The opening scene of this book is one of the most gripping I have ever encountered. Starting this book is like stepping off a building and suddenly, you are suspended in midair, gasping and utterly alert, alone with your breath and the wind. It captures the highwire experience like the documentary Man on a Wire did, in slow, exquisite detail. That's what sticks with me about this book; I don't remember the plot much, (it's a story about a tighrope walker, all other plot pales by comparison) but I was there, up on that wire and I felt what it is to be so constricted as to be utterly free, quiet inside, calm to the core because the alternative is too sickening to envision. It's like Lars von Trier says, that limitations in art are liberating, they become a lens through which the creative force is magnified, intensified. So it is in the physical world, and in this book, we are made free by walking the tightrope in this man's shoes. And it is worth the walk.
I bought a small stack of novels from the front table at She Said Boom on College. I think one of the other books was Saramago or something achingly sad that I just couldn't face, and then I picked this up and fell in. I was at the cottage, at the beginning of the summer, under the window and over the lake just as the season was turning to hot, the school year over, vacation ahead.
Thinking about this book makes me want to read it again and let go like that, but maybe I'll just reread that first scene and then let it all go.
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