Category: Let the Great World Spin (1)

Feelings

The first chapter shows how fast a lifetime goes by in the eyes of an outsider. I understand Corrigan’s desire to help others that need whatever he has more than he does, but his prolonged exposure, in his apartment in the Bronx, to the underbelly of the city is doing more harm to him then is worth it for the meager offerings he can dish out to those he has elected himself to serve. His brother attempts to rescue him, but doesn’t understand any reason to endure the smog of lust, greed, and literal living to simply survive however possible, when his own survival thought is screaming at him to leave. The two brothers resemble the two tear drops from the yin yang symbol, one of which is shed in response to an event seemingly unrelated.

 

Geography

The prologue begins with a man taking the attention of passerby in Manhattan by walking a tightrope between the Twin Towers. The chapter begins in the hometown of two brothers in Dublin who live with their mother. After her death, the charitable brother joins an organization he refers to as the order, and is sent on a mission to Naples, then rerouted to New York City, settling in an apartment in the Bronx. The first brother, also the narrator, stays in Dublin, leaving only after a bomb went off near him, and soon after he lands in JFK airport to meet his brother. Corrigan takes him back to his apartment. The apartment is not a home, it is a vessel through which Corrigan tries to, as non-invasively as possible, take on the haze of the world threatening to smother those that work at street corners late at night by providing, but what seems like an afterthought makes all the difference to those treated like the merchandise they sell themselves as. Corrigan takes his brother to the hospital at which his duty is to bring a few of the elderly outside to sunshine and open air. Here the narrator meets the woman his brother is smitten by, also the woman who caused him to drive to Long Island while contemplating his feeling for her, and the conflict potentially arising from the strict rules, including celibacy, in the order he has aligned himself with.

This book, in 70 small pages, was able to take me on an emotional rollercoaster and a deeper understanding of one’s purpose for living. For one, their purpose can be to find beauty (whatever that means) within the humdrum of our dark, yet boring reality, like Corrigan, while others refuse to accept beauty as a part of life, like the boys’ mother, who even in her las moments on Earth, refused to let any light into her home simply because she believed it would damage her carpet, as if light is a deteriorating factor rather than a rejuvenating one.

This book and its meanings can be broken into two separate parts. The first is its geography and it how it affects the characters who inhabit it. When put very simply, the prologue and the end of chapter one, filled with the evils that are brought upon by the extreme pressures and influences of city life are bridged together by a more simplistic lifestyle that is created by the more relaxed environment of Dublin, Ireland. However, there is more meaning of this placement that simply placing a more relaxed environment (Dublin) in between two city-life environments. In fact, what it really shows is how two environments that appear to be the antithesis of each other at first glance can actually create similar emotions and actions of the people that inhabit these places.

Though New York City seems to be full of chaos, where days aren’t made official until the daily noise of sirens, as mentioned in the prologue, Dublin possesses evils of its own, where its relaxed mood isn’t always a good thing, as it seems as if the environment itself doesn’t even care about itself enough to even try to get out of its own grayness (Chapter 1). Here, McCann is trying to suggest that two completely opposite environments can cause similar experiences and all lead back to the same road filled with impiety and depressive stages. Nonetheless, each environment gives people the chance at their own escape from reality, from the heroin users and prostitutes of New York City to the drunks of Dublin along the shore line, as if their only hopes are for that very shore line to sweep them away to a new and better life, one they know will never come. Hey, I never said these escapes were great either. In essence, McCann suggests that no matter the society we live in, even the escapes that are given to us only create a new environment filled with as much evil and hopelessness as the last. We just don’t know it yet.

The next part of the book I want to get into is my feelings towards the characters of this book. First off, let me say I felt a deep connection to most of these characters, as I see myself or many of my close friends and family in almost all of these characters. The boys’ mother reminds me so much of my own mother, who is also very sweet and kind in her own right. Yet, what baffles me about the mother is why she seems to be so disconnected to life, from hiding her feelings when the boys decided to put on their father’s clothes, to not allowing light into her own home to prevent the carpet from getting ruined. The narrator is the one who feels most alien to me as he seems to look more at other people’s lives rather than focus on his own. It’s almost as if he lives his life through others.

