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Wednesday, August 11, 2010

review: let the great world spin by colum mccann

The beginning point for the novel is the walk by Philippe Petit between the World Trade Center towers in 1974. What I liked about this was the way in which the stories about not exactly happened that day with the walk, but with the people on the ground were told in short stories and slowly interwove with each other.

And the stories tie together, all the way through the end. When Claire is first introduced, I had to wonder what she had to do with the story. On Park Avenue, she was far away from the world of the Bronx that is first introduced (after a recap of Ireland), and the prostitutes whose children later play a role. Each character, and the world inhabited by that character, was distinctly developed and there was no blurring between. Which I would imagine is hard to do all in the same novel. Often times there is one world, or a set of characters that you build throughout, but here each one was built in a vignette.

W
hat was incredible were the moments about Petit's walk on the wire. Those paragraphs made everything slow down and the noises become a whisper, as though you were either up there above everything and the world was still, or down below watching and becoming so invested in Petit that everything else just faded away for those few moments.

I
loved it. I thought it was a very fitting tribute to the walk, and to New York.



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