Castlebar Book Club
The Book Club meets once a month (usually the second Tuesday of the month) in Castlebar Library at 8.00pm. Check events page for next meeting. (Previous Book Club selections)
Book for November meeting, 2009
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
New York, August 1974. A man is walking the sky. The city stands still in awe. Between the newly built Twin Towers the man is striding, twirling and showboating his way through the air. One hundred and ten stories below him, the lives of eight strangers spin towards each other Corrigan, a radical, passionate Irish monk working in the Bronx with a clutch of prostitutes; Claire, a delicate Upper East Side housewife reeling from the death of her son in Vietnam; her husband Solomon, a cynical judge turning over petty criminals in a downtown court; Lara, a young artist struggling with a spiralling drug addiction and a doomed marriage; Fernando, a thirteen-year-old photographer chasing underground graffiti; Gloria, solid and proud despite decades of hardship; Tillie, a courageous hooker who used to dream of a better life; and Jazzlyn, her beautiful, reckless daughter raised on promises that reach beyond the high rises of New York. Set against a time of sweeping political and social change, from the backlash to the Vietnam War and the lingering sceptre of the oil crisis to the beginnings of the Internet - a time that hauntingly mirrors the present time - these disparate lives will collide in the shadow of one reckless and beautiful act, and be transformed for ever. Weaving together themes of love, loss, belonging, duty and human striving, Let the Great World Spin celebrates the effervescent spirit of an age and the small beauties of everyday life. At once intimate and magnificent, elegant and astonishing, it is a lyrical masterpiece from a storyteller who continues to use the wide world as his canvas.
amazon.co.uk
Like a great pitcher in his prime, McCann is constantly changing speeds, adopting different voices, tones and narrative styles as he shifts between story lines. Inevitably, some of his portraits work better than others … 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.
In a loose sense, what connects everyone in this novel is the high-wire walker; the day of his stunt is a pivotal one in all of their lives. But they are bound more powerfully by something else: grief. “Let the Great World Spin” is an emotional tour de force. It is a heartbreaking book, but not a depressing one. Through their anguish, McCann’s characters manage to find comfort, even a kind of redemption.
The New York Times
McCann describes the sensation that Petit feels on the highest wire as "another kind of awake". There are many moments in his writing here when he too provides that kind of sharpness and, watching, you smile at the risk. McCann backs himself to step out into the spaces his novel opens up and it is always thrilling to follow him. Tacked inside Petit's cabin door was a piece of wisdom that he lived by, one which this triumphant all-or-nothing novel also wears near to its heart: NOBODY FALLS HALFWAY.
The Guardian
This is a very readable, enjoyable novel for many reasons: the death-defying Monsieur Petit high in the sky, the colourful descriptions, but especially for McCann’s ambitious, stylish, empathetic orchestration of differences and the novel’s resilient, redemptive spirit. It’s a novel about chance and choice, religion, art, politics, about death – “the greatest democracy of them all”, but McCann, like all artists, is on the side of life.
The “Let” and the “Great” in that Tennysonian title are positive, affirming and freeing. These qualities quietly pervade a work that celebrates “the ongoing of ourselves” and that’s what makes Let The Great World Spin such a remarkable achievement.
The Irish Times
With Phillipe Petit's breathless 1974 tightrope walk between the uncompleted World Trade Centre towers at its axis, Colum McCann offers us a lyrical cycloramic high-low portrait of New York City in its days of burning; Park Avenue matrons, Bronx junkies, Center Street judges, downtown artists and their uptown subway-tagging brethren, street priests, weary cops, wearier hookers, grieving mothers of an Asian war freshly put to bed; a masterful chorus of voices all obliviously connected by the most ephemeral vision; a pin-dot of a man walking on air 110 storeys above their heads.
Richard Price
A blockbuster, groundbreaking, heartbreaking, symphony of a novel. No novelist writing of New York has climbed higher, dived deeper.
Frank McCourt
A giant amongst us - fearless, huge-hearted, a poet with every living breath.
Peter Carey
An audacious and wonderfully skilled writer.
Joseph O'Connor
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