonder that the thread that ties together the vignettes in "Let the Great World Spin" is Petit's momentous tightrope walk as witnessed by the various residents of New York City. McCann introduces us to a number of these residents, some living gritty lives in the projects, others living lives of quiet luxury in a Park Avenue penthouse, still others trying to survive somewhere between the two extremes, in addresses less prone to preconception. And all of these residents are tied to the story and tied to the events of the day in ways that are sometimes obvious but more often as tenuous as a wire strung between buildings. But a wire that stretches. And holds.
McCann's brilliance lies in the fact that each individual we meet is a revelation, a wholly expressed and vivid entity burnt onto our brain cells for all time. When we first meet the young Irish monk, Corrigan, living in a pit in the projects in order to try to protect the downtrodden, the hookers, and the elderly of the neighborhood, we jump into his world without a thought for our own safety, because we are smitten by his desire to bring goodness to bad places. As it turns out, he - and we - should have considered our safety a bit more carefully. So we learn straight off that some stories are not connected by so much as common addresses or economic status as they are by loss, by grief, by people left behind to trudge on when another's goals are left unfulfilled. Other characters will learn similar lessons, some by choice and others by circumstance, but McCann does not leave us behind like onlookers in a theater. He tells us these stories to make us look at our own and to consider the effect our lives have on the lives around us.
Add to this ingenious structure the most perfect prose in modern literature and you have not a book, not a work of fiction, but an experience. McCann's stories are startlingly beautiful in many ways - their description, their construct, their gorgeous dissection of the dreams and memories of their characters. But the windows McCann opens, the doors he peers through, are just as often opening onto heartbreak as they are onto joy. Somehow, though, the grief and loss make the small tribulations and unexpected beauty that much more meaningful, the way a small remembrance can give us an inner photograph of our own unique definition of happiness. "So much depends upon the red wheelbarrow...", after all. McCann's characters allow us a glimpse of their sorrow and their happiness and let us decide if a balance has been achieved. That is, if the living of a life matters in the world, which is what McCann ultimately appears to be weighing in his fiction. Which is why he has allowed us glimpses into lives connected to other lives, and connected to other lives still, like the branches of an ever-expanding tree limb. How does this new person have an impact on the soul I have just become acquainted with, how can this person across town make a mark on the life of the one I just met in the Bronx? Late in the book one of our characters says, "It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected."
Reading "Let the Great World Spin" makes me understand anew that we are all connected, that what we do matters, that our actions send ripples into the world that can affect other people in strange and unexpected ways. And every so often something stunning and remarkable happens that can bind us all together in sorrow or in joy. Like two planes hitting the Twin Towers. Or an angel walking between them.
It is therefore no wonder that the thread that ties together the vignettes in "Let the Great World Spin" is Petit's momentous tightrope walk as witnessed by the various residents of New York City. McCann introduces us to a number of these residents, some living gritty lives in the projects, others living lives of quiet luxury in a Park Avenue penthouse, still others trying to survive somewhere between the two extremes, in addresses less prone to preconception. And all of these residents are tied to the story and tied to the events of the day in ways that are sometimes obvious but more often as tenuous as a wire strung between buildings. But a wire that stretches. And holds.
McCann's brilliance lies in the fact that each individual we meet is a revelation, a wholly expressed and vivid entity burnt onto our brain cells for all time. When we first meet the young Irish monk, Corrigan, living in a pit in the projects in order to try to protect the downtrodden, the hookers, and the elderly of the neighborhood, we jump into his world without a thought for our own safety, because we are smitten by his desire to bring goodness to bad places. As it turns out, he - and we - should have considered our safety a bit more carefully. So we learn straight off that some stories are not connected by so much as common addresses or economic status as they are by loss, by grief, by people left behind to trudge on when another's goals are left unfulfilled. Other characters will learn similar lessons, some by choice and others by circumstance, but McCann does not leave us behind like onlookers in a theater. He tells us these stories to make us look at our own and to consider the effect our lives have on the lives around us.
Add to this ingenious structure the most perfect prose in modern literature and you have not a book, not a work of fiction, but an experience. McCann's stories are startlingly beautiful in many ways - their description, their construct, their gorgeous dissection of the dreams and memories of their characters. But the windows McCann opens, the doors he peers through, are just as often opening onto heartbreak as they are onto joy. Somehow, though, the grief and loss make the small tribulations and unexpected beauty that much more meaningful, the way a small remembrance can give us an inner photograph of our own unique definition of happiness. "So much depends upon the red wheelbarrow...", after all. McCann's characters allow us a glimpse of their sorrow and their happiness and let us decide if a balance has been achieved. That is, if the living of a life matters in the world, which is what McCann ultimately appears to be weighing in his fiction. Which is why he has allowed us glimpses into lives connected to other lives, and connected to other lives still, like the branches of an ever-expanding tree limb. How does this new person have an impact on the soul I have just become acquainted with, how can this person across town make a mark on the life of the one I just met in the Bronx? Late in the book one of our characters says, "It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected."
