Sometimes slight, but always impressive: an important addition to the chorus of heavier, more lifeless tomes on the subject.
From the restaurant that once had the best views in town, 9/11 is witnessed minute by agonizing minute.
Beigbeder (99 Francs, not reviewed) isn’t afraid of taking a risk: a Frenchman writing about a subject incredibly sensitive to Americans, and a subject he has no firsthand knowledge of. Fortunately, he’s got plenty of ideas and not much by way of axes to grind. The novel (it appeared in France in 2003) comes at its story from a couple of angles. The first, the famous restaurant just minutes before the first plane hits, is the obvious attention-grabber. We relive the event through the eyes of some of the victims, most importantly a father who’d brought his two boys up for breakfast. Beigbeder also introduces himself (or a barely concealed facsimile) as a wandering French author in the present day, trying to wrap his mind around the disaster and mostly coming up only with scattered conjectures and heat ’n’ serve theories. The book is heavy with frustration, both on the part of the author, detesting his own ineffectuality, and on the part of the victims, trapped in the restaurant between the burning wreckage of the plane below and the locked rooftop door above. While Beigbeder’s own maunderings about the cause and effect of 9/11 do provide for some divertingly ruminative passages—he has no trace of Euro-intelligentsia knee-jerk dislike of America—but, ultimately, the victims here are the most eloquent witnesses. Beigbeder is unafraid to shed light on the more tragically horrifying aspects of the attacks, at least as far as he can imagine them, and there are several moments of pure soul-aching sadness. And in the end, this is a story without answers, but one that takes the worst that humanity can dish out and faces it down, unflinchingly.
Sometimes slight, but always impressive: an important addition to the chorus of heavier, more lifeless tomes on the subject.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-4013-5223-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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