A CO-OPer’s Book Review of “Let The Great World Spin”

21 Dec 2011, Posted by Samantha in coolshit, 0 Comments

Set in New York City during August of 1974, Colum McCann’s book begins with a man suspended on a tightrope between the twin towers

This has become one of my most adored books, especially since moving into New York City. It really GETS New York, and is just an inspiring read about how interconnected our lives in this great city can all become. The characters are truly unforgettable and the writing is some of the richest I’ve come across in a while. I’d consider this  must read for any New Yorker, any city dweller, and anyone who *thinks* they have all the answers about what humans are really capable of.

Some of my favorite quotes:

“She was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.”

____

“One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.

He had a theory about it. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn’t care less about where it stood. He had seen a T-shirt once that said: NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would.

New York kept going forward precisely because it didn’t give a good goddamn about what it had left behind. It was like the city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. Two pillars of salt. Long Island and New Jersey. ”

_____

“He didn’t like it all that much when he first came – all the rubbish and the rush – but it was growing on him, it wasn’t half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn’t matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.”