Reading "Let the Great World Spin" makes me understand anew that we are all connected, that what we do matters, that our actions send ripples into the world that can affect other people in strange and unexpected ways. And every so often something stunning and remarkable happens that can bind us all together in sorrow or in joy. Like two planes hitting the Twin Towers. Or an angel walking between them.
August 29, 2015
I had a difficult time getting into this book but in the end I am glad I persevered. It is really a story about New York City in 1974 centered around Phillippe Petit's historic tight rope walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center. But the story itself trancends all that and takes us into the lives of some of the people whose days are coloured by this incredible feat and what unfolds is a powerful,complex tale of life, love, loss and redemption. I don't think I realized just how profound and deeply felt this story was until I had finished it. It will be some time, no doubt, before I am done thinking about all this book brings to bear.
November 21, 2024
4.5★
“Perfect strangers touched one another on the elbows. Swearwords went between them, and whispers that there’d been a botched robbery, that he was some sort of cat burglar, that he’d taken hostages, he was an Arab, a Jew, a Cypriot, an IRA man, that he was really just a publicity stunt, a corporate scam…”
If you ever wondered how easy it is to influence someone, just stop walking and look up. Pretty soon, someone else will stop and look up, and if there seems to be something worth looking at, you could end up with a crowd like this one watching a man standing on the edge of the top of one of the World Trade Center buildings (before, you know).
McCann has taken this real event as the hub of the various groups gathered around New York City who have a view of this man who seems destined to fall. The guesses as to what on earth he is doing up there get wilder, and people seem even to be encouraging him to jump (not that he can hear them, of course).
Then McCann shows us some of those watching who call the city home. I probably won’t remember them all, but these I do remember.
~ An Irish immigrant and his brother “Corrigan” (a drunk who becomes a celibate volunteer care-worker)
~ A group of prostitutes and their pimps and families, some of whom Corrigan tries to help
~ A group of mothers (for whom there is no collective noun) who have lost their sons in Vietnam (who would have had a collective name – orphans – had they lost their parents)
~ A hippie couple, usually high, who cause a fatal crash that involves some people above
~ A kid who photographs graffiti in dangerous places on the subway walls and dreams of publication and fame
~ A bunch of computer programmers who hack into the phone system (this is before our internet) to call random phones in NYC to try to find someone who can see the man on the tower.
“…and they watched as he lifted one dark-slippered foot, like a man about to enter warm gray water. The watchers below pulled in their breath all at once. The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before. Out he went.”
McCann’s people feel real, and their voices are as varied as they are. I don’t know if NYC is the great world, but it certainly represents a lot of it, and it never sleeps, so in a way, it is spinning.
The Irish brothers are Ciaran and John Corrigan, but John has only ever been addressed as Corrigan, ‘the monk’, because he’s celibate and religious now. He works nights, rescuing and helping the down-and-outs.
“…there was something about him that made dislike difficult. His theme was happiness—what it is and what it might not have been, where he might find it and where it might have disappeared.”
When Ciaran stays in Corrigan’s flat, he is surprised to have girls and women trekking through to use the bathroom at all hours.
“’But they still come around,’ he said. ‘The girls. I don’t encourage it, really. I mean, what are they going to do? Pee on the street? It’s not much. Just a little gesture. A place they can use. A tinkling shop.’ ”
Corrigan is always disappointed that he can’t do more. Maybe his faith isn’t good enough.
“ ‘But these girls, man. Sometimes I think they’re better believers than me. At least they’re open to the faith of a rolled-down window.’”
The brothers are only the first two of McCann’s people, but I have to say he writes the black vernacular and wealthy society matron’s voices as well as he does the Irish. He also includes the background of the wire-walker and the event, some fact, some fictionalised.
He attibutes this real photo to the kid who was photographing graffiti in the subways, credited as below.
"PHOTO: © FERNANDO YUNQUÉ MARCANO"
In his author's note, he gives the real credit.: "Vic DeLuca, Rex Images, August 7, 1974, copyright Rex USA" I have included the photo to give a sense of the scale - hard to imagine!
I’m not surprised it won the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction, an acclaimed American literary prize since 1950.
I will spare you my many pages of quotations and just recommend you read it yourself!
[I apologise if my including the photograph upsets anyone with the reminder of the towers and a plane. It is the only photo in the book, and I did want to give the sense of the height.]
“Perfect strangers touched one another on the elbows. Swearwords went between them, and whispers that there’d been a botched robbery, that he was some sort of cat burglar, that he’d taken hostages, he was an Arab, a Jew, a Cypriot, an IRA man, that he was really just a publicity stunt, a corporate scam…”
If you ever wondered how easy it is to influence someone, just stop walking and look up. Pretty soon, someone else will stop and look up, and if there seems to be something worth looking at, you could end up with a crowd like this one watching a man standing on the edge of the top of one of the World Trade Center buildings (before, you know).
