Philippe Petit is a French tightrope walker on August 7, 1974 made a huge undertaking: travel the gap between the Twin Towers on a steel cable, to 417 mt. high, with no protection (for those who wish to learn there is a documentary film Man on Wire semplioemente or more from the interview with Fabio Fazio protagonist of this "Che tempo che fa in 2009).
insane and ingenious idea, prepared dall'acrobata and his staff for six years, meticulously, like a big robbery or an attack, but with no purpose other than the tragedy of 2001: "The sleepless nights , wandering the streets alone pale of the World Trade Center from a distance, with the lights on the towers seemed to just one. He stopped on a street corner and you threw up there, imagining the sky, silhouette of the blackest black. "
With This Kiss Go to the Whole World (Let the Great World Spin) Colum McCann, a writer already appeared in this blog post # 4 in , Petit says under the rope twisted fates of characters intense, engaging and sometimes shocking.
We are in New York in the early 70's, the less touristy the modern era. These are the years of dirty streets, Central Park dangerous, Bronx pericolossisimi and Harlem, the Village filled with drugs, graffiti tags and the explosion of color. And yet sultry air of the city McCann takes us into lives full of poetry.
We developed a passion for excellence econd-extremist Corrigan, neomissionario the Bronx, already as a boy in his Dublin stealing the covers of the closet to give to the homeless. In New York you will find what to do in one of the worst areas of the city.
We moved in knowing the elegant Claire who lives on the Upper West Side, in fact, there in the words of other mothers who, like her, have lost children in Vietnam. Among these is Gloria, a descendant of slaves, not wealthy but that comes in a beautiful harmony with Mrs. Uptown.
know the desperate life of the prostitute and her daughter Tillie Jazzlyn " One day I had gone swimming in Jazzlyn, have had some week. Her skin glowed. I looked and I thought that the word "beauty" was born with her own. I wrapped in a towel and I promised her that he would never beat the pavement ".
Will's intention?
And then there are Blaine and Lara, artists in the Village when it was full of artists, young programmers from Palo Alto, California working on what would become the internet, but for now they use technology to find out if the tightrope walker will succeed or not.
mounting cross-narrative, a young reader would not hesitate to describe as reflected by the films of Tarantino (even though we know that the father of all this is John Dos Passos ), makes reading flowing, enriched by a passion imbued from time to time by a light irony with which the author recounts the soul of the characters, managing to elicit empathy in the reader with all the protagonists, no matter with whom you can, or should , identify.
The wise distribution of territorial and ethnic history and events, forced the crossings in geometric map of New York offer numerous ideas for a passionate description of the city, seizing its inner aspects in a sublime "Coming to this city was like entering in a tunnel, he said, and discover with surprise that the light at its end was not important and sometimes it was just the light tunnel to make it tolerable. " This
Go Kiss the world closes with an epilogue set in 2006 and McCann show here, once again, his talent. Introduced a couple of new characters (well, one already glimpsed ...) and closes the circle with feeling and a bit of plausible hope. Do not betray the sense of the fragility of life and strength necessary for its defense, which runs throughout the novel, a concept that applies to us all, but perhaps it is even more true in New York City: "One of the wonders of New York that, wherever you come from, just minutes after landing yours already. " This
Go Kiss the world , Colum McCann, Rizzoli, 2011
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