McCann tells the novel’s readers that Brâncuśi’s sculptures were impounded by U.S. The sculptures depict the elongated body of a bird in flight, shorn of wings. Just before the two narrative sections at the heart of Apeirogon, McCann describes Constantin Brâncuśi’s famous bird sculptures as some of the most beautiful artworks of the 20th century. Petit righted himself and made it to the other side of the valley without falling.

It finally flew away to great cheers from the crowd. It first perched on Petit’s head, then on the end of his balancing bar. When freed from a pocket in his billowing costume while he was midway across the valley, the bird would not fly away. In the middle of the wire, he intended to release a white dove-a pigeon really-as a symbol of peace. Petit sought to unite Israel and Palestine for a moment by his performance. Petit appears in Apeirogon as well, walking out over the Hinnom Valley in Jerusalem in May 1987. The feather will remind Petit of his own creaturely fragility, the consequence of his fall should he make a mistake. As Philippe Petit-himself spritely and birdlike-approaches the towers to survey the area before his daring tightrope walk between them, the woman hands him a feather from a black-throated warbler. In a core section of Let the Great World Spin, McCann’s National Book Award-winning novel set in New York in 1974, a woman shown circling the base of one of the Twin Towers and picking up the corpses of small birds who, dazed by the lights of the towers, had crashed headlong into them.

Apeirogon goodreads