Windows on the World - Softcover

Beigbeder, Frederic; Frank Wynne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007184700 ISBN 13: 9780007184705

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2005

Synopsis

A daring, moving fictional account of the last moments of a father and his two sons atop the World Trade Centre on September 11.The only way to know what took place in the restaurant on the 107th Floor of the North Tower, World Trade Center on September 11th 2001 is to invent it.'Weaving together fact and fiction, empathy and dark humour, autobiography and intellect, Windows on the World dares to confront the terrifying image that has come to define our world, the image onto which we project our fears, our compassion, our anger, our incomprehension.Beigbeder is a fierce, furious, infuriating chronicler of human iniquity and human suffering, and this book is a controversial, yet surprisingly humane attempt to depict the most awful event of recent memory.

About this title

About the Author

Frederic Beigbeder was born in 1965 and lives in Paris. He works as a publisher, literary critic and broadcaster.

From Publishers Weekly

"You know how it ends: everybody dies." Thus begins Beigbeder's gripping apocalyptic novel, which takes place on September 11, 2001 - the date on which New York realtor Carthew Yorston has taken his seven- and nine-year-old sons for a long-promised breakfast at the eponymous eatery atop the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Alternating with Smith's narration is the voice of Beigbeder himself - or a thinly disguised version of the French author - musing about the tragedy one year later over his own breakfast in Le Ciel de Paris, on the 56th floor of the Tour Montparnasse, the tallest building in Paris. Each chapter of the novel represents one minute on that fateful morning, from 8:30 to 10:29; nearly all are less than three pages, and several prove startling in their brevity ("In the Windows, the few remaining survivors intone Irving Berlin's 'God Bless America' (1939)"). Both men riff on everything from trivia to politics and make often poignant philosophical observations. Abundant doses of gallows humor at once add levity and underscore the drama. Yorston's overheard snatches of fatuous cell-phone conversations, for example, would be funny in another context, while the enforced exit of a cigar-smoking guest at Windows on the World "thereby proves that a cigar can save your life." Though some readers may be put off by this novel's subject matter, Beigbeder invests his narrators with such profound humanity that the book is far more than a litany of catastrophe: it is, on all levels, a stunning read.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0007184700
• ISBN 13: 9780007184705
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384