McCann has taken this real event as the hub of the various groups gathered around New York City who have a view of this man who seems destined to fall. The guesses as to what on earth he is doing up there get wilder, and people seem even to be encouraging him to jump (not that he can hear them, of course).
Then McCann shows us some of those watching who call the city home. I probably won’t remember them all, but these I do remember.
~ An Irish immigrant and his brother “Corrigan” (a drunk who becomes a celibate volunteer care-worker)
~ A group of prostitutes and their pimps and families, some of whom Corrigan tries to help
~ A group of mothers (for whom there is no collective noun) who have lost their sons in Vietnam (who would have had a collective name – orphans – had they lost their parents)
~ A hippie couple, usually high, who cause a fatal crash that involves some people above
~ A kid who photographs graffiti in dangerous places on the subway walls and dreams of publication and fame
~ A bunch of computer programmers who hack into the phone system (this is before our internet) to call random phones in NYC to try to find someone who can see the man on the tower.
“…and they watched as he lifted one dark-slippered foot, like a man about to enter warm gray water. The watchers below pulled in their breath all at once. The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before. Out he went.”
McCann’s people feel real, and their voices are as varied as they are. I don’t know if NYC is the great world, but it certainly represents a lot of it, and it never sleeps, so in a way, it is spinning.
The Irish brothers are Ciaran and John Corrigan, but John has only ever been addressed as Corrigan, ‘the monk’, because he’s celibate and religious now. He works nights, rescuing and helping the down-and-outs.
“…there was something about him that made dislike difficult. His theme was happiness—what it is and what it might not have been, where he might find it and where it might have disappeared.”
When Ciaran stays in Corrigan’s flat, he is surprised to have girls and women trekking through to use the bathroom at all hours.
“’But they still come around,’ he said. ‘The girls. I don’t encourage it, really. I mean, what are they going to do? Pee on the street? It’s not much. Just a little gesture. A place they can use. A tinkling shop.’ ”
Corrigan is always disappointed that he can’t do more. Maybe his faith isn’t good enough.
“ ‘But these girls, man. Sometimes I think they’re better believers than me. At least they’re open to the faith of a rolled-down window.’”
The brothers are only the first two of McCann’s people, but I have to say he writes the black vernacular and wealthy society matron’s voices as well as he does the Irish. He also includes the background of the wire-walker and the event, some fact, some fictionalised.
He attibutes this real photo to the kid who was photographing graffiti in the subways, credited as below.
"PHOTO: © FERNANDO YUNQUÉ MARCANO"
In his author's note, he gives the real credit.: "Vic DeLuca, Rex Images, August 7, 1974, copyright Rex USA" I have included the photo to give a sense of the scale - hard to imagine!
I’m not surprised it won the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction, an acclaimed American literary prize since 1950.
I will spare you my many pages of quotations and just recommend you read it yourself!
[I apologise if my including the photograph upsets anyone with the reminder of the towers and a plane. It is the only photo in the book, and I did want to give the sense of the height.]
October 30, 2015
How?
How did he do it?
How did he get the wire across?
That's the question that intrigues those who saw or heard of Philippe Petit's daring tightrope walk on August 7, 1974. Not who, not why. How.
How he bridged the unbridgeable, the chasm between those two monolithic structures. Spider-like, sending a thread that looks as delicate as silk from afar, but is strong enough to carry a man, a thread that connects the two separate giants.
This took a wee while to work its magic. It is oblique, (which I like, but it can be unsettling), there are some oddly ugly metaphors - a sunset the colour of muscle. Yuk. It teeters perilously close to the edge of hokey cliché and manipulative tear-jerk - I mean, a fatal car crash? C'mon. But there I was thrown the lifeline of some breathtakingly well executed writing, which persuaded me to struggle back on board. There's more. There are more - a whole ensemble. And they start to come together, all these people, in unexpected ways. There are gossamer thin threads thrown across the void, threads that are delicate and easily broken, and as strong as a wire that can carry a man. They connect. They cross the void between those different worlds. It worked.
How did he do it?
How did he get the wire across?
That's the question that intrigues those who saw or heard of Philippe Petit's daring tightrope walk on August 7, 1974. Not who, not why. How.
How he bridged the unbridgeable, the chasm between those two monolithic structures. Spider-like, sending a thread that looks as delicate as silk from afar, but is strong enough to carry a man, a thread that connects the two separate giants.
This took a wee while to work its magic. It is oblique, (which I like, but it can be unsettling), there are some oddly ugly metaphors - a sunset the colour of muscle. Yuk. It teeters perilously close to the edge of hokey cliché and manipulative tear-jerk - I mean, a fatal car crash? C'mon. But there I was thrown the lifeline of some breathtakingly well executed writing, which persuaded me to struggle back on board. There's more. There are more - a whole ensemble. And they start to come together, all these people, in unexpected ways. There are gossamer thin threads thrown across the void, threads that are delicate and easily broken, and as strong as a wire that can carry a man. They connect. They cross the void between those different worlds. It worked.
