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Loading... Let the Great World Spin: A Novelby Colum McCann
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I love stories about New York so I was really excited to receive Let the Great World Spin. It didn't disappoint. All of the intertwined tales grabbed my attention and I wasn't ready for them to end. The only one that I didn't love was the story of the actual tightrope walker. For some reason - I really can't explain why - I hurried through those parts, anxious to get back to the other people's stories. McCann did a wonderful job of capturing this period of time in NYC as well as capturing the essence of a diverse group of characters. (  ) spurnell | Nov 23, 2009 |  Interconnecting lives in New York City based mostly in the 70's. There is a very interesting tie between the stories. (  ) rlovejoy | Nov 21, 2009 | Colum McCann has accomplished a rare feat: he's a foreigner, but he's brought out a more sophisticated, forceful, and American novel about that most fascinating and aggravating of American cities, New York, than almost any American author could. "Let the Great World Spin" sheds its knowing and compassionate light on the lives of a handful of New Yorkers - two women distraught over the loss of sons in Vietnam, the judge husband of one of these women, a drug-addled avant garde artist struggling with heavy guilt, a clique of prostitutes in the South Bronx and the naif who strives to minister to them, the Central American woman who falls for this would-be priest. The daily struggles with grief, poverty, and hopelessness swirl - spin - around the focal point of an amazing, only-in-New York stunt that was perpetrated on a sultry summer day in 1974: a tightrope walk between the tops of the two World Trade Center towers. In fact, this unnamed daredevil's portrait is one of the most captivating and entertaining parts of the book. It is one of the continuing strands Mr. McCann so skilfully weaves together; they spin and swirl in an ever-tightening whirlpool centered around the nexus of the tightrope stunt. The stunt does not function as a deus ex machina device, although it can seem that way. As in "Five Skies" by Ron Coleman, this one high aspiration, this out-of-this-world concept, carries a symbolic weight. People strive to rise above in this story, and the tightrope walker carries not only their hopes and dreams aloft, but those of millions of other New Yorkers, too. Mr. McCann's prose works wonders with the internal dialogs here; it contains just the right level of language, slang, insult, street patois, and curse to be expected from each of these characters. His concept is ingenious and his somewhat unorthodox way of twirling the yarns together into a cohesive whole achieves its object brilliantly. This book takes and breaks our hearts, heals them partway back up, and then gives us hope for these characters and for their fellow hopefuls here on the ground. This is the best book I have read this year. I honor Mr. McCann's achievement, and encourage in the highest possible terms, other LT'ers to take it up! Oh, you will be pleased and enriched! (  )1  LukeS | Nov 14, 2009 | a rather lovely, "Crash" like pastiche of intertwining lives whose connection is deeper than the event they all experience. ( ) bansheegirl | Oct 20, 2009 | Intertwined stories of "ordinary lives" on one day in New York, August 7, 1974. The description of these lives in a time when NYC was in decline are wonderful. ( ) ghefferon | Oct 15, 2009 | 
 This is an exceptional performance by a writer whose originality and profound humanity is evident throughout this highly original and wondrous novel.  The lousy feeling that you’ve been duped into buying a bogus product increases as you read Let the Great World Spin, and like all chintzy things manufactured for tourists, the book can’t withstand the slightest amount of tensile pressure. Apply a little scrutiny to the artistic decisions being made, and worse and worse details appear, from the awful prose, which ceaselessly pitches and yaws between staccato bursts of words and breathless run-on sentences, to the gaudy, exhibitionist displays of grief. But tackiest of all is the way that McCann deals with his African-American characters, who come off as nothing more than anthropological specimens. It is a mark of the novel’s soaring and largely fulfilled ambition that McCann just keeps rolling out new people, deftly linking each to the next, as his story moves toward its surprising and deeply affecting conclusion. ... Here and elsewhere, “Let the Great World Spin” can feel like a precursor to another novel of colliding cultures: “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” Tom Wolfe’s classic portrait of New York in the 1980s. But McCann’s effort is less disciplined, more earnest, looser, rougher, more flawed but also more soulful — in other words, more like the city itself. Gritty yet hopeful... in terms of sheer lyricism, McCann pulls out all the stops. My review copy was an absolute mess of Post-its and marked passages by the time I was halfway through. A book so humane in its understanding of original sin that it winds up bestowing what might be called original absolution... a pre-9/11 novel that delivers the sense that so many of the 9/11 novels have missed.
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