Falling Man
Roman
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- CHF 10.00
Descrizione dell’editore
Falling Man – Don DeLillos eindringliches Meisterwerk über den 11. September und seine Folgen
New York am 11. September 2001: Eine Stadt in Asche und Rauch. Mit sprachlicher Präzision zeichnet Don DeLillo den Ablauf der Ereignisse nach: von den Tätern zu den Opfern, von Hamburg nach New York. Im Zentrum steht Keith Neudecker, der sich aus einem der brennenden Türme des World Trade Centers retten kann. Wie in Trance schlägt er sich zu seiner Ex-Frau Lianne und seinem kleinen Sohn Justin durch.
In ihrer Verzweiflung klammern sich Keith und Lianne aneinander, wollen aus der Einsamkeit der Angst zurück in ein gemeinsames Leben finden. Gespräche kreisen um den Schock, um den Terrorismus als ständige Bedrohung. Keith durchlebt immer wieder das Trauma der Flucht, während Lianne ziellos durch die Stadt irrt. Bis sie voller Entsetzen Falling Man sieht, einen Performance-Künstler, der sich als Chronist des Zeitalters des Terrors von Wolkenkratzern stürzt. Der Terror bestimmt die neue Realität.
Mit großer Sensibilität und Scharfsinn gelingt es Don DeLillo in Falling Man, das scheinbar Unsagbare in Worte zu fassen. Ein weiterer Höhepunkt in seinem Werk, der die einschneidenden Ereignisse des 11. September und ihre Folgen auf berührende Weise greifbar macht.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When DeLillo's novel Players was published in 1977, one of the main characters, Pammy, worked in the newly built World Trade Center. She felt that "the towers didn't seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light." DeLillo's new novel begins 24 years later, with Keith Neudecker standing in a New York City street covered with dust, glass shards and blood, holding somebody else's briefcase, while that intimation of the building's mortality is realized in a sickening roar behind him. On that day, Keith, one half of a classic DeLillo well-educated married couple, returns to Lianne, from whom he'd separated, and to their young son, Justin. Keith and Lianne know it is Keith's Lazarus moment, although DeLillo reserves the bravura sequence that describes Keith's escape from the first tower as well as the last moments of one of the hijackers, Hammad until the end of the novel. Reconciliation for Keith and Lianne occurs in a sort of stunned unconsciousness; the two hardly engage in the teasing, ludic interchanges common to couples in other DeLillo novels. Lianne goes through a paranoid period of rage against everything Mideastern; Keith is drawn to another survivor. Lianne's mother, Nina, roils her 20-year affair with Martin, a German leftist; Keith unhooks from his law practice to become a professional poker player. Justin participates in a child's game involving binoculars, plane spotting and waiting for a man named "Bill Lawton." DeLillo's last novel, Cosmopolis, was a disappointment, all attitude (DeLillo is always a brilliant stager of attitude) and no heart. This novel is a return to DeLillo's best work. No other writer could encompass 9/11 quite like DeLillo does here, down to the interludes following Hammad as he listens to a man who "was very genius" Mohammed Atta. The writing has the intricacy and purpose of a wiring diagram. The mores of the after-the-event are represented with no cuteness save, perhaps, the falling man performance artist. It is as if Players, The Names, Libra, White Noise, Underworld with their toxic events, secret histories, moral panics converge, in that day's narrative of systematic vulnerability, scatter and tentative regrouping.
