Because now I am redeemed as a patron, a sponsor, a book buyer holding three of his award-winning novels, chosen randomly, in my hand. 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. 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. I want to go back and immediately re-read it. June 23rd 2009 Let the Great World Spin (the 2009 National Book Award winner) is such a book. Our, LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in. 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. purchase near the west side of the towers, while down in the foyer of the World Trade Center the cops were sprinting across the marble floor, and the undercovers were whipping out badges from beneath their shirts, and the fire trucks were pulling into the Couple of reasons why: 1) The structure of the book--loosely connected novellas and stories--keeps the reader from getting to know any of the characters, constantly introducing new ones just when you get interested in the last, and totally abandoning a few who clearly have a lot more to say. (including. We are on a boat going to Ellis Island and she is smiling, giddy, the Manhattan skyline in the background. Let the Great World Spin is a polyphonic novel, which means that it is written from multiple different perspectives, ultimately following a large cast of characters. McCann's characters are rounded and sympathetic, covering a wide cross section of New York society. The twin towers are prominent in the background, and little did she, or any of us, know that less than ten years later they would be gone, destroyed, obliterated in a puff of smoke. Phillipe Petit's astonishing 1974 walk between the Twin Towers forms the centrepiece of the story, and in its shadow the lives of several characters intersect in surprising and intricate ways. When, on the novel's last page, one of McCann's characters reflects that, as humans, "we stumble on ... [we] bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves" and concludes that "it is almost enough," we feel all of the power this novel has been so patiently and inexorably building up. 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. We’d love your help. Instant downloads of all 1350 LitChart PDFs ), Ah, Dear God, this man knows how to write and send the human soul soaring after the resurrection from the dark night of the spirit. While a few of the sections (particularly one of computer hackers working on the early Arpanet) are weaker than the others, overall, this beautifully written book was one that I never wanted to end. The notion of uncertainty—of not knowing what will happen—spurs them forward in their quest to understand what’s going on in New York, a curiosity similar to their interest in technology and how it might change the world. My students love how organized the handouts are and enjoy tracking the themes as a class.”, LitCharts uses cookies to personalize our services. A true valentine to NYC--a jisgaw puzzle of faces that come from different places. 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 … And not one emotion but a hundred. When the pedestrians look up to the buildings' peaks to see a tightrope walker making his way between them, their eyes cannot believe what they see -- and we reflect on the buildings' more recent history, when our eyes also could not believe what they saw, and when the notion of falling from the sky took on all those horrible shadings. For the love of all that's holy, write me, Brendan. And he smiles beneath his pork pie hat. It seems that The Kid is perhaps compensating for his failed communication with Sable by taking delight in writing code. Slums. So a long queue forms to buy his paperback novels and gain a valued autograph: a man of the blue collar has to make a living, after all. Let the Great World spin tacitly addresses an array of political and cultural issues at play in the United States in the 1970s. I was only looking at words in a book, but the image gives me instant vertigo! "Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting. See all 5 questions about Let the Great World Spin…, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, Let the Great World Spin - Section 1 - Beginning through Miro Miro On The Wall, Let the Great World Spin - Section 3 - The Ringing Grooves of Change through the End, Let the Great World Spin - Section 2 - A Fear of Love through This is the House that Horse Built.