Those who saw him hushed: Let the Great World Spin, the National Book Award winner by Colum McCann

11/22/2009 Those who saw him hushed: Let the Great World Spin, the National Book Award winner by Colum McCann

"There's hardly a line in the novel about 9/11, but it's everywhere if the reader wants it to be", said Colum McCann speaking about Let the Great World Spin, the book which won the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction. Set around Philippe Petit's 1974 World Trade Center tightrope walk, Let the Great World Spin is an allegorical story inspired by 9/11, "a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s." A short excerpt:

Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some thought at first that it must have been a trick of the light, something to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall. Others figured it might be the perfect city joke–stand around and point upward, until people gathered, tilted their heads, nodded, affirmed, until all were staring upward at nothing at all, like waiting for the end of a Lenny Bruce gag. But the longer they watched, the surer they were. He stood at the very edge of the building, shaped dark against the gray of the morning. A window washer maybe. Or a construction worker. Or a jumper.

Up there, at the height of a hundred and ten stories, utterly still, a dark toy against the cloudy sky.

He could only be seen at certain angles so that the watchers had to pause at street corners, find a gap between buildings, or meander from the shadows to get a view unobstructed by cornicework, gargoyles, balustrades, roof edges. None of them had yet made sense of the line strung at his feet from one tower to the other. Rather, it was the manshape that held them there, their necks craned, torn between the promise of doom and the disappointment of the ordinary. It was the dilemma of the watchers: they didn’t want to wait around for nothing at all, some idiot standing on the precipice of the towers, but they didn’t want to miss the moment either, if he slipped, or got arrested, or dove, arms stretched. - an excerpt from Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Let the Great World Spin
Colum McCann
View Details Library Cart Library Lookup Amazon.com

subscribe to lovethebook.com news

Book Awards News