#colum mcann

[dk-thrive]

If you can’t shake something free, you go back and you grasp it. I couldn’t forget her.

— Colum McCann, Twist: A Novel (Random House, March 25, 2025)

[aseaofquotes]

Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

[melissareading]

"The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own."

Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin)

[librarysexghost-blog]

All I wanted to do was walk out into a clean elsewhere.

Colum McCann | Let the Great World Spin

[soniasaraiya]

So he knows the city, she thinks. He's been here before. This place belongs to him too. Another surprise. She's always thought one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing it is yours.

Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann

[soniasaraiya]

Let the Great World Spin

It was beautiful.

There are some books that you must carry around with you for a while, after you have finished them, to sort them all out inside your head, to put everyone in their right places. To imagine the proper resolutions to things. These are the romantic books — the fantasy novels, the twist at the end. You are left cliffhangered, manipulated.

Let the Great World Spin is not one of those books. I put it down with a sense of relief. Sadness, because it is a sad story, but relief, because I put my trust in the author and he did not let me down. Rather, he carried me carefully over the finish line, and set me down gently. It is a loving narrative. I rarely read authors who can so effortlessly slip in and out of characters' perspectives. And who can weave together a world that feels infinitely complex, but fragile.

It is the right book to read your first few weeks living in New York City post-9/11. I think you can read it at other times, but this was a particularly good one. The book is hopeful about many things I am not so optimistic about: chiefly, America. It was good to read about hope, about the wayward justice of the world, about the lives of others. Confusing, too, but in some way, the confusion made sense. Of course I don't know. How could I know all this?

It makes me think that all this postmodern thought that brings me to despair can actually arrive somewhere good, and I'm sure a postmodernist would disagree, but I cling to the idea of the world as a good place, of people as good people, despite everything that goes awry along the way. We see everyone, in this book, and they see each other. It reminds us of the humanity of everyone, every single person, which is overwhelming, but also beautiful.