But it's not always a bad thing to let some time pass between finishing a book and "talking" about as it allows things to sink in a bit. I was simply glowing/gushing about Colum McCann's Let The Great World Spin, so was curious to see if I would still feel that way a couple of weeks later... and not to string you along, the answer is an unequivocal yes.
I would have never thought that would be the case a few months back. One of the nice things about the Kindle (and most e-readers) is that you can read the first 20-25 pages of a book for free and World just didn't grab me. It's not that I thought it was not good, but I just didn't feel I was in the right "mood" to read it, so it returned to the to-be-read back-burner. But World would not go away, in the interim it won the National Book Award, named Amazon's Fiction Book of 2009 (as well as a slew of other year-end/best-of list), a #1 seed in the Tournament of Books (wrote about that a little while back)... and probably much more, so I decided to give it another go... and while yet again, the opening sequence still didn't win me over, about 40-50 pages in (of only about 350 pages total), I started to "get" what all the fuss was about.
A big reason for the slow/"WTF?" start was that I was expecting World to be a very New York novel as I knew the core of the book was a real-life tightrope walk that took place between the the World Trade Center buildings in the summer of 1974. While that is addressed in the opening stages of the novel, I was thrown by a whole back-story, and a lengthy one at that, that took place in Ireland (if you haven't figured out by his name, the author's homeland).
But I was determined to stick with it (with some very early encouragement from Joanna, who just gave the book a rave as well), and as I have already given away, my patience/persistence paid off. This was a truly glorious novel. I struggled to come up with the right superlative and “glorious" just seems to be one of those not-everyday words that makes it sound like something special, though "gorgeous" and "lyrical" that I have read in other reviews are quite good ones too!
I would also call World "well-crafted," and that's where there may be some divide in one's opinion about the novel. There is a lot of coincidence and serendipity in this novel and McCann quite cleverly spins this world to land on very precise places. Given the amount of praise this book has received, I would guess there were more sly smiles and 'a-ha' moments than eye rolls or folks who feel they had been manipulated. Often it would take me a few pages to see what McCann had up his literary sleeve, but more often than not I was enthralled, even when the narrative sometimes quite randomly stepped outside the main cast of characters.
As usual, I know I haven been a bit coy about saying too much about the stories and the characters in this one, but this just seems to be one of those books that benefits from having the story and surprises unfold for the reader.
If anything, my feelings about this book have probably grown stronger. It was a slam dunk 5-star book for me, and certainly had me re-thinking other books that I had given the top rating... even this book that I am now reading is flirting with 5-stars, but I found myself comparing it (in an apples vs. oranges way) to World.
The story and characters continue to haunt me a bit (in a good way) and I marvel at how McCann spun these stories of love and loss in 1970s New York City into an incredibly poignant post-9/11 work with nary a mention of that horrific day, nearly three decades later, when the world again would be looking up at those twin towers.
Comments