Hello.
So here I am reborn, finally my coffee ... which reopens its doors after a sleep of Sleeping Beauty. I was very busy and despite my desire to see you back, it took the invitation of Charlemagne bookstore that I finally found the time needed to write my ticket. Alongside that I write a novel to be released ... I hope in not too long! I come back to share with you my favorites past and present according to my wanderlust, and I hope you'll enjoy doing a little way with me.
And forgive me for this lengthy absence, I invite you today to a fascinating journey into the world post September 11, in the footsteps of six major Anglo-Saxon novelists Jonathan Safran Foer, Gift of Lillo, Ian Mac Ewan, Jay Mac Inerney, Paul Auster and Joseph O'Neill. Most of the novels which I will talk emerged since a while, but the release of Netherland, Joseph O'Neill, made me want to read or reread the novels to see what connections between them to each other, and what their reading successive mosaic composed.
We read in the press that all these novelists _ some of whom are New Yorkers _ had in common that they felt for months or years after the collapse of the towers, the inability to write a fiction from the event that changed their lives and ours and bore the XXI century in disbelief and dismay. Sometimes reality overwhelms us to the point where fiction becomes temporarily impossible. After Sept. 11, reality had taken all the space, saturating our retinas images of planes hitting the towers, childish mirage horrific destruction, then images of the war in Iraq, the tragedy in London or Madrid, etc. etc., all these dominoes collapsed increasing the grip of fear on our reptilian brains. What world emerged gradually from the matrix of Ground Zero, the magma of flesh and metal scrap which had a crumbling civilization supposed to protect us from chaos? To put this world to decipher it, we lacked the eyes of novelists lights, open to the intimate, concentrated on the interior. This is expressed by Don de Lillo in an interview with magazine Read in April 2008:
"The fiction creates a language for describing the inner life. It can examine the impact of the story about the intimate lives. [...] A novelist can examine the effects of tragedy on the intimate lives of characters who lived it. And that, an essayist and a historian can not do that. [.. .] The fiction thus explores uncharted territory. This does not of course say it is closer to the truth but simply as it can penetrate areas that are not open to other forms of writing. "
We read in the press that all these novelists _ some of whom are New Yorkers _ had in common that they felt for months or years after the collapse of the towers, the inability to write a fiction from the event that changed their lives and ours and bore the XXI century in disbelief and dismay. Sometimes reality overwhelms us to the point where fiction becomes temporarily impossible. After Sept. 11, reality had taken all the space, saturating our retinas images of planes hitting the towers, childish mirage horrific destruction, then images of the war in Iraq, the tragedy in London or Madrid, etc. etc., all these dominoes collapsed increasing the grip of fear on our reptilian brains. What world emerged gradually from the matrix of Ground Zero, the magma of flesh and metal scrap which had a crumbling civilization supposed to protect us from chaos? To put this world to decipher it, we lacked the eyes of novelists lights, open to the intimate, concentrated on the interior. This is expressed by Don de Lillo in an interview with magazine Read in April 2008:
"The fiction creates a language for describing the inner life. It can examine the impact of the story about the intimate lives. [...] A novelist can examine the effects of tragedy on the intimate lives of characters who lived it. And that, an essayist and a historian can not do that. [.. .] The fiction thus explores uncharted territory. This does not of course say it is closer to the truth but simply as it can penetrate areas that are not open to other forms of writing. "
They all felt that constructing a fiction about a tragedy that had touched them with such violence would be impossible. And then, as Don de Lillo said nicely, "gushed a novel." Then two, then three, etc.. Maybe because at the same time that life resumed its course, a little less innocent but still stubborn, came the need to say the unsayable. And exhume the emotions that the brutality of the images and comments without end had hidden.
eight years. Remember. We were afraid to take the metro and train, afraid to travel, go to crowded places, fear of malls, airports, afraid of those faceless ready to die when we were not. And terrorism has placed in our landscape, we are reassured, or at least have regained consciousness on the part of the necessities of life. And now we are the novelists most powerful booster shot that is because fiction has the power to wake the dead and buried terrors in everyone, the strong emotions and unanswered questions.