February 10, 2017
An ambitious and complex novel set in New York in 1974. Each chapter tells the story of a different character, and it gradually becomes clear that they are much more linked than seems the case early on. McCann's characters are rounded and sympathetic, covering a wide cross section of New York society.
The central inspiration is Philippe Petit's high wire walk between the towers of the World Trade Centre, and his story has a symbolic resonance that links the remaining tales of survival.
If I have a slight criticism it is that the last chapter, set in 2006, ties up the loose ends a little too neatly, but overall this was a very rewarding read.
The central inspiration is Philippe Petit's high wire walk between the towers of the World Trade Centre, and his story has a symbolic resonance that links the remaining tales of survival.
If I have a slight criticism it is that the last chapter, set in 2006, ties up the loose ends a little too neatly, but overall this was a very rewarding read.
June 29, 2020
I just finished Let the Great World Spin. WOW, I loved this book. You read it for the words, the thoughts that arise in you as you listen. You do not read this book for the plot. Maybe even parts are implausible, but that does not lessen the impact of the words. You cannot understand every line as you listen. Impossible. This is a book about life and how it whirls around you and how everything and everyone is interconnected.
How can I describe this book..... it is poetry that does not rhyme. If I extract a few lines to show you, you will miss their import. They are part of the context, each line related to the next. Just as people are...
Absolutely excellent narration. Some stories are fun. Some are sad. You get a perfect balance. You will not understand more if you read the paper book. To understand you have to stop and think and each one of us will come up with a different explanation. There is no right explanation.
Do not be scared to read this book because you hear that is composed of different stories. It is, but they do all relate to each other. By the end you have learned about the lives of several disparate characters, maybe not every detail, but who they really are, what motivates and moves them. You see life and death and growth and disintegration and the world spins on with us little specks on the surface. But regardless of our smallness, we are each one of us important to each other.
I loved this book.
There are many other reviews out there. If you want to know the factual details of who does what and the role of each character, read another review. Me, I do not advise reading this book for its plot. I will just say this: Philippe Petit and his tightrope act between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, that is today now long gone, really did happen in NYC in 1974. The rest is wonderful, imaginative fiction.
******************
Narrators: Richard Poe, Gerard Doyle, Carol Monda, Johanna Parker, Ramon de Ocampo, Chris Sorensen, Patricia R. Floyd, Jim Frangione, Alma Cuervo, Lizan Mitchell, and Cherise Boothe.
How can I describe this book..... it is poetry that does not rhyme. If I extract a few lines to show you, you will miss their import. They are part of the context, each line related to the next. Just as people are...
Absolutely excellent narration. Some stories are fun. Some are sad. You get a perfect balance. You will not understand more if you read the paper book. To understand you have to stop and think and each one of us will come up with a different explanation. There is no right explanation.
Do not be scared to read this book because you hear that is composed of different stories. It is, but they do all relate to each other. By the end you have learned about the lives of several disparate characters, maybe not every detail, but who they really are, what motivates and moves them. You see life and death and growth and disintegration and the world spins on with us little specks on the surface. But regardless of our smallness, we are each one of us important to each other.
I loved this book.
There are many other reviews out there. If you want to know the factual details of who does what and the role of each character, read another review. Me, I do not advise reading this book for its plot. I will just say this: Philippe Petit and his tightrope act between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, that is today now long gone, really did happen in NYC in 1974. The rest is wonderful, imaginative fiction.
******************
Narrators: Richard Poe, Gerard Doyle, Carol Monda, Johanna Parker, Ramon de Ocampo, Chris Sorensen, Patricia R. Floyd, Jim Frangione, Alma Cuervo, Lizan Mitchell, and Cherise Boothe.
August 29, 2014
Let the great world spin. And the great world of New York did indeed spin in this book.
How do you view melancholy and heartbreak as something pure and beautiful and riveting and just plain astounding? You read Colum McCann's work, that's how.
It was an orchestra of sorts--the many different voices and narratives. McCann writes with so much lyricism, he makes you want to dance with the tightrope walker the book opens with (taken from the true 1974 story of Philippe Petit, by the way). Three word sentences and then one-page paragraph. Almost no dialogue and then a three-page dialogue-only scene. Simply-structured sentences combined with complex word vines. The prose is a web of bemusement, much like the characters.
Ireland, a city I love reading about ever since Frank McCourt made tales of Ireland (and what one might call the 'Irish dialect' in literature) alluring. Yet McCann does not even come close to writing about Ireland the way in which he writes about New York.
