Falling Man: A Novel
Don DeLillo
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 1416546065
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Falling Man is a magnificent, essential novel about the event that defines turn-of-the-century America. It begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and tracks the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few people.
There is September 11 and then there are the days after, and finally the years.
Falling Man is a magnificent, essential novel about the event that defines turn-of-the-century America. It begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and tracks the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few people.
First there is Keith, walking out of the rubble into a life that he’d always imagined belonged to everyone but him. Then Lianne, his estranged wife, memory-haunted, trying to reconcile two versions of the same shadowy man. And their small son Justin, standing at the window, scanning the sky for more planes.
These are lives choreographed by loss, grief, and the enormous force of history.
Brave and brilliant, Falling Man traces the way the events of September 11 have reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory and our perception of the world. It is cathartic, beautiful, heartbreaking.
The Commission: WHAT WE DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT 9/11
Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
tossed in the chips and watched the eyes across the table. They regressed to preliterate folkways, petitioning the dead. There were elements of healthy challenge and outright mockery. There were elements of one’s intent to shred the other’s gauzy manhood. Hovanis, dead now, decided at some point that they didn’t need seven-card stud. The sheer number of cards and odds and options seemed excessive and the others laughed and made the rule, reducing the dealer’s choice to five-card stud and
was a shyness for a time and then something that eased the mood, a look or a wisecrack or the way she begins to hum, in a parody of social desperation, eyes darting about the room. But the faint discomfort of those early moments, the sense of ill-matched people was not completely dispelled. “Sometimes six or seven horses single file, going up the street. The riders looking straight ahead,” she said, “like the natives might take offense.” “I’ll tell you what surprises me.” “Is it my eyes? Is it
What she began to feel, aside from helplessness, was a heightened sense of who she was in relation to the others, thousands of them, orderly but all-enclosing. Those nearby saw her, smiled, some of them, and spoke to her, one or two, and she was forced to see herself in the reflecting surface of the crowd. She became whatever they sent back to her. She became her face and features, her skin color, a white person, white her fundamental meaning, her state of being. This is who she was, not really
The cards fell randomly, no assignable cause, but he remained the agent of free choice. Luck, chance, no one knew what these things were. These things were only assumed to affect events. He had memory, judgment, the ability to decide what is true, what is alleged, when to strike, when to fade. He had a measure of calm, of calculated isolation, and there was a certain logic he might draw on. Terry Cheng said that the only true logic in the game was the logic of personality. But the game had
impending. They embraced, saying nothing. Later they spoke in low tones that carried a nuance of tact. They would share nearly four full days of indirection before they talked about things that mattered. It was lost time, designed from the first hour to go unremembered. She would remember the song. They spent nights in bed with the windows open, traffic noises, voices carrying, five or six girls marching down the street at two a.m. singing an old rock ballad that she sang along with them,