Approaching September 11 with my powers of the fiction might have seemed impossible in the case of all tragedies beyond comprehension. Everyone has taken a path for him, highly personal, and it gives a series of novels very different from each other, approaching more or less near the impact. Don de Lillo chose to enter the picture of a man covered with dust, out of a tower with a briefcase in hand
"I did not write a novel in which the events befall over the shoulder of a character and vaguely affect his life. No, I needed something more immediate return to the chaos itself, penetrate the smoke and ash reach this man who had burst in my imagination ... and enter his mind, his life. "
In his novel The Man Who Falls , he called the most offensive symbol of 11 September subliminal image and become taboo: that those people who preferred to jump towers and crashing down. That of this photo by Richard Drew, Associated Press, which toured the world the day after the tragedy before to be ignored by all media: the man who fell from a tower, head down, body straight, going to their deaths in a position that seems resigned. If the media have ignored is that this symbol of America was falling too shocking. Better to concentrate on the heroism of the rescuers, the courage of survivors and relatives of the disappeared. Better to show an America that rises despite his wounds. Don de Lillo is therefore scratch where it hurts. And it does so in the manner of one of his characters, David Janiak, who perform this for months, fell from the top of buildings, held by a single rope, in the precise position and painful to those skilled in the photo: full length, straight, one knee bent, wearing a suit. This performance will be tracked by the police for creating "a dangerous situation and physically aggressive." Aggressive, it is, this man who by his fall constantly reminded New Yorkers that they would rather forget, which haunts them. Lianne, a character in the novel, whose husband is the survivor dusty carrying a briefcase, can not detach his thoughts
"Throughout his long, free-fall, she thought, and this image had punctured the head and heart, my God, an angel was in freefall and his beauty was horrific. "
Not content to awaken the most powerful ghost World Trade Center, "unknown soldier of a war that we do not know the end" (in the words of the writer Tom Junod), Don de Lillo not hesitate to slip, the area of furtive few scenes in the head Hammad, future terrorist and suicide bomber who comes off little by little all bonding and ground before slipping up in the frenzy of a chosen death. These scenes are few, because one suspects _ before the writer does admit _ he "knew he could not penetrate his soul." Some heinousness of the human soul are inaccessible to the writer. It must go down too deep in the darkness. Writing about a "monster" requires finding itself points of agreement with him, and it is not easy.
Other authors have not approached so close to the attack, and yet their stories are all in their own way, great novels of the post September 11. Having found their subjective distance from the event, they could tell from all the detail, refer to the earthquake and its aftershocks through its effects on our lives.
Thus, Ian Mac Ewan is his novel Saturday eighteen months after September 11 in London. Double bend in time and space. His hero, Henry Perowne, is a neurosurgeon in London, and has everything to be happy: a job he loves, a woman he loves and desires always after more than twenty years of marriage, two loving children, intelligent and talented, and a beautiful house overlooking a square in the tidy neighborhood reconstituted Fitzgravia behind the Post Office Tower. Yes but now, the sight of a burning plane flying too low to Heathrow Airport in the early hours of Saturday in February 2003, will change its scheduling flawless day of his life. Because since September 11, image of an airplane in the sky has ceased to be harmless:
"Nearly eighteen months have passed since half the planet watched the captives loop invisible ducts open sky to their martyrdom, and the silhouette of any innocent airliner started to trigger new associations. Everyone agrees, airplanes in flight now refer to predatory birds or running their loss. "
In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close , Jonathan Safran Foer, the hero is 9 years old and his father disappeared in one of the World Trade Center. Oskar has found a mysterious key in the pocket of a jacket of his father, accompanied by the word "Black", and is looking for the lock through the boroughs of New York, Staten Island, Bronx and Manhattan to Brooklyn , wandering the streets of a city bereft of its twin towers, which breathes with the melancholy air. Overcoming his fears for the sake of his quest, he climbs to the top of the Empire State Building: "When the door opened, we went out on the panoramic terrace. As we did not know who search, we only looked at a time. Of course, the sight was incredibly beautiful, but my brain started to do its thing and all the time I thought a plane was heading against the skyscraper, just below us. [...]
I thought about all the things everyone is saying, and the fact that all people will die, whether in a millisecond, in days or months, or seventy-six and a half, when it is born. Everything that is born must die, which means that our lives are like skyscrapers. Smoke rises faster or slower, but they are all on fire, and we are all trapped. "
aircraft, smoke, skyscraper ... These words have become as anxiety that the image of the man falling. Impact still in the novel Netherland by Joseph O'Neill, where a couple will break up in the months following the attacks. Of course, September 11 merely expands a flaw existing between Hans and his wife, provide an excuse for this woman who wants to leave her husband and took refuge in London. As if London was less risky at a time when all major Western cities are in the crosshairs of terrorists. And now this man sentenced to not see his son for four years every fortnight, between two planes, and share the bed of the little boy in the house of her parents. Because Rachel, his wife, decided to combine it with Bush's America, to make the share responsibility of the war in Iraq and all the misfortunes that have beset their lives. Because politics is now their place of conversation and swallowed any form of intimacy, replacing it with a fight futile and hopeless:
"- This is not reasoning," I said. C is just aggression.
