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Let the Great World Spin

by Colum McCann (Goodreads Author)

3.89 of 5 stars 3.89 · rating details · 43,231 ratings · 5,796 reviews

An American masterpiece from internationally bestselling novelist Colum McCann—a dazzling and hauntingly rich vision of the loveliness, pain, and mystery of New York City in the 1970s

In the dawning light of the late summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. . . . It is August, 1974, and a tightrope walker is run...more

Paperback, 349 pages

Published by Bloomsbury UK (first published January 1st 2009)

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Jul 07, 2012 Jason rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: for-kindle, wine-club, 2012, reviewed

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, ther...more

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Jun 05, 2013 Richard rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 le...more 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.(less)

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Apr 17, 2013 Nathan James rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011, alltimefavorites, immigrant-fiction

I wanted to remember some of the lines from this book so I wrote them in my journal. I haven't read anything in a while that has made me ache. The loss in this book and the admiration the narrators have for the central figure is overwhelming as you read it. The author has obviously lost someone special and has captured that loss on paper. Just gorgeously written, especially the chapters titled Miro, Miro on the Wall and Centavos.

SPOILERS AHOY AHOY

To describe this book would be misleading. It is...more I wanted to remember some of the lines from this book so I wrote them in my journal. I haven't read anything in a while that has made me ache. The loss in this book and the admiration the narrators have for the central figure is overwhelming as you read it. The author has obviously lost someone special and has captured that loss on paper. Just gorgeously written, especially the chapters titled Miro, Miro on the Wall and Centavos.

SPOILERS AHOY AHOY

To describe this book would be misleading. It is a tale of interwoven characters who don't know how they connect, each chapter is written from a different point of view, and there's some play with the chronology of the plot. Pretty standard fiction fare nowadays. Let the Great World Spin feels different to me because it executes a Maris-on-Frasier relationship. We never hear from Maris or McCann's character Corrigan directly, but we get a fully fleshed out character from hearsay. In Corrigan's case, he just keeps getting more and more wholesome and that wholesomeness radiates through the other characters in the novel. That delicate kind of wholesome that isn't preachy or judgmental.

To me, the character Corrigan illustrates the reason I dislike Oprah. He felt no need to wear his good deeds like a medallion - he did not do the tremendously kind things he did for his own self-esteem or for an audience. He did them because it was right. The fact that the reader learns of Corrie's philanthropy is solely because we hear it from other characters. He would never tell us these things if he were to narrate. He was a reminder to people who most needed reminding that there is still good in the world.

Similarities can easily be drawn between him and the unnamed tightrope walker. I would like to write about the tightrope walker and Corrie's differences. We are told the tightrope walker's intentions for walking out between the Twin Towers were because the Towers were there to be walked between. Since this stunt took place before reality tv shows and 24 hour news channels, I can somewhat believe it. But somewhere in there he must have done it for notoriety, don't we all have some wish to be remembered, or at least have our 15 minutes of fame? That's the main difference to me between the tightrope walker and Corrie.

The only reason this book didn't get a 5 star from me is because of the phreakers chapter. I'm still wrapping my head around it. I wouldn't say it was a mismatch to the rest of the book; but its reason for being included isn't as obvious. Communication and distance are definite themes of the novel. The beginnings of the internet seem like a good locale for that discussion - but the rest of the book was so tightly written; much more obvious in its motives. Plus there was always a tie in to other characters of the novel somehow in other chapters. Maybe I should read it again, because I don't think any of the people the phreakers got a hold of tied in.(less)

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Jul 23, 2012 Catherine Siemann rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2009-favorites

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, p...more

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Jan 28, 2013 Aerin rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: americana, litrachur, well-that-was-awesome, what-if-it-all-means-something

The events we remember in stark relief, the events that change us or change our world, may be the closest we'll ever get to time travel. No matter how far away time takes us from them, we can always, always return.

Most Americans who were cognizant on September 11, 2001, remember the day in elaborate detail. Where we were when we first saw the footage or heard the news, what we thought or feared at the time, how we felt and how we made sense of it in those first few days after.

One interesting asp...more The events we remember in stark relief, the events that change us or change our world, may be the closest we'll ever get to time travel. No matter how far away time takes us from them, we can always, always return.

Most Americans who were cognizant on September 11, 2001, remember the day in elaborate detail. Where we were when we first saw the footage or heard the news, what we thought or feared at the time, how we felt and how we made sense of it in those first few days after.

