Falling Man
Falling Man is a 2007 novel by the American writer Don DeLillo . The novel addresses the consequences of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 for a couple involved in the events and the thoughts of the terrorist Hammad .
The German translation was published in October 2007 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch .
content
Keith and Lianne live in New York with their son Justin . Keith works for a law firm in the World Trade Center . The starting point of the novel is the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in which two planes flew into the two towers of the World Trade Center, which then collapsed.
At the time of the attacks, Keith is in the north tower of the twin towers . He can save himself (De Lillo describes him after the well-known photograph from September 11, 2001, which shows a man with a dirty suit and a briefcase, who is in the middle of the ruins of the World Trade Center and a cloth is in front of the Shut up), but is psychologically disturbed by the events and slowly isolates himself from his ex-wife Lianne and their son Justin. He begins an affair with a woman named Florence, who was also in the World Trade Center at the time of the attacks. By the end of the novel, he spends most of his time in Las Vegas , playing poker . As a result, Lianne is also lonely, who now lacks a hold in her life. The trauma remains unresolved: unlike other writers who dealt literarily with the terrorist attacks of September 11th, including Siri Hustvedt , Jay McInerney and Ken Kalfus , DeLillo offers neither a conciliatory ending nor a distanced view of the events.
Lianne repeatedly encounters the eponymous "Falling Man". This is an anonymous performance artist who recreates the famous photograph The Falling Man , which appeared in many newspapers the day after the terrorist attacks. It shows a man who (presumably) fell from the fire-cut upper floors of the World Trade Center and is now headfirst in free fall. The artist lets himself abseil upside down from buildings, only rudimentarily secured, and, according to the Swiss cultural scientist Christina Rickli, represents the “guardian of New York's traumatized collective consciousness”.
Parallel to the story of Keith and Lianne, another storyline deals with the feelings and thoughts of a terrorist from the Hamburg terror cell . Don DeLillo depicts this Hammad, who dies at the end of the novel when the plane crashes into one of the two towers, as a person who ultimately follows the ideology of Islamist terrorism, but is marked by considerable self-doubt.
Reviews
“What makes this new novel so breathtaking is the way in which narrative and essayistic are brought into balance, linguistically terse, purer than in Mao II or DeLillo's big atom bomb-hits-baseball novel Underworld. It is a meditation on what it means to live in these times and in these rooms, as DeLillo says with a bit of a metaphysical touch. "
“Falling Man is cumbersome, surprisingly unexciting over long stretches and at the same time a prime example of what literature can do in documentary terms. DeLillo provides nothing less than a seismogram of the New York soul situation after the fall of the towers. "
Individual evidence
- ↑ Christina Rickli: Grief or Trauma Stories? American novels after 9/11 . In: Sandra Poppe, Thorsten Schüller and Sascha Seiler (eds.): 9/11 as a cultural turning point. Representations of September 11, 2001 in cultural discourses, literature and visual media . transcript, Bielefeld 2009, ISBN 978-3-8394-1016-5 , pp. 103–120, here p. 115 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
- ↑ Christina Rickli: Grief or Trauma Stories? American novels after 9/11 . In: Sandra Poppe, Thorsten Schüller and Sascha Seiler (eds.): 9/11 as a cultural turning point. Representations of September 11, 2001 in cultural discourses, literature and visual media . transcript, Bielefeld 2009, ISBN 978-3-8394-1016-5 , pp. 103-120, here p. 114 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
- ↑ Georg Diez: Proximity. Distance. Cold. In: The time. 21/2007. (Book review)
- ↑ Frank Schäfer: The language after the impact. on: taz.de October 31, 2007. (Book review)