Falling Man
(Don DeLillo)
In the days after Sept. 11, when editors were scrambling for a writer who could say something profound about what had just happened, Don DeLillo was a name you heard a lot. The attacks themselves seemed so DeLillo-esque, a freakish juxtaposition of big, glossy, spectacular images and the confusion, fear and death we knew lay behind them. How was it possible to bridge the gap, to find a way to reconcile the Hollywood unreality of what we saw with the dust and blood of what we thought we felt? I say "thought" because most of us only ever saw the towers fall on TV, yet somehow we seemed to be experiencing it bodily. Ours is a culture constantly building mirages and then trying to peek behind them. Reality TV, backstage industry dish, "just like us" photos of celebrities -- we want simultaneously to be dazzled by fantasies and assured of authenticity, and here was a nightmare that collapsed the two and then smashed our faces in it.
I wish I could say that DeLillo''s new novel, "Falling Man" -- his Sept. 11 novel at last -- offers some unique insight into what happened that day. What I can say is that it''s one of his best books in years, a revelation after the debacle that was "Cosmopolis" and free of the bloat that afflicted even "Underworld." DeLillo is a master of the prose riff, and there are a few riffs in here as good as anything he''s ever produced: a description of the immediate aftermath of the towers'' collapse from the viewpoint of a Man fleeing the World Trade Center, three chapters told from the perspective of one of the hijackers, and a final section that depicts, with almost inhuman perfection, the attacks themselves. For these passages alone, the book is worth reading.
Resumos Relacionados
- Falling Man: A Novel
- The Brooklyn Follies
- Http://www.ucg.org/booklets/me/
- White Noise
- The Pilot's Wife
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