- Assault? But, Hans, you do not understand? You do not see that it has nothing to do with relations personal? Politeness, kindness, you, me ... none of this is relevant. It is a matter of life and death struggle for the future of the world. Our personal feelings do not enter the picture. There are forces at work. The United States is now the strongest military power in the world. They can and they will do whatever they want. We must stop this. Your feelings, like my feelings - she sobbed, now - have nothing to do with all this. "
In La Belle Vie Inerney Jay Mac, we are interested in frica and overprotected by a bourgeois Manhattan, and the eye of the writer does Vachard no savings: superficial women drowned in luxury, teen cams, men dissolved in the vanity of their lives and only care about increasing the gap between them and the rest of the world ... From a social event that turns the game of massacre, to September 12 is tilted, as if the sheet was torn off the calendar. The world shook off, but it will not change the deal for a tiny minority of them. For most, the collapse of the towers will become a point of anguish inscribed in indelible deep within themselves, the idea that they are no longer safe, quickly expelled by additional luxury and activities. To the point where the characters collapses into tears evoke a lost friend, her grief seems like a parody. One time they thought of leaving New York. One time only. "The Good Life", this simulacrum of happiness shining vacuum, can be experienced here. And yet, something essential has been lost: the sense of security that conveyed the big cities, New York in mind, the heart of a technological barrier erected against the brutality of a world crude , distant, anachronistic. New York, and all major cities in its wake, have become fragile. The unthinkable has happened and now everything is possible, especially the worst. How to reassure children when adults wobble? Lie. Say that everything will be alright now, it's over, the chaos is over, the wicked are dead. In each of the novels, parents attempt to deceive in children who are not fooled. For if the twin towers fell, other towers may fall. Others had come. Children Falling Man watch the sky with binoculars, looking for Bill Lawton (distortion of "Bin Laden"), creating confusion and anxiety among parents who are on the verge of the treatment. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close , the grandmother of Oskar remembers the lie of his father during the Second World War:
"I'll always be there to protect you, everything will be fine." And she adds: "It was not my father a liar. This made him my father."
"I'll always be there to protect you, everything will be fine." And she adds: "It was not my father a liar. This made him my father."
In the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, everyone lies to everyone, love. Oskar himself, the top of his nine years, has a secret too heavy for him, unaware that his mother, grandmother and even that strange tenant lives with it, have locked theirs to protect. These secrets will be released interwoven one after the other, releasing the emotions necessary to mourning and recovery of life. For as the author puts it this funny and poignant novel:
"September 11 has prompted people to externalize their share of childhood. Many have cried for the first time in years, said" I ' love "to their families, etc.. The disaster we have not made naive, but has eliminated a time, the layers that adults build around them."
Adopt the perspective of a child of nine years allows him to ask the world a closer look at both free and innocent, more vulnerable too. But in most novels I have chosen, we find these characters reconnect with the emotions and terrors of childhood. Children who evoke the disaster that veiled terms, speaking of "worst day" (Jonathan Safran Foer) or "planes". Children who believe in ghosts and feel the presence of the dead at Ground Zero in the stifling atmosphere of the early days:
"The presence of the dead was almost tangible in the early hours night, when their spirit was hovering between the canyons. It was better to feel around to see that in his sleep after returning home. "(Jay Mac Inerney)
In La Belle Vie , Luke, a survivor of the towers was among the first to clear the scene of a disaster. And he speaks of these bubbles inside the debris , "these empty pockets where it was hoped that as we feared to find survivors
"It was terrifying, these holes - like when you're small and we are afraid of the dark space under the bed. Here I am supposedly trying to help people and I am afraid to reach out. These voids are like passages to hell. "
Waking necessarily those childhood terrors brings to parents that have been lost or whose life has away, and who are no longer there to explain the chaos of the world . The hero of Joseph O 'Neill is haunted by memories of his lost mother. After Sept. 11, the lack of it becomes more acute here because without parental support and forced to be one for her little boys. heroes La Belle Vie , Luke returns to his mother in this time of deep questioning about the meaning of his life, and the reunion coincides with the resumption of a meaningful dialogue with his daughter. Lianne, the heroine of Falling Man , continues to visit her mother as if she was looking for answers that only those who preceded us in this world are likely to hold. As for Oskar, the little hero of Jonathan Safran Foer, is tirelessly and courageously that tracks the trail of his missing father.
