Look Elsewhere....
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This novel is so badly written that at times it's laughable: 240 pages of vacuous pseudo-profundity resembling poetry written by a precocious teenager with no life experience. The characters are self-absorbed non-entities inhabiting clichés of lifestyle and character - eg: don't give a damn poker-player; twittering, anxious mother; shady art dealer astride the continents.
White Noise was great, thanks mainly to the humour, but this is another plotless exercise in self-reverence by this most overrated of novelists. The only thing more predictable than the book itself is the praise heaped on it by critics desperate to find something which only they can appreciate. To that end, what better than a novel that can turn the defining moment of our times into something so dull and uninteresting?
If you're looking for insight into 9/11, look elsewhere. If you're looking for a great novel, look elsewhere. In fact, whatever it is you're looking for, look elsewhere!
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Great Thing
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A disturbing history about the particular effects of a huge disaster in the small lives of some citizens.
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how tragic
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I'm a huge fan of delillo but this book broke my heart. Delillo has misjudged his material to such a degree that he's entered full on self parody. not only that but he's had the audacity to try to write from the perspective of a suicide bomber. The scenes are overblown, melodranmatic and pretentious. please Don, stick to what you know best, the banal in all it's complexity and leave the epic stuff to the historians and the hacks.
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Terse, Quite Compelling Novel On 9/11 From Don DeLillo
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For better or for worse, a literary cottage industry has arisen in the aftermath of 9/11. This still recent horrific event - which ought to endure within the American psyche for decades, if not centuries - has become either the subject of several critically acclaimed novels, or a firmly entrenched background to the tales being spun by such gifted writers from Jonathan Safran Foer to William Gibson. Now one of the truly great writers of American fiction, Don DeLillo, has chimed in with "Falling Man"; a novel that is remarkable not only for its relative brevity, but also for delving deeply into the psyche of New Yorkers who witnessed the World Trade Center terrorist attack and are still coping with their psychological trauma years later. Quoting from its dust-jacket blurb, "Falling Man" is indeed a work of fiction that is "cathartic, beautiful and heartbreaking". Without question, it also demonstrates that DeLillo is still a worthy literary artist at the height of his creative powers; a keen observer of human nature in the wake of unspeakable tragedy. His latest novel also proves that DeLillo is an elegant storyteller delving into the lives of ordinary people who remain mentally imprisoned by the searing images and painful memories of that fateful, tragic clear blue September morning not so long ago. Without question, for these very reasons, "Falling Man" is one of the most impressive novels published this year.
DeLillo deftly weaves the narratives of three members of a rather unremarkable New York City family, whose lives remain touched forever by what they witnessed on 9/11/01; a dysfunctional American family which was tearing itself apart at the seams long before that September morning. We meet Keith as he stumbles through the grayish ash blizzard of building debris and human remains, soon after the collapse of the first World Trade Center building to fall, his face splattered by glass fragments and blood, pressing northward on foot towards Canal Street. Years later his estranged wife Lianne remains in a psychotherapy support group, reliving the grim memories of that day, recalling Keith's unexpected arrival at the Upper East Side apartment of herself and their young son Justin, whose hobby is to stare out of apartment windows, searching the skies with a pair of binoculars for more airplanes crashing into tall buildings like the World Trade Center towers. But is it really a hobby, or rather a phobia, brought on by witnessing the terrorist attacks from the window of a young friend's apartment not far from the World Trade Center? DeLillo's literary ambitions are so vast, that he takes us to an Afghanistan Al-Qaeda training camp, and to Germany, allowing his audience to reside inside the mind of one of the 9/11 hijackers, right up to the final fateful moments of the terrorist's life. But this is an excursion that deflects from, not enhances, the powerful narratives he's created for his three main protagonists, and one that remains a rather facile effort in trying to explain the psychological motivation of one of the nineteen Al Qaeda hijackers. It is also an effort that makes this figure sympathetic to the reader, as if his blind adherence to Islamofascism is one worthy of pithy; an effort that others, most notably John Updike, have handled far better.
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Powerful 9/11 meditation
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Cerebral rather than emotional, this very good novel explores the impact of 9/11 by focussing on one middle class family living in Manhatten.It is both a love story and a meditation on history and memory, religion and science. It also contrasts the terrorists of Europe in the 1960s and '70s with present day Islamic suicide bombers.
DeLillo's writes wiry prose which can have the density of a good poem, gnomic sentences that demand to be re-read.This is a demanding book but well worth the effort.
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