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One doesn't have to dig too deep to see how a hair-raising acrobatic feat of 1974 connects with the terrorist strike some 27 years later. The horror of the destruction of the twin towers refused to go away from McCann's head. His father-in-law had a narrow escape. links of london Pendants His young daughter leapt into her doting grandpa's arms when he reached home, only to recoil, saying he was still burning.The wars of retaliation unleashed against Afghanistan and Iraq by the American government soon after reinforced the macabre images of the fall of the towers, over and over again.

"Shortly after 9/11, everything in Manhattan seemed to have intimate meaning. A child's painting showing the twin towers held together by a stick was as interesting as anything Damien Hirst might have made," McCann says, in a reference to the British installation artist, known for his disturbing and provocative works."I wanted to shake 9/11 out of my body by going all the way back to a different point of innocence. Maybe where we are now is where we have been before, I thought. So talking about 1974 was my way of allegorically going back to the past, to a moment of real grace, of reconciliation."

The tightrope walk then is only a take-off point, a sepia photograph inside which McCann invites his readers to walk around and find their place. There's a space for everyone here - the Irish monk who believes he can make a difference, to the sordid lives of Bronx prostitutes; links of london sweetie the elite woman of Park Avenue mourning the death of her son in the Vietnam war; and the painter who has been through the phases of being a junkie and being clean and is still looking for direction.The defining moment of the story for McCann is when two little girls - the progeny of hookers - who have just lost their mother in an accident and grandmother to a longish term in prison, are rescued by strangers from one of the harshest crime-prone neighborhoods in New York.

"That's the moment when the towers get built back up," says the author.The lure of stories has dragged him across half the world. McCann bicycled across 40 states in the United States in the 1980s, getting nearly killed by an Ute Indian in California, and teaching juvenile delinquents to appreciate the irreverent charm of JD Salinger at a ranch in Texas.He spent three years in Russia, researching the extra-large life of the iconic performer Rudolph Nureyev to write Dancer. To write Zoli, he roamed around the gypsy camps in Slovakia, hoping to inhabit the mind of a gypsy woman abandoned by her own set for publishing her poetry and giving in to a life of conformity.

But imagination meets exhaustive research halfway in his work, taking the lead from that point on. For instance, the Philippe Petit story (narrated by the artist himself in To Reach the Clouds), is reinvented by McCann.But that's the point of wanting to write, says McCann, "writing toward what one wants to know rather than what one already knows"."It's a great privilege being a writer," he adds, "to be able to shift the words slightly, sideways, Replica Watches  to become somebody other than yourself, become alive in a geography that's not yours, talk about the human condition, find yourself and your own people. Our ability to understand otherness is encapsulated in literature."

When he returns to his New York home, it would be no surprise if Colum McCann carries more than half a story from China inside his head.