Windows on the World

Beigbeder does what a writer should do: piss the right people off. The rest of us can look at Windows on the World with a knowing smile, while the dunderheads who haven't "figured it out" yet feign their disgust.

If you wanted an action story, or a story of heroic firefighters come to save the day, or a book avoiding touching the tough topics, then you've come to the wrong book. Many of the other reviews here are judging this book extremely harshly. I believe that is not deserved - this book does what it claims to do very well. Biegbeder tries here to understand how the destruction on 9/11 has affected both the american psyche, as well as his own personal life