The New York he describes, I see clearly. I was a teenaged immigrant when I lived in New York City. Though I was fortunate to have parents who swore to keep us out of the projects even though they had lost everything when they emigrated, I walked the streets of the projects with my high school friends in Queens, where I lived. I visited the Bronx with them, where mothers leaned out of windows speaking in code, asking their sons to buy things I had no idea of then until I saw small bags exchanged through palms. Walked the projects of Staten Island with friends who had just moved there after escaping war in their homelands. Went to church in the middle of what was then Brooklyn's worst projects; Bedsty. Watched while some of my friends never made it through high school and some were deported for bad behavior. Sometimes it all seems unnerving, as if someone handed me a skateboard and I skated through all of it in slow motion.
Now here goes McCann, illuminating it all, reminding me. He speaks of prostitution, drugs, death, etc. But mostly, the book probes about life and consequences, life and the decisions we make, life--the good, the ugly, the beautiful, the painful.
Ciaran Corrigan was my favorite character. Then Jaslyn; the daughter of Jazzlyn the prostitute. Ciaran told the twisted story of his brother, John Corrigan, who was a priest living in the projects with prostitutes, and somehow he became their best friend and angel. But even a priest has struggles and even his family must deal with tragedy. Through Ciaran's narration, I wanted to move with the book and never let it go. Until about 80 pages in when the parallel narration took Ciaran away from me and introduced another character.
And this is the only problem I had. The parallel narratives seemed almost like short stories that were later stringed into a novel. And since McCann was a short story writer, that theory may not be too far off. There was the overarching theme of New York, yes, and there were characters whose lives were later intertwined yes, but don't look to be driven by some plot alignment. I love short stories but I hate when I'm reading a novel and it starts to feel like a short story collection. You come across so many characters--which, I admit, seems befitting for New York. Though when I got to Tillie's narration (the older prostitute) it seemed a bit inauthentic because the New York-African American dialect was off.
Great book and an author whose masterful prose I will gladly seek.
"The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough."
4.5 stars
How do you view melancholy and heartbreak as something pure and beautiful and riveting and just plain astounding? You read Colum McCann's work, that's how.
It was an orchestra of sorts--the many different voices and narratives. McCann writes with so much lyricism, he makes you want to dance with the tightrope walker the book opens with (taken from the true 1974 story of Philippe Petit, by the way). Three word sentences and then one-page paragraph. Almost no dialogue and then a three-page dialogue-only scene. Simply-structured sentences combined with complex word vines. The prose is a web of bemusement, much like the characters.
Ireland, a city I love reading about ever since Frank McCourt made tales of Ireland (and what one might call the 'Irish dialect' in literature) alluring. Yet McCann does not even come close to writing about Ireland the way in which he writes about New York.
The New York he describes, I see clearly. I was a teenaged immigrant when I lived in New York City. Though I was fortunate to have parents who swore to keep us out of the projects even though they had lost everything when they emigrated, I walked the streets of the projects with my high school friends in Queens, where I lived. I visited the Bronx with them, where mothers leaned out of windows speaking in code, asking their sons to buy things I had no idea of then until I saw small bags exchanged through palms. Walked the projects of Staten Island with friends who had just moved there after escaping war in their homelands. Went to church in the middle of what was then Brooklyn's worst projects; Bedsty. Watched while some of my friends never made it through high school and some were deported for bad behavior. Sometimes it all seems unnerving, as if someone handed me a skateboard and I skated through all of it in slow motion.
Now here goes McCann, illuminating it all, reminding me. He speaks of prostitution, drugs, death, etc. But mostly, the book probes about life and consequences, life and the decisions we make, life--the good, the ugly, the beautiful, the painful.
Ciaran Corrigan was my favorite character. Then Jaslyn; the daughter of Jazzlyn the prostitute. Ciaran told the twisted story of his brother, John Corrigan, who was a priest living in the projects with prostitutes, and somehow he became their best friend and angel. But even a priest has struggles and even his family must deal with tragedy. Through Ciaran's narration, I wanted to move with the book and never let it go. Until about 80 pages in when the parallel narration took Ciaran away from me and introduced another character.
And this is the only problem I had. The parallel narratives seemed almost like short stories that were later stringed into a novel. And since McCann was a short story writer, that theory may not be too far off. There was the overarching theme of New York, yes, and there were characters whose lives were later intertwined yes, but don't look to be driven by some plot alignment. I love short stories but I hate when I'm reading a novel and it starts to feel like a short story collection. You come across so many characters--which, I admit, seems befitting for New York. Though when I got to Tillie's narration (the older prostitute) it seemed a bit inauthentic because the New York-African American dialect was off.
Great book and an author whose masterful prose I will gladly seek.
"The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough."
4.5 stars
August 2, 2022
It's hard to describe this National Book Award winning novel without using the phrase 'balancing act.' Phillipe Petit's astonishing 1974 walk between the Twin Towers forms the centrepiece of the story, and in its shadow the lives of several characters intersect in surprising and intricate ways.
