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“Let the great world spin” by Colum McCann
“As the narrator of Colum McCann's new novel sees it, Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974 triggered a quietude generally unknown to New Yorkers. “Those who saw him hushed,” McCann writes. “It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.” In “Let the Great World Spin,” Petit's stunt acts as a centerline on which McCann hangs the stories of a dozen spiritually disheveled characters, each searching for an alcove of silence in a clamorous city. A recovering drug addict wonders if Petit, famed also for his juggling of her, can keep aloft the shards of her broken existence from her. The mother of a soldier killed in Vietnam condemns the high-wire act as a reckless offense against life's sanctity. Only to an indigent Catholic monk, wrestling with a cryptic God, is the spectacle simply the most beautiful thing in the world. ”
Taken from Washington Post.
See also:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/books/review/Mahler-t.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/30/let-great-world-spin-mccann
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colum_McCann
The recommended titles are in the Library of the International Institute. If you are interested in reading this recommendation, you can check its availability at library catalogue.
Let the great world spin / Column McCann. — London: Bloomsbury, 2009. — 349 p. ; 24cm
ISBN 978-1-4088-0049-2
PR 6063.C335 L47 2009
