In the past few weeks I've finished "Life of Pi" by Yann Martel and "Let The Great World Spin" by Colum McCann. Both made my top five list of the year. Not that that means much or anything. But I consider these books, already, to be among the best works of fiction I've ever read. Both were invariably page-turning, eminently readable, prestigious-ly award-winning. Yet they varied a great deal in why they were so good. McCann's book I know was better. Every part of me knows it was the better story, the better writing. And in lieu of "Life of Pi" I find that laughingly ironic.
Life of Pi
The prose was good. Not memorable. But it couldn't really be memorable. It couldn't sweep you away to a bustling, rumbling India at the time of The Emergency like Rohinton Mistry's "A Fine Balance" could. It couldn't wrap you in warm smelling perfumes of India like Rushdie's "The Moor's Last Sigh" could. Inevitably it was limited by it's narrator. The limitations of the young narrator in any story are always glaring. Words are smaller. Places smaller. The sense of the past, history, is weaker. Adult narrators and voices carry much more weight than that of a child or teenager (perhaps why I ended up not liking "The Lovely Bones" as much as a I thought I would). The young narrator just gets old. Their voice, their views, the words they use. But Martel doesn't succomb to that at all. He rises above it. Often some passages reading like diary entries or how-to manuals or mere lists; ending like it does with a transcribed interview.
Where Martel gets you I can't say if you haven't read it. But it grabs you. Chokes you and makes you well up with the need to inhale quickly, to turn every page faster and faster, breathless, because you can't quite grasp that the story was about that until it's over and you're left breathing, finally, among the stale air over a closed book with nothing to do but think. To take inventory. To value it's worth. It was a remarkable book. And I am better for having read it.
Let The Great World Spin
McCann's book on the other hand was some of the best prose I've ever read. His language, his words, his descriptions of 1970s New York City swept around me like a breeze through the city. Over buildings, around corners, through drain gates, through sound and bustle and noise and decay and life and death. It was a strong breeze, his language. A good, steady, soul-cleansing breeze. Where the story gets you, because it's not really about anything other than New York City, is it's characters. It's exquisite portrayals. The Irish, the African-American, the priest, the hookers, the artist, the judge, the Park Avenue bourgeois, the Vietnam vet, the computer nerds. I'm not sure where it left me because it left me at a completely different place than "Life of Pi". Not at some mountaintop contemplating. But dropped, breathless, awed, over-stimulated on the streets of NYC where I need to keep moving so I don't get hit by a cab. I'm not better for having read it, certainly not that type of book. But having read it, I sense something is better. Something is better.
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