Corrigan is one of its sprawling cast. A Dublin import, he is a man of God who makes it his mission to serve a congregation of prostitutes working the city's grimy streets. Tillie and her daughter Jazzlyn are among them, two women who would dream of a happier life if they didn't know better. Claire is a wealthy Park Avenue housewife, mourning the death of her son in Vietnam. At a group for grieving mothers, she meets Gloria, a strong and thoughtful woman who has suffered more heartache than most. And Lara is an aimless, coke-addicted artist who doesn't realise her life is about to change in the most profound way.
Colum McCann does such an impressive job of weaving the stories together, a real high-wire act of his own. Some of their voices struck me more than others - Tillie's sorrowful account from a prison cell and Gloria's tale of courageous resilience were my favourites. McCann also brings a gritty 70s New York to life in a spectacular way, "a city with its fingers in the garbage, a city that ate off dirty dishes." Nitpickers might call the novel unfocused, but you have to admire its audacity and style. It's as mesmerizing as the tightrope theatrics that inspired it.
Corrigan is one of its sprawling cast. A Dublin import, he is a man of God who makes it his mission to serve a congregation of prostitutes working the city's grimy streets. Tillie and her daughter Jazzlyn are among them, two women who would dream of a happier life if they didn't know better. Claire is a wealthy Park Avenue housewife, mourning the death of her son in Vietnam. At a group for grieving mothers, she meets Gloria, a strong and thoughtful woman who has suffered more heartache than most. And Lara is an aimless, coke-addicted artist who doesn't realise her life is about to change in the most profound way.
Colum McCann does such an impressive job of weaving the stories together, a real high-wire act of his own. Some of their voices struck me more than others - Tillie's sorrowful account from a prison cell and Gloria's tale of courageous resilience were my favourites. McCann also brings a gritty 70s New York to life in a spectacular way, "a city with its fingers in the garbage, a city that ate off dirty dishes." Nitpickers might call the novel unfocused, but you have to admire its audacity and style. It's as mesmerizing as the tightrope theatrics that inspired it.
February 24, 2022
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann was told in a non-linear fashion by several different narrators and each with some type of tangential relationship to the other characters in the book; some will become aware of that interrelationship while others may not. Most of the story unfolds over the course of several days and some events are told from many different perspectives. The narrative is primarily in New York City interspersed with a fictional narrative of the history-making feat of funambulist Phillipe Petit on August 7, 1974 when he walked across a tightrope strung between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. There is a photograph in the book that is somewhat prescient as there is a shadow of an airplane flying over the Twin Towers while Petit is making his way in this death-defying feat on the high-wire between the towers.
This was a wonderful book and while this is the first book that I have read by this Irish author, it certainly won't be the last. Colum McCann notes that the title comes from the poem Locksley Hall by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I will close with the words of Colum McCann:
Philippe Petit crosses between the Twin Towers. AP Photo/Alan Welner
This was a wonderful book and while this is the first book that I have read by this Irish author, it certainly won't be the last. Colum McCann notes that the title comes from the poem Locksley Hall by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I will close with the words of Colum McCann:
"Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told."
Philippe Petit crosses between the Twin Towers. AP Photo/Alan Welner
July 23, 2012
New York City in 1974 was a run-down, uneasy place, trapped in a spiral of decay. Colum McCann's novel captures the spirit of the place and the people eloquently and movingly, the despair and isolation, the community and the hope. The stories of a disparate group of New Yorkers are linked together by Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers: a monk working among prostitutes in the Bronx; his brother, newly arrived from Dublin; one of the prositutes; a Park Avenue matron (Claire, perhaps named to echo Clarissa Dalloway of whom she reminded me a bit) reaching out uncertainly to other mothers of soldiers killed in Vietnam; her judge husband; and a couple of art world refugees. While a few of the sections (particularly one of computer hackers working on the early Arpanet) are weaker than the others, overall, this beautifully written book was one that I never wanted to end.
July 14, 2014
SURPRISING. LUMINESCENT. ENGROSSING.
Despite depressing themes; in gratitude of lambent prose that sparkles and twinkles across the page, Colum McCann’s, ‘Let the Great World Spin’ is a joy to read.
“NOBODY FALLS HALFWAY”
(Pg. 149 -- B&N Digital Edition)
After reading the prologue I thought, “Wow. I’m going to like this novel.” By page fifty-five or so, though, I was ready to give it two stars and lament how I should have known better than to read a book by anyone with ‘Mc’ in their name. Native-born Irish writers are all so frustratingly depressing.
By page ninety-five, a complete turnaround; I was thinking, “Hot-damn, WOW! This fellow is an incredible writer,” and was eager to award his novel at least four stars. It’s poetry. It’s lyrical. It’s luxurious. It’s literature. And it’s me who’s lovin’ it.
So much for my proclivities toward ethnic-author stereotyping.
“ The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.
(Pg. 309 – B&N Digital Edition)
Recommendation: Pick up this award winning novel for a delightful read.
[nookEbook #6:]
Despite depressing themes; in gratitude of lambent prose that sparkles and twinkles across the page, Colum McCann’s, ‘Let the Great World Spin’ is a joy to read.
