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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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0 0In 1974, Philippe Petit decided to pull a stunt that both shocked and thrilled New York when he walked a tightrope wire between the World Trade Towers. This true life story is the common thread that ties all of the chapters of Colum McCann’s beautiful fictional novel entitled “Let the Great World Spin,” together.
Each chapter is its own short story, yet each story seamlessly weaves into the other as the reader makes the surprising discovery that the characters are not only drawn together by this exciting stunt in some small way, but in many more ways than the read could ever anticipate.
The book opens with a kind-hearted priest who has decided to plant himself in the roughest New York neighborhood to act as an aid to the prostitutes that have set up shop. His small and sparse apartment becomes a place of refuge for the prostitutes in his community and he puts his own reputation on the line to care for them and many others in his community. From there the writer takes you on a journey as each chapter segues into the next as you learn about other elements of the story that somehow seem unrelated, but then are pulled together magically in this book. To share what each chapter is about would give away a beautiful plot that is worthy of any reader to discover on their own.
I will say it was a difficult read for me at times and a little labor intensive for a summer read. The dialogue was also, at times, a struggle to read as the dialogue and writing mimic the speech of the characters that the chapter is being written about. Just like most books of short stories, some chapters were far more interesting in others, but it was one of the most unique novels I have read in a long time. It is a book that will stick with you long after the book is shut and will remind you how our own stories are so easily interwoven into others as the great world spins on.
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