One interesting aspect of events that go down in history is that, if you ask people years or decades later about what they remember, you come away with not just a record of the event itself, but of the world as it existed on the day it occurred. If you ask people now about 9/11, hidden quietly behind the atrocities is this oddly-preserved snapshot of our lives on a particular day some eleven years ago. Where we were living, what we were doing, our struggles and our hopes and fears and personal tragedies, what mattered to us and what was floating around in the zeitgeist, all frozen in the amber of memory because of the evil that interrupted it.

But it isn't just these monumental events that send repercussive ripples through multiple lives, and every day could be a snapshot of our interconnected world if only we were to remember it.

One can't really say that Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin is about 9/11, because it takes place in 1974 and never mentions the event. It might be more accurate to say that the book is imbued with 9/11, a visceral artistic response to the attacks that would somehow be made tacky and crude if it were to discuss them directly. I don't think I could read a novel that was about 9/11, that would try to wring some glib literary pablum from the slaughter and the wreckage and that cloudless bright morning. It is still too soon for that, for me, and may always be.

But in August 1974, another event caused New Yorkers to stop in their tracks and look up at the World Trade Center in disbelief. That morning, a man strung a tightrope between the tops of the towers, and for an hour danced back and forth across the high wire.

McCann uses this event (which really happened, accomplished by famed funambulist Philippe Petit) as the fulcrum around which he spins the lives of his multiple characters. The tightrope walk and its aftermath intersects with their various lives in separate ways, and it means something different to each of them. But in the end, this is not a book about an event or its effect. It's about what's already happening in their lives when it occurs. It's a snapshot of a particular day: how it interconnects people in ways they don't even know, how it affects the past and the future, how it incarnates the larger cogs of history's machine.

This novel is intensely personal, focusing on individual lives, but as a whole it is as diverse and broad as New York City itself. Because what is a city but an abundance of individual lives? And what is any particular day but another incremental step in each of those lives: toward destruction or salvation, isolation or connection, grief or contentment, death or new creation? (less)

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Jun 08, 2013 Aubrey rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: on-hand, 5-star, reviewed

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 pi...more 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 ones 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.

(less)

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Dec 12, 2009 Mike Gross rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Colum McCann is upper middle-class, white, and has a penis. And this fact shone through in virtually every depiction of the characters he chose to write, every context in which he situated those characters, and the entire tone & voice & style of this book. It was a disappointment for me because it lacked authenticity and quite often bordered on flat-out cheesiness (the slang-talking, ethnic prostitute, it turns out has an IQ of 124! wow, what a unique way to flip the tables on my percept...more

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Jan 16, 2010 Maggie rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 f...more

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Jun 03, 2011 Kemper rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011, modern-lit, historical-fiction

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 ac...more 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.(less)

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Apr 27, 2012 Carl rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Further update:
Apparently there is an ongoing audience for this review, based on recent comments, and I might have hurt their reading pleasure "cuz" I didn't indicate there were SPOILERS!! Heck, I was just trying to save folks some precious reading time; doubt reading this will affect your like or dislike of the book. But watch for the WARNINGS.

UPDATE.
After some colleagues urged me to try it again, I plowed on, finished it, and am willing to move it up to 3 stars. Well written, but still too dis...more Further update:
Apparently there is an ongoing audience for this review, based on recent comments, and I might have hurt their reading pleasure "cuz" I didn't indicate there were SPOILERS!! Heck, I was just trying to save folks some precious reading time; doubt reading this will affect your like or dislike of the book. But watch for the WARNINGS.

UPDATE.
After some colleagues urged me to try it again, I plowed on, finished it, and am willing to move it up to 3 stars. Well written, but still too disjointed, hopping from one unfinished vignette to another, the connections being too loose or too forced for me to enjoy. The characters were too one-dimensional.

(SPOILER ALERT, avert your eyes until the end of the paragraph!!)

The ending seemed pretty lame to me as well--the slacker brother becomes a rich software mogul married to the avant-garde artiste whose former husband (and whatever happened to him? he could have become a junkie male hooker and become a part of the cast of that story, or maybe found God and took up where Corrigan left off, ministering to the hookers...) caused the wreck that led to the death of the too good to be true priest and the junkie hooker, who is redeemed by having a decent daughter, thanks to the efforts of the smart and sensitive but downtrodden black lady who was part of the informal support group of moms who'd lost sons in Vietnam, one of whose members was the Park Avenue wife of the judge who sentenced the hooker grandmother to jail...

(OK to start reading again) ...blah blah blah.

My friends cried at the end. I was sad I hadn't spent time on a better book.

