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Let the Great World Spin: A Novel by Colum…
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Let the Great World Spin: A Novel (original 2009; edition 2009)

by Colum McCann

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5,9413141,658 (3.99)530
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.
… (more)
Member:molugum
Title:Let the Great World Spin: A Novel
Authors:Colum McCann
Info:Random House Trade Paperbacks (2009), Edition: 1st Edition/1st Printing, Paperback, 400 pages
Collections:Your library
Rating:*****
Tags:None

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Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (2009)

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» See also 530 mentions

English (301)  French (3)  Spanish (2)  German (2)  Dutch (2)  Danish (2)  Italian (1)  Catalan (1)  Norwegian (1)  All languages (315)
Showing 1-5 of 301 (next | show all)
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. ( )
  bschweiger | Feb 4, 2024 |
"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. ( )
  MylesKesten | Jan 23, 2024 |
"What happens to one of us, happens to all of us". Always give the other person the benefit of the doubt. You don't know what's going on in their life. Gloria's story was particularly powerful. All the female characters were fully realized. How could a male author understand those inner lives? ( )
  jemisonreads | Jan 22, 2024 |
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. ( )
  ellink | Jan 22, 2024 |
Colum McCann is a wonderful writer, no doubt, but it took me some time to get into this book--and even after I'd decided I liked it, there were parts I wanted to rush through because they seemed mostly disconnected from the main plot.

The story is narrated by, I think, something like ten different characters. There is a core connected group made up of two Irish brothers, a pair of prostitutes, two ladies who lost sons in Vietnam, a nurse, an artist/former junkie, and, of course, the tightrope walker whose dramatic stroll between the Twin Towers sort of anchors this book to one day in New York City in 1974.

So, the story is all over the place, but that's probably the point. In a way, this is more like a group of connected short stories than a traditional novel. The epigraph McCann chose illustrates this: "All of the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is." And so some of the characters are people we glimpse but never really know--a hacker who falls in love with a librarian over the phone, a graffiti photographer, a sister in the military. At the same time, we maybe know "what the world is" a little better by the end of this book because we have seen through the eyes of so many.

In the Afterword, McCann says that this book is his reaction to 9/11, and yet the NYC-in-the-1970s setting seemed to be full of everyday tragedies that stand in stark contrast to the huge tragedy of 9/11. Drugs, poverty, and violence are mundane and everywhere, as evidenced in the daily grind of the projects, arraignment court, a walk to Harlem. But the book echoes 9/11 in the act of the tightrope walker, how he makes the whole city stop and pay attention and come together to witness something shocking.

So, beautiful job, Mr. McCann. Deserving of the National Book Award. ( )
  LibrarianDest | Jan 3, 2024 |
Showing 1-5 of 301 (next | show all)
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.
added by jjlong | editEsquire, Tom Junod (Jul 8, 2009)
 

» Add other authors (14 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Colum McCannprimary authorall editionscalculated
Doyle, GerardNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Monda, CarolNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Ocampo, Ramon deNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Parker, JohannaNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Poe, RichardNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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Epigraph
“All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be,
they are everywhere. That is what the world is.”

—Aleksandar Hemon,
The Lazarus Project
Dedication
For John, Frank, and Jim.
And, of course, Allison.
First words
Those who saw him hushed.
Quotations
I knew the Catholic hit parade - the Our Father, the Hail Mary - but that was all. I was a raw, quiet child, and God was already a bore to me.
"With all respects to heaven, I like it here."
"But see, this logical God, I don't like him all that much. Even His voice, He's got this voice that I just can't, I don't know, I can't like. I can understand it, but I don't necessarily like it. He's out of my range. But that's no problem. Plenty of times I haven't liked Him. It's good to be at a disturbance with God. Plenty of fine people have been in my place and worse."
There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.
The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn't look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. War was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple - hate your enemy, know nothing of him.
Last words
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
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Wikipedia in English (2)

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.

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Book description
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.
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