In Saturday that we feel the more violently the disappearance of the sense of security. Because saw a plane in flames tear the skies over London, and although it has nothing to do with terrorists, Henry Perowne feels threatened and weakened. Her day will be profoundly changed. This is not a Saturday like any other, nothing works as it should, a threat sown early in the story hangs over the hero and how a storm brewing, it will burst in the evening, coming to remind this man preferred that no one, now, is immune to the threat posed by the pariahs of our society. And face the real threat and physical, social status and professional indemnity insurance shall no longer of any help:
"Never in his life he had hit someone in the face, even as a child. He never wore the iron cons of anesthetized body in a sterile environment and regulated . In fact, he can not defend themselves. "
This loss of sense of security leads to a profound melancholy, found a novel to another. Most of the characters seem trapped in a shell of sadness they can not be undone. Hans, the hero of Netherland , wonders about his rapid fall in the black hole of melancholy:
"I still do not know exactly if my descent into chaos fell to an Achilles heel or folly punished generally of wanting to face life with confidence - unwisely , some might say. All I know is that evil has taken me by surprise. "
Because the threat is not only what terrorism that crystallizes the visceral fears of half the globe. More profoundly, there is the idea that states which we belong leading worldwide actions which, like the butterfly flapping its wings, trigger earthquakes. And that these earthquakes no longer be content to remain politely stationed in the Third World. Now, the fall-out of our states can result in shattered lives and massacres downstairs from us.
Hence the prominence that politics plays in the lives of all the protagonists of these novels. Considerable space, far more important than before. September 11, politics, international politics and in particular, broke into our privacy. Remember our feverish discussions about the war in Iraq, terrorism, the Bush administration ... You will find them in these novels, in lieu of privacy and by shielding profound questions between Hans and his wife in Netherland ; poisoning the reunion of Henry Perowne and his beloved daughter in Saturday, exacerbating relations of the mother Lianne, Nina, and her lover Martin in The Man Who Falls. Martin moves to which pleasure iron in the wound of Americans:
"First they kill you and then you strive to understand them. Maybe finally get it by learning their names. But it must that they kill you first. [...] But that's why you had built the towers, right? Have they not been conceived as fantasies of wealth and power, destined to one day become fantasies of destruction? "
"First they kill you and then you strive to understand them. Maybe finally get it by learning their names. But it must that they kill you first. [...] But that's why you had built the towers, right? Have they not been conceived as fantasies of wealth and power, destined to one day become fantasies of destruction? "
policy, it is found in the heart of Alone in the dark , the latest novel Paul Auster. Let me put aside voluntarily because if the world after September 11th is also the center, it is especially its impact and the war in Iraq is about. the little daughter of August Brill, the book's hero, has lost a fiance in the war, performed in a manner hideous. Again, we find the power of images: the girl and her family could not help watch the video of his execution, mesmerized, knowing it would haunt them more viscerally as the news of his death. Through this intimate tragedy, war, war eternal and unquenchable, who broke into the lives of the characters in the novel: "My subject tonight is war, and now that the war has entered this house, it seems to me that if I insult Titus and Katya j'amortissais instantly. "
To occupy his sleepless nights, August Brill, forced into immobility by accident, invented another world, an alternate history in which either September 11 or the war in Iraq thereunder, would not have happened. But the war caught up with him even in his fiction, since in the latter, a civil war ignites in America. Following the defeat of Al Gore truncated for president, New York and several other states have seceded, and the resulting conflict that cruelly highlights rift between the "two Americas" that the election of George Bush highlighted . August Brill also remembers a bloody race riot that the district of Newark in his youth:
"That was my war. Not a real war, of course, but once you have been witness to violence of this magnitude, it is not hard to imagine worse, and the time that the brain is capable of doing that, we understand that the most terrible possibilities of the imagination are the country in which we live. "
So what world provide all these novelists whose talents meet one story to another? A world anxious, fragile, wistful, captive to the tyranny of the media. A world where "we are all targets now ", as summarized in Martin Falling Man . A world that has changed without turning back. Where he will live without the illusion of a world safe. Where fear could change us into slaves of power and information without our noticing, as pointed out by Ian Mac Ewan:
"Not so long ago, his thoughts wandered more unpredictable, a list of topics much longer. He wondered if it would not now becoming a pigeon, a consumer ever more hungry for information, opinions, speculations, any crumb launched by the authorities. It is a docile citizen who looks at the Leviathan increase his power while hiding in his shadow. "
But still, this world "mysterious murders, strange world continues to turn," wrote Paul Auster . And us. And I would strongly advise you to immerse yourself in these novels, I really enjoyed reading them one after another, moving from the eye and tasty Vachard Jay Mac Inerney poignant and funny look at Jonathan Safran Foer or scalpel virtuoso Ian Mac Ewan ... enter in these novels, you'll be in good company.
soon.
Gaëlle Nohant