(The Old)
Another critically acclaimed work of "literate" fiction that I've left unfinished. I couldn't even get through the first of the sub-stories, that of the devoted-to-celibacy, -poverty, etc. Irish monk living in squalor among the drug addicts/prostitutes of Harlem, as narrated by his slacker brother. Their characters as boys interested me, but the story of life in Harlem just dragged on, and eventually I got bored. Never got to the other stories and their connections to the first.(less)

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Jun 20, 2011 Eric rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 McCa...more

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May 27, 2013 Arah-Lynda Hay rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: i-said

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 profo...more

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Apr 01, 2013 Lewis Weinstein rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

This is the current read of our Cayo Hueso Literary Salon. I've just read through the reviews of my GR friends, mostly 4* and 5*. From somewhere among those reviews, I have the thought that this book shows that each of us, at some time in our lives, approaches the high wire of life, if we dare, fraught with opportunity and danger. Now to read the book.

BTW, if you haven't seen it, I recommend you see MAN ON THE WIRE. Netflix has it.

I have read the first chapter, dealing with the two Corrigan brot...more

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Aug 23, 2012 Jen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Вече и на български от Жанет 45 - http://books.janet45.com/books/756. Все още не съм напълно сигурна в каква степен емоционалният резонанс на този роман подлежи на транслиране.
Ноо, превела съм ви го с много голямо желание! И старание. :) Дано стигне до повече хора.

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Jan 15, 2012 Elisa rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: preferiti

L'antidoto a "Chiedi alla polvere"

Separa le tende, apre il triangolo, solleva appena il telaio, avverte un alito di vento sulla pelle: cenere e polvere e luce scacciano l'oscurità dalle cose. [...] Avanziamo incespicando, portiamo un po' di rumore nel silenzio, troviamo in altri di che andare avanti. E' quasi abbastanza.

Colum McCann mi ha fatto sentire a casa. La casa: quel posto in cui puoi rifugiarti, rinchiuderti a rinnegare il mondo intero e un attimo dopo progettare nuovi piani di conqui...more L'antidoto a "Chiedi alla polvere"

Separa le tende, apre il triangolo, solleva appena il telaio, avverte un alito di vento sulla pelle: cenere e polvere e luce scacciano l'oscurità dalle cose. [...] Avanziamo incespicando, portiamo un po' di rumore nel silenzio, troviamo in altri di che andare avanti. E' quasi abbastanza.

Colum McCann mi ha fatto sentire a casa. La casa: quel posto in cui puoi rifugiarti, rinchiuderti a rinnegare il mondo intero e un attimo dopo progettare nuovi piani di conquista dell'esterno. Il posto in cui trovi una coperta di affetto confortante, certo, ma anche stilettate pronte a trapassarti da parte a parte, nei tuoi punti più sensibili. Stilettate necessarie o meno, ma presenti.
McCann fa esattamente lo stesso effetto di una madre affettuosa coi piedi per terra. Ti mostra un oggetto che vortica in aria grazie al soffio del vento, ti dice: "Vedi, che bello! Questa è l'armonia di cui a volte è capace il vento". Poi, ti fa notare che quello che vortica in aria è un sacco di plastica abbandonato tra il lerciume del Bronx, tra siringhe insanguinate e futuri interrotti, e che il vento può perdere tutta la sua poesia quando inizia a fregiarsi con nomi di donna come Katrina.

Mi sono sentita a casa perché il racconto si basa su un fatto realmente accaduto e che mi ha colpita qualche mese fa grazie a un documentario: la traversata dello spazio tra le torri gemelle da parte di un funambolo francese, Philippe Petit. Piccolo di nome e di fatto, viso comune, sguardo arzillo, sorriso giocoso, voglia di essere (e non di vivere, perché questo può riuscire anche senza averne voglia, sepolti nell'apatia). McCann ha preso la voglia di essere di quest'uomo, ha puntato il dito verso la sua impresa più strabiliante, un uomo che passeggia a 110 piani di altezza e fa pure il teatrante salutando le folle e facendo inchini. Che bello, pazzesco, fenomenale, cazzo. Come le persone stipate nelle strade di New York col naso per aria, tanto stipate che persino le strade non bastavano più per racchiuderle, ti ritrovi lì col cuore in mano a Petit, con il piede nel suo piede, passo dopo passo, sul filo. Provi l'ebrezza dell'altitudine, il solleticare del vento che ti passa vicino senza farti cadere - finalmente, finalmente - e poi McCann ti butta giù. Come la busta che cade volteggiando, ti scaraventa tra il pubblico, inchiodandoti alle loro vite. E ti ritrovi con un piede sul filo e l'altro al piano terra del World Trade Center.

