(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
[terror] Don DeLillo, as readers know from the ambitious Underworld (1997), steers in his new book against one of the most delicate themes imaginable: 11. September 2001. In The Fallen Man, we get the story of a family in New York after the big bang. After the attack, the protagonist Keith comes to himself on the street. He is covered in blood. We follow him and his family to this day.
This theme may seem a bit strange to DeLillo, a writer some experience as an esoteric and even "postmodernist". The reception of the novel in the United States has also been mixed. Literature and their pretentious projects are banned from Ground Zero: "The suffering belongs to the people, peel you off!" Is the message. When the head boils, all shades are swept aside and the prejudice becomes clear.
However, the Falling Man comments on this "prejudice behind the everyday facade" game becomes apparent when the otherwise reflected Lianne, Keith's wife, knocks up his neighbor to play meditative (!) Arabic music.
Everything changes
Keith walks out of the skyscraper after the attack. He is offered a shuttle and goes home to the family. It surprises everyone, as it is in full resolution. Even the years that follow, Keith spends with his wife and children, but he is far away, both physically and mentally. For long periods of time, he travels away to play poker, without that he thinks about getting off too well. This is precisely what DeLillo's point is: No decisions are made. Keith is just waiting.
However, a basic premise in the book is that everything changes with the terrorist attack. The deafening bracket. To the extent that both hearing and vision are smoking. But as in an old novel, insights come after the shaking: Lianne and Keith see themselves as who they are, and they see that everything is different.
No one knows exactly what the metamorphosis would bring. But the starting point of life is new, which alone is more than good enough reason for DeLillo to approach the theme. Thus, it would be more hair-raising if the author remained dumb.
In the waiting room?
DeLillo is a skilled analyst of the United States, but perhaps it is the peculiarly lyrical prose he writes in Cosmopolis (2003) that impresses most in writing. With his latest novel, DeLillo moves between two extremes. On the one hand, he creates suggestive moods where the void is left with meaning. On the other hand, the reader is placed in a fairly usual waiting room.
Describing a scene and leaving the external action, while the language glows, is the author's specialty. The opening also has good passages, such as: “The bracket was still in the air, the roaring drone of the fall. This was the world now. The smoke and ash rolled across the streets and rounded corners, overturned corners, seismic waves of smoke, with office paper coming by, standard sheets with sharp edges, swept past, unreal in the morning. " But in the Man who falls, there are many, long sides where not much happens in the language.
A demonstration, in which Lianne feels alone in the crowd, is depicted with quivering intensity. But a lot just doesn't quiver. Maybe it's a point from the author that the same scenes are played out time and time again: Keith at new poker tables. New cities, anonymous hotel rooms, dead faces. I suspect that the author has partially sought the repeat, but also simply that he does not live up to his best prose, as if he himself still suffers artistic late damage after the terrorist attack.
There are passages that at one and the same time show DeLillo's strength as a novelist and give an explanation of what is going on this time. For example, Lianne talks to her mother's lover, Martin. He is an anonymous and civilized cosmopolitan man with fine language, living in different big cities. He is a sophisticated art dealer, with a past as an RAF terrorist. His replies about the United States are good phrases, but through Martin DeLillo makes a simple analysis: Martin sees parallels between the hijackers, the RAF and the whole universal rebel spirit. The depictions of the Fallen Terrorists also look like pure public information to the Yankees. While the language is empty.
The humanist and the terrorist
Don DeLillo himself has undergone a process of change. From being the foremost practitioner of postmodernism, the author has gradually become a concerned humanist. In The Falling Man, the frightened humanism is the central voice of the book. But in his urge to explain, DeLillo may seem to have forgotten old insights. The contexts in Cosmopolis were never intended as simple analyzes with the aim of fully explaining the order of things. Rather, the text was able to bring new complexities to the surface. DeLillo recorded hidden connections for the reader. These gave the text power and you never got the feeling that the author was trying to provide simple explanations for a multifaceted world. This time, the synthesis is all-inclusive. I miss the artistic grips of Cosmopolis, where the author suggests connections, weaving threads into each other in small moments, before everything slips back into place. The text is getting a little too flimsy now, perhaps because DeLillo himself is in an artistic state of waiting, but also because the book is measured against texts you can hardly surpass.
