Date read June 2013
When You Are Engulfed in Flames, by David Sedaris
Three Stars
Few writers make me laugh out loud, but Sedaris is one of them. Generally, that happens when he surprises me with one of his uniquely bent insights or generalizations. He’ll have explained some aspect of his wacky family, which is diverting in itself, but it’s the life lessons he draws that deliver the yucks. This book includes many of his familiar bits — his childhood, his homes in France, his travels — but lacks an overriding theme that would benefit from a front-to-back read. For that reason, this is the perfect bed table book to dip into now and then when you’re short of time or between books.
Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann
Four Stars
The optimism of Colum McCann’s novel begins in the title, reminding us that the world is much more than our individual lives and its ceaseless spinning is as likely to deliver joy as it is to deliver sorrow. The story is mostly set in New York City in August 1974 when Phillipe Petit strung a wire between the towers of the World Trade Center and mesmerized much of the city 110 stories below. At that time the city was at its low point — decrepit, bankrupt, crime-ridden — and much of the action takes place in a Bronx Housing project where an Irish monk named Corrigan has opened his apartment to the hookers who ply their trade under the Deegan Expressay and fallen in love with a Guatemalan nurse who is the widow of a death squad officer. The monk’s brother, Ciaran, arrives from Ireland and is appalled by but also drawn to two of the streetwalkers, Tillie and her 17-year-old daughter, Jazmin, who has toddler twins of her own. Across the river in Manhattan is Claire, wife of a judge and bereaved mother of a son lost in Vietnam, who has found some solace for her grief by getting to know other women whose sons died in southeast Asia. And there is Lara, a daughter of privilege and artist, who left behind drugs and alcohol when she escaped the city a year earlier but disastrously falls right back in on her first return to the city. As Petit dances across his wire, the lives of these characters collide in a tragedy, but the great world spins on, and ultimately delivers the survivors to redemption and joy.