Mi sono sentita a casa perché la prosa di McCann è meditata ma mai artificiale, ponderata ma mai alleggerita o appesantita da inutili code o tacchi alti per far sembrare magnificente quello che non lo è. Perché con frasi come "cenere e polvere e luce scacciano l'oscurità dalle cose" è capace di mischiare tutto, bene, male e incertezza, e di farne un cocktail che ha il sentore della vita che vedi scorrerti ogni giorno davanti.

Mi sono sentita a casa anche perché questo libro mi è stato regalato da una persona speciale, e nel leggere i passi che l'hanno emozionata sentivo sovrapporsi la mia voce e la sua, sul timbro di McCann. Sarà melenso, forse, ma così è stato per me: bello e umano come una chiacchierata liberatoria.(less)

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Feb 19, 2013 Romina rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Tutto ha inizio il 7 agosto del 1974 a new york, quando l'equilibrista Philippe
Petit decide di dare colore ad una mattinata grigia e di fermarla, attirando a
se l'attenzione, camminando lungo un cavo teso fra le torri del World Trade
Center a ben 110 metri di altezza.
E' lui il fulcro del romanzo, è come se da lassù vedesse e guidasse le storie,
incastrandole e dando ad ognuna di esse un senso ....vita.
E' strano come questo libro mi abbia lasciato un'infinità di emozioni
contrastanti.
Ho cercato di le...more

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Feb 03, 2011 Deborah Edwards rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: personal-faves

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...more 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. (less)

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Dec 23, 2011 Maggi rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

When I began this book, I was unaware that a central motif is Phillipe Petit's tightrope walk between the towers of the World Trade Centers, but I could not have been happier when I realized this, as it is one of the most fascinating acts by a human being ever. I loved most of this book, which is a series of interconnected characters' stories, but would have preferred McCann had stayed with the early characters; I didn't find the later characters anywhere near as compelling. A self-sacrificing I...more

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May 12, 2009 Rebecca rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This was my introduction to Colum McCann's work. I won the book in a give-away and as soon as I received it, I couldn't put it down. It is a captivating read. The characters and their stories are so different, a small slice of life in NYC in '74 from the Bronx to Park Ave to the tightrope walker between the WTC, yet each one weaves into the other seemlessly, drawing you into their worlds. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and look forward to reading his other titles.

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Mar 15, 2010 George rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nook-ereads

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. Nati...more

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Jun 16, 2009 Linda rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A unique tale that intertwines the lives of several persons that live in New York in 1974.

What a facinating nway to write a book. One chapter you are listening to a womens club who meets because they have lost children...they see/hear of a man walking a tight rope between the Twin Towers. This distracts them from their purpose of the meeting to relieve them of the grief nestled and nurtured insde them. They get back on track to discuss the losses in their lives, still wondering if that tight-rop...more

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Mar 21, 2011 Kristen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

My dear friend Russell places this book in his Top 50 books of all time (this is an example of one of the many reasons why I love Russell -- he doesn't have a Top 5 or Top 10 book list, he has a Top 50!), and I think I would have to do the same. It's a beautifully written book that highlights the lives of a dozen or so characters whose stories are interrelated and interwoven with one another around one single event -- Philippe Petit's historic tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974. But...more

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May 16, 2011 Lillian rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I recently watched the documentary, Man on a Wire, which chronicles Philippe Petit's 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of New York City. This novel zooms in on the lives of a few of the thousands of anonymous people who stared in awe at the tiny man-dot moving back and forth on a wire 110 stories in the air. Not all of the characters saw that moment, but each feels its influence. Father John Corrigan, who has an unorthodox ministry to girls who walk the streets, is bringing one of them...more

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Jan 11, 2011 Michele rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"There Are So Many Stories To Be Told"
Let The Great World Spin was a book club selection, which was enjoyed by all who attended, and it prompted a lively, intelligent discussion. The story is based on the lives of eleven characters on the day in 1974 when French funambulist, Philippe Petit, danced across a wire (tightrope) secured between the new twin towers at the World Trade Center in New York. It is a well-written, literary masterpiece with highly believable, three-dimensional (complicated) c...more "There Are So Many Stories To Be Told"
Let The Great World Spin was a book club selection, which was enjoyed by all who attended, and it prompted a lively, intelligent discussion. The story is based on the lives of eleven characters on the day in 1974 when French funambulist, Philippe Petit, danced across a wire (tightrope) secured between the new twin towers at the World Trade Center in New York. It is a well-written, literary masterpiece with highly believable, three-dimensional (complicated) characters.