“NOBODY FALLS HALFWAY”
(Pg. 149 -- B&N Digital Edition)
After reading the prologue I thought, “Wow. I’m going to like this novel.” By page fifty-five or so, though, I was ready to give it two stars and lament how I should have known better than to read a book by anyone with ‘Mc’ in their name. Native-born Irish writers are all so frustratingly depressing.
By page ninety-five, a complete turnaround; I was thinking, “Hot-damn, WOW! This fellow is an incredible writer,” and was eager to award his novel at least four stars. It’s poetry. It’s lyrical. It’s luxurious. It’s literature. And it’s me who’s lovin’ it.
So much for my proclivities toward ethnic-author stereotyping.
“ The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.
(Pg. 309 – B&N Digital Edition)
Recommendation: Pick up this award winning novel for a delightful read.
[nookEbook #6:]
April 18, 2024
Love this book about loss and moving forward. Beautifully told.
May 24, 2010
When you google “Let the Great World Spin” together with “weave”, you get something like 130,000 hits. I guess that makes sense. It’s the natural, albeit overused, word for what McCann did so well: tell multiple stories about multiple people with multiple themes, focusing on one point-of-view at a time, but with enough overlap to bind them together. (I tried to come up with a more distinctive metaphor, but my spinning disc with multi-colored curves coming from the center like one of those psychedelic swirl lollipops smacked of trying too hard.)
Anyway…
This was a very good book. I liked the way it was structured, with Frenchman Philippe Petit’s historic walk on a tightrope between the Twin Towers in 1974 as the common strand in most of the stories. For any of you who saw Man on Wire, you know this was a pretty cool, real-life event. McCann’s 10 other stories seemed like they could have been true, too. With millions of stories in the Naked City to work with, the challenge was to come up with a representative subset. And to combine them in the manner of a spinning disc with multi-colored curves coming from the center like one of those psychedelic swirl lollipops. (OK, I see it now: “weave” truly is better.)
The cast of characters is as engaging as it is varied. We meet a modern-day urban monk, his brother from Ireland, mother-daughter prostitutes with hearts of something less clichéd than gold (though not like greasy black banana peels either), an unfortunate society lady whose son had been in Vietnam, her husband the municipal judge, her new friend in a support group who didn’t know quite what to make of her (with race as a complicating factor), the nerdy developers who gave birth to the internet, an art photographer with a specialty in tagging, an artistic couple with integrity in varying degrees, and the daughter of one of the hookers, sent away and now grown, returning to tie up a few of the stories’ loose ends. Phillippe features, too, though not always as a focal point.
The writing, I thought, was top notch. The plots were engrossing and the descriptions gave a real sense of time and place. Plus, McCann lays out his words with a real rhythmic flair. Spun or woven, read and enjoy.
Anyway…
This was a very good book. I liked the way it was structured, with Frenchman Philippe Petit’s historic walk on a tightrope between the Twin Towers in 1974 as the common strand in most of the stories. For any of you who saw Man on Wire, you know this was a pretty cool, real-life event. McCann’s 10 other stories seemed like they could have been true, too. With millions of stories in the Naked City to work with, the challenge was to come up with a representative subset. And to combine them in the manner of a spinning disc with multi-colored curves coming from the center like one of those psychedelic swirl lollipops. (OK, I see it now: “weave” truly is better.)
The cast of characters is as engaging as it is varied. We meet a modern-day urban monk, his brother from Ireland, mother-daughter prostitutes with hearts of something less clichéd than gold (though not like greasy black banana peels either), an unfortunate society lady whose son had been in Vietnam, her husband the municipal judge, her new friend in a support group who didn’t know quite what to make of her (with race as a complicating factor), the nerdy developers who gave birth to the internet, an art photographer with a specialty in tagging, an artistic couple with integrity in varying degrees, and the daughter of one of the hookers, sent away and now grown, returning to tie up a few of the stories’ loose ends. Phillippe features, too, though not always as a focal point.
The writing, I thought, was top notch. The plots were engrossing and the descriptions gave a real sense of time and place. Plus, McCann lays out his words with a real rhythmic flair. Spun or woven, read and enjoy.
August 24, 2024
A beautiful, inspirational book (yes I actually said that) about characters in and out of the NYC area who witness Mr. Philippe Petit's astonishing act of audaciousness and bravery by walking on a tightrope wire between the World Trade Towers in 1974.
A little lagging at first, it’s a gentle novel about characters who find the will to find love and hope in spite of their dire living circumstances. It's very much like a modern day Woolf novel, filled with hope and sadness building into a slow burn finale that genuinely brings tears.
Each character is unforgettable, lovable and ultimately unforgettably human.
A little lagging at first, it’s a gentle novel about characters who find the will to find love and hope in spite of their dire living circumstances. It's very much like a modern day Woolf novel, filled with hope and sadness building into a slow burn finale that genuinely brings tears.
Each character is unforgettable, lovable and ultimately unforgettably human.
