by nonhocapito - Sep 20, 2010
I am browsing through "Falling man" by Don Delillo these days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Man_%28novel%29
I wanted to one day open a thread about this, but I guess a simple post will do... I wanted to discuss how is it possible that a fantastic writer like him would end up concocting lies, prostituting his talents to make lies look more real. How sad!
"Falling man", heralded like one of his "finest novels", is a tragic product of bamboozle and malice... unfortunately when the truth will be all out, this will take the name of Delillo down with it...
The adventurous parts of the book are all staged on the day of 9/11, and all these parts are just FANTASIES created by watching, probably over and over, the photos and the videos, and reading the witnesses reports.
Apparently never, during the whole process that apparently took years, this great genius of the American Novel had the uneasy feeling of being in presence of Fakery. Even without figuring out that the whole thing could be and was produced in a studio, in front of a machine, how not to see that these elements he was feeding his talents with lacked the variety, the unpredictability and the accidents of reality?
Oh, but he was going to make the unreal sound real. I think this whole book is an act of pride more than anything else, the pride of the writer who will prove he can turn
anything, any lie, into truth...
Every helpless desperation set against the sky, human voices crying to God and how awful to imagine this, God’s name on the tongues of killers and victims both, first one plane and then the other, the one that was nearly cartoon human, with flashing eyes and teeth, the second plane, the south tower.
I wonder if Delillo
knows, rather than being just a fool. I had the feeling he knew, and was -- him too! -- trying to fool me, as I read this passage where one of the characters browses through the victims pictures:
Pictures snapped anonymously, images rendered by machine [nonhocapito's note: he means took inside a photo-booth, automatically. But it makes you think, doesn't it]. There was something in the premeditation of these photographs, the bureaucratic intent, the straightforward poses that brought her paradoxically into the lives of the subjects. Maybe what she saw was human ordeal set against the rigor of the state. She saw people fleeing, there to here, with darkest hardship pressing the edges of the frame. Thumbprints, emblems with tilted crosses, man with handlebar mustache, girl in braids. She thought she was probably inventing a context. She didn’t know anything about the people in the photographs. She only knew the photographs. This is where she found innocence and vulnerability, in the nature of old passports, in the deep texture of the past itself, people on long journeys, people now dead. Such beauty in faded lives, she thought, in images, words, languages, signatures, stamped advisories.
The book includes parts dedicated at the last days of one Hammad/Mohamed Atta, "pushing a cart through the supermarket", going to flying lessons and things like that.
The weight loss had come in Afghanistan, in a training camp, where Hammad had begun to understand that death is stronger than life. This is where the landscape consumed him, waterfalls frozen in space, a sky that never ended. It was all Islam, the rivers and streams. Pick up a stone and hold it in your fist, this is Islam. God’s name on every tongue throughout the countryside. There was no feeling like this ever in his life. He wore a bomb vest and knew he was a man now, finally, ready to close the distance to God.
...which pretty much sums up how Mossad pictures its enemies for convenience.
In one word, this novel is
propaganda. The author of White Noise, of Underworld, of Mao II is a fucking agent, or a useful idiot....
An then there are the falling people, of course
Things began to fall, one thing and then another, things singly at first, coming down out of the gap in the ceiling, and he tried lifting Rumsey out of the chair. Then something outside, going past the window. Something went past the window, then he saw it. First it went and was gone and then he saw it and had to stand a moment staring out at nothing, holding Rumsey under the arms.
He could not stop seeing it, twenty feet away, an instant of something sideways, going past the window, white shirt, hand up, falling before he saw it. Debris in clusters came down now. There were echoes sounding down the floors and wires snapping at his face and white powder everywhere. He stood through it, holding Rumsey. The glass partition shattered. Something came down and there was a noise and then the glass shivered and broke and then the wall gave way behind him.
He took one step and then the next, smoke blowing over him. He felt rubble underfoot and there was motion everywhere, people running, things flying past. He walked by the Easy Park sign, the Breakfast Special and Three Suits Cheap, and they went running past, losing shoes and money. He saw a woman with her hand in the air, like running to catch a bus.
He went past a line of fire trucks and they stood empty now, headlights flashing. He could not find himself in the things he saw and heard. Two men ran by with a stretcher, someone facedown, smoke seeping out of his hair and clothes. He watched them move into the stunned distance. That’s where everything was, all around him, falling away, street signs, people, things he could not name.
Then he saw a shirt come down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life.
"He could not find himself in the things he saw and heard".
Indeed, mr. Delillo, indeed.
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Note: Delillo's previous novel, Underworld, dates back to 1997 and had this, of all pictures, as a cover:
I probably should read that book again.
Wouldn't you just remove the flyers, possibly place them in his coffin (cough cough) as a final farewell to the brother/husband you loved?