A couple of months ago, in one of those bizarre ways that chance encounters overlap, I purchased a book at the bookstore on a complete whim – bought solely on the fact that I had nothing currently of interest in my book pile and I liked the cover illustration (a simple line drawing of a city below) and the fifteen second skim of the back cover. I failed to notice a thin black line across the top with a tiny silhouette perched upon it, focusing instead on the red line drawings of the buildings across the parchment colored paper. The book sat on my desk, untouched, for that weekend and several weeks longer. That same weekend, instead of starting in on this new paperback novel, we watched a movie instead – a documentary about a French man who walked a thin wire between the world trade towers. The movie was arresting in its depiction of the events, the collection of images captured of the feat, the retelling of the story from the mouths of those that pulled it off, and the almost painful views from above. My stomach resided midway up my esophagus through the majority of the movie, a not unpleasant sort of pain. I would watch it again and again. A few weeks later I picked up the book and began the series of stories that seemed to wind themselves around a particular event in New York – a figure high above the streets, suspended on a wire. That very event is the core of the novel, and the irony that I would choose the book and the film on the same day, with no knowledge of one or the other, has made the experience of both that much sweeter. I highly recommend both – perhaps the film, and then the book. First lose the stomach, and then yourself in this great novel.
2 thoughts on “man on wire”