April 28, 2021
” Fra le auto bloccate, dietro, c’era chi apriva le portiere e chi, impaziente di riprendere la marcia, stava già pestando sul clacson:
il rincorrersi dei vaffanculo, il ritornello di New York”
Tutto comincia con un cavo teso tra le torri del Word Trade Center.
Una folla che diventa sempre più numerosa cerca di mettere a fuoco un puntino che prende la forma di un uomo intento ad appoggiare un piede su quella fune
”Lassù, a centodieci piani di altezza, assolutamente immobile, un’inezia scura si stagliava contro il cielo nuvoloso.”
Un romanzo modulato con un ritmo ininterrotto e costruito con periodi brevi che danno una sensazione di perentorio, definitivo, come, ad esempio qui:
” Ho raggiunto il Bronx che ormai era buio.
Sono uscito dalla stazione nel caldo serale. Mattoni grigi e tabelloni pubblicitari. Il suono ritmico di una radio da qualche parte. Un ragazzino in maglietta senza maniche piroettava su un pezzo di cartone usando la spalla come perno per il resto del corpo. Contorni sfocati. Nessun limite. Mani a terra e piedi che disegnavano in orbita un ampio cerchio. Si è abbassato e all’improvviso ha vorticato sulla testa, si è inarcato all’indietro, si è compresso come una molla ed è balzato in aria. Tenebra in movimento.
Tassisti abusivi oziavano sulla Concourse. Vecchi bianchi con ampi cappelli. Ho lanciato lo zaino nel baule di un’enorme automobile nera.”
Questo vale soprattutto nella prima parte, poi è come se qualcosa si sciogliesse.
Si parte con un funambolo che s’ispira ad un uomo reale (Philippe Petit che il 7 agosto 1974 camminò davvero tra le torri) e si fa poi conoscenza con una serie di personaggi che scopriamo, più o meno intrecciati tra loro.
Ogni capitolo è modulato su una di queste voci e s’una prospettiva diversa creando, così, una storia multistrato che solo a New York ha la sua ragione di essere:
”Non ci avevo mai pensato prima, ma all’improvviso mi sono resa conto che a New York tutto è costruito su qualcos’altro, nulla esiste separatamente, le cose sono una più strana dell’altra, e fra loro connesse. “
Una struttura ed una prosa affascinante che mi ha convinto a leggere altro dell’autore.
La quinta stella rimane spenta per ragione forse insondabili o, forse, dovute semplicemente ad una lettura (cause forze maggiori) un po’ troppo a singhiozzo.
Comunque meritevole.
il rincorrersi dei vaffanculo, il ritornello di New York”
Tutto comincia con un cavo teso tra le torri del Word Trade Center.
Una folla che diventa sempre più numerosa cerca di mettere a fuoco un puntino che prende la forma di un uomo intento ad appoggiare un piede su quella fune
”Lassù, a centodieci piani di altezza, assolutamente immobile, un’inezia scura si stagliava contro il cielo nuvoloso.”
Un romanzo modulato con un ritmo ininterrotto e costruito con periodi brevi che danno una sensazione di perentorio, definitivo, come, ad esempio qui:
” Ho raggiunto il Bronx che ormai era buio.
Sono uscito dalla stazione nel caldo serale. Mattoni grigi e tabelloni pubblicitari. Il suono ritmico di una radio da qualche parte. Un ragazzino in maglietta senza maniche piroettava su un pezzo di cartone usando la spalla come perno per il resto del corpo. Contorni sfocati. Nessun limite. Mani a terra e piedi che disegnavano in orbita un ampio cerchio. Si è abbassato e all’improvviso ha vorticato sulla testa, si è inarcato all’indietro, si è compresso come una molla ed è balzato in aria. Tenebra in movimento.
Tassisti abusivi oziavano sulla Concourse. Vecchi bianchi con ampi cappelli. Ho lanciato lo zaino nel baule di un’enorme automobile nera.”
Questo vale soprattutto nella prima parte, poi è come se qualcosa si sciogliesse.
Si parte con un funambolo che s’ispira ad un uomo reale (Philippe Petit che il 7 agosto 1974 camminò davvero tra le torri) e si fa poi conoscenza con una serie di personaggi che scopriamo, più o meno intrecciati tra loro.
Ogni capitolo è modulato su una di queste voci e s’una prospettiva diversa creando, così, una storia multistrato che solo a New York ha la sua ragione di essere:
”Non ci avevo mai pensato prima, ma all’improvviso mi sono resa conto che a New York tutto è costruito su qualcos’altro, nulla esiste separatamente, le cose sono una più strana dell’altra, e fra loro connesse. “
Una struttura ed una prosa affascinante che mi ha convinto a leggere altro dell’autore.
La quinta stella rimane spenta per ragione forse insondabili o, forse, dovute semplicemente ad una lettura (cause forze maggiori) un po’ troppo a singhiozzo.
Comunque meritevole.
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