The characters are extremely diverse, and include an Irish immigrant “monk” with a heart of gold, a Park Avenue wife of a judge/mother of a son who was killed in Vietnam, a Guatemalan nurse, a young artist trying to kick a cocaine habit and living a 1920s lifestyle, a heroin-addicted street-walking prostitute and her daughter and two young children. There is also a chapter where seemingly unrelated characters in Palo Alto, CA—a group of pioneering computer hackers—find a way to contact payphones in Manhattan on the day of Petit’s performance, and try to get a live blow-by-blow account of the event from eye-witnesses. It’s a reminder to the reader of the state of technology at the time, and how different the world of 1974 was from today, when the event, no doubt, would have been broadcast on every television station and the Internet.

This prompted our group to discuss our own “day-in-the-life” experiences we had on Sept. 11, when we first heard of the attacks on the twin towers. Not surprisingly, everyone in the room watched the horrendous events unfold on television.

The high wire event loosely connects all the characters and it feels as though the lives are spinning and folding atop one another in unexpected ways. In spite of the darkness and at times, overwhelming grief associated with these character’s lives, the reader is left satisfied and reminded how different (and important) each life and each character’s personal story is.

I give this book my highest recommendation.

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Feb 11, 2010 Tung rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 happe...more

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Feb 14, 2013 Diane rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: book-club-reads

I read a lot of books, but this is my very favorite read of the last few years. With writers testing writing narratives that bring together seemingly unconnected threads into a tale, I have grown weary with this device because generally these writers do it badly and in the service of a flawed or flat-out crappy story. See for example, Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad.

This book serves its times, characters, and tale with insight, respect and love. The twin towers are gaining mythic to...more

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Jan 18, 2012 Rhoda rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book had an interesting format in that it was almost written as a number of short stories, however as the book progressed you see that the stories and characters connect. Each "story" is written from the perspective of a different character and I liked how certain events were viewed by the different characters and how each "story" built on the other ones and filled in gaps that were missing from previous ones.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed the individual stories and the writing style, I just...more

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Apr 15, 2013 Simona Bartolotta rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, narrativa-contemporanea

“C'è chi pensa che l'amore sia la fine della strada, e che se si è abbastanza fortunati da trovarlo ci si ferma lì. Altri dicono che è come un burrone nel quale si precipita. Ma chiunque abbia vissuto almeno un po' sa che muta con il passare dei giorni, e secondo l'energia che gli si dedica, lo si conserva o ci si aggrappa, oppure lo si perde, ma a volte capita che non sia nemmeno mai stato lì, fin dall'inizio."

Let The Great World Spin è il romanzo corale più bello che io abbia mai letto. Voglia...more

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Sep 30, 2012 Christopher Ryan rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I despise this book on so many levels. Primarily because it touches upon all the necessary/obvious hot points of recent American history: racism, Vietnam, 9/11, even hammering the latter home by ludicrously having a security guard tell someone they can't use their phone in a fricking airport terminal while waiting for luggage. Also: poverty, religion, class warfare, etc. It's as if some foreign writer came in to write about America and wanted to come away with all its dark secrets by scanning ne...more

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Aug 05, 2011 Brian rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Once in awhile you come across a book, that due to some circumstance speaks to you a little louder and clearer than the others. This for me was that book. A novel created from a series of interwoven stories (each chapter depicts another character in the narrative,) it all surrounds the actual tight rope walk between the two towers at the World Trade Center, while the building was being finished in the early 1970s.(One of the first acts of gorilla art in the US.) The writing (as I would expect fr...more

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About Colum McCann

Colum McCann is the author of two collections of short stories and four novels, including "This Side of Brightness,""Dancer" and “Zoli,” all of which were international best-sellers. His newest novel “Let the Great World Spin” will come out in 2009. His fiction has been published in 26 languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Paris Review and other places. He has wri...more Colum McCann is the author of two collections of short stories and four novels, including "This Side of Brightness,""Dancer" and “Zoli,” all of which were international best-sellers. His newest novel “Let the Great World Spin” will come out in 2009. His fiction has been published in 26 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 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 Nathan Englander.

Colum has completed his new novel, "Let the Great World Spin." It is scheduled for release in the U.S on June 23 rd, 2009. An extract was published in the Paris Review in fall 2008. The British and Irish release will be in August, while European publishers will quickly follow up – in what amounts to an unprecedented international publication – in September 2009.

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.

Let the Great World Spin will be published June 30th. Advance copies will be available here on GoodReads!!!!

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“The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.” — 121 people liked it

“Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you're lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who've been around awhile know it's just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it's never even there in the first place.” — 116 people liked it

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