Look at Me
A Novel
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- 79,00 kr
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • In this ambitiously multilayered novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, a fashion model named Charlotte Swenson emerges from a car accident in her Illinois hometown with her face so badly shattered that it takes eighty titanium screws to reassemble it.
She returns to New York still beautiful but oddly unrecognizable, a virtual stranger in the world she once effortlessly occupied.
With the surreal authority of a David Lynch, Jennifer Egan threads Charlotte’s narrative with those of other casualties of our infatuation with the image. There’s a deceptively plain teenaged girl embarking on a dangerous secret life, an alcoholic private eye, and an enigmatic stranger who changes names and accents as he prepares an apocalyptic blow against American society.
As these narratives inexorably converge, Look at Me becomes a coolly mesmerizing intellectual thriller of identity and imposture.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Jennifer Egan published Look at Me way back in 2001, but this thoughtful thriller is perfect for the age of Instagram. Following a catastrophic car crash, model Charlotte Swenson is rendered unrecognizable, viewed as a stranger in her old Manhattan haunts. Charlotte decides to use her new anonymity to outrun her troubled past—until an encounter with a tormented private investigator saddles her with a whole different kind of fame. We won’t spoil the strange, chilling turns Egan’s story takes, but suffice it to say that issues of image and identity are at the center of Charlotte’s increasingly disturbing journey. With Egan’s trademark smarts, Look at Me is more than a take on celebrity culture’s fixation with appearances: It’s a tense, compelling critique of beauty itself.
