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Loading... Let the Great World Spin: A Novel (original 2009; edition 2009)by Colum McCann (Author)
Work InformationLet the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (2009)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. What an amazing book. Fantastic plot-weaving. ( ) Once in a while you come across a book that crackles with some electricity that hums deep inside you, and you know you are under the pull of a great work. Let the Great World Spin is such a novel for me. Using the real Iife event of Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center as the jumping off point to weave a tale, Mr. McCann gives us rich, varied characters whose lives peripherally or intimately collide on that day. The writing itself is so lovely, the tales sad and funny and poignant. The tightrope walker’s tale. The tale of the judge before whom he was brought after being taken into custody. The tale of the two prostitutes charged with robbery, on the court’s docket just before the tightrope walker. The Irish monk who watched out for the hookers in his neighborhood, whose brother comes from Ireland to stay with him — their beginnings in Dublin, their interconnection with others in the novel. I cared about the characters, their small stories and how they intersected with each other on that day. It was like a modern day Canterbury Tales. Lovely, lovely book. "It was America after all. The sort of place where you should be allowed to walk as high as you wanted." Let the Great World Spin is a beautiful novel.The novel proceeds from a series of internal monologues. Each character drawing the story from their perspective. One story from a high wire performer who strings a wire across the tops of the two towers of the World Trade Center; a story told from the perspective of a prostitute. Another story told from the point of view of the brother of an Irish monk who has dedicated his life to ministering street walkers in New York's "projects." The characters are so vivid and the language is believable. I must say that this is one of the few books I've read that made me feel physically ill. I got vertigo just imagining the man on the high wire, walking, sometimes skipping and running, a mile above the pavement. And then thinking of the spinning earth, spinning on its axis, around the sun, the solar system spinning in the galaxy, and the galaxy spinning through the universe. Characters walk high literally, and figuratively -- stoned on a variety of substances -- some high because they are high in society, others high because they serve God. It is a majestic canvas. The narrators are uniquely unreliable and push you more to examine the landscape yourself. The moral landscape. The societal landscape. This book was difficult for me to get into and I almost stopped reading it more than once. It was probably close to page 60 or more when I finally started to enjoy it. It opens with Philippe Petit's wire walk between the twin towers but everything else is fiction. The author somehow weaves the stories of multiple characters who seem like they shouldn't be connected at all. Even though it was sad, it's one of those books where the character's stories really stick with you.
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. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML:NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • Colum McCann’s beloved novel inspired by Philippe Petit’s daring high-wire stunt, which is also depicted in the film The Walk starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people. Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s. Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth. Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.” A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent” (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic. “This is a gorgeous book, multilayered and deeply felt, and it’s a damned lot of fun to read, too. Leave it to an Irishman to write one of the greatest-ever novels about New York. There’s so much passion and humor and pure lifeforce on every page of Let the Great World Spin that you’ll find yourself giddy, dizzy, overwhelmed.”—Dave Eggers “Stunning . . . [an] elegiac glimpse of hope . . . It’s a novel rooted firmly in time and place. It vividly captures New York at its worst and best. But it transcends all that. In the end, it’s a novel about families—the ones we’re born into and the ones we make for ourselves.”—USA Today. No library descriptions found.
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LibraryThing Early Reviewers AlumColum McCann's book Let the Great World Spin was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Author ChatColum McCann chatted with LibraryThing members from Mar 1, 2010 to Mar 14, 2010. Read the chat. Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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