Finally there is Corrigan. At first, I wasn’t really sure how to feel about him. t first, I thought of him as that annoying little brother who always gets all the attention from strangers because he is simply “too cute.” Then, I realized there was something much more philosophical to Corrigan’s lifestyle, from trying to find beauties within all the war and poverty in the world, to the charity he did all on his own without ever “sponsoring” a religion with a Bible, a collar, or any other religious symbol. This really proved to me that Corrigan was truly trying to create a beautiful world, something that can never truly be achieved, because what is beautiful to one, like what Corrigan saw in his last moments, can be total nonsense to another, like with what Adelita thought Corrigan was describing. From this, we must ask ourselves: how beautiful is beauty?

 

Let me just start off by saying that I am beyond SHOOK. I’ll give you a little background on how I function. You see, I tend to be absorbed into the world of whatever book I’m reading; I become the book. “Read Chapter 1 for homework,” Professor Purves said. “It’s a great read,” she said. While I do not disagree with either of those statements, they did NOT prepare me for what the book had in store.

The prologue begins with the whole “Is it a bird? Is it a plane?” type of scenario where a man (Petit) is standing on top of one of the twin towers is New York City. Suspense is built as people of all backgrounds watch anxiously at what he is going to do. Is he going to jump or nah? The prologue ends with him starting to tightrope walk to the other tower, to everyone’s surprise.

Chapter 1 starts with the story of two boys and their mother and a physically absent father in Dublin, Ireland. The unnamed narrator is the older brother, while the younger one is John Andrew but goes by Corrigan, which is actually the family name. Now, Corrigan is a special character. He is what I see when I look into the mirror. “[Corrigan] might have been naive, but he didn’t care; he said he’d rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic,” his older brother describes him (McCann 21). Corrigan was blind in his love in that he did not discriminate in who to love, and he made himself vulnerable and open rather than be a skeptic like his brother. This is probably also the reason why I don’t find any of the characters as alien or baffling.

Corrigan really intrigues me; he seems to have no limit whatsoever. Even his brother rages on and on about how Corrigan is being taken advantage of. I believe McCann captures humanity beautifully: so beautifully, in fact, that I see myself in all the characters. Corrigan drinks starting at a very early age with the poor and the alcoholics, not to get drunk but to feel the pain of people everyone else considers trash. We see his love for people again when he moves to The Bronx, following the orders of the order of monks he joined. We see how is life is like through the narrator’s eyes, who follows because of a war in Ireland.

When the narrator joins Corrigan in The Bronx, he receives a culture shock. He sees a black person for the first time, and he cannot stop staring. Younger me relates to the narrator, because a village in India looks nothing like the Big Apple. After one hell of a rollercoaster ride in the Bronx, we end the chapter in a hospital bed, which made me fling the book across the room. Let me just end with saying that I am very much still SHOOK.

The prologue of the book starts us off at the World Trade Center in Manhattan. There is a lot of tension there because of a figure at the edge of a building, with no one sure why someone would be up there. At the start of chapter 1, we are taken to Dublin in Sandymount to the childhood home of Corrigan and his brother, Ciaran. There is also the place Corrigan used to go to get drunk with the other drunkards. The book then goes to New York City, where Corrigan now lives and Ciaran also goes there. Corrigan’s apartment appears to be a central area to the story and is where the other characters like Jazzlyn and the other hookers are introduced as people that Corrigan wants to help.

The beginning of the book sort of reminds me of my childhood and what it was like to be carefree and asking all these questions and wondering what’s going on. The tone sort of shifts however when Corrigan’s drinking and smoking problem is introduced, the father not being with them and the mother eventually dying. This is a point in the book where it becomes a lot more sad and where I can’t relate much to except for my dad not living with me either. There is also a spiritual feeling I get when hearing Corrigan talk about his relation to God and how devout he is, even though this is pretty opposite of who I am. Ciaran sort of has more similarity to me in his nature of questioning things and being a bit more real on how things are. The ending of the chapter is also very sudden and depressing which adds to the importance of the moment, as incidents like that in real life are also sudden and usually unforeseen. Overall, the tone really changes after the first few pages from being bright, to a bit more dark. However, it was a good read and does really pull you in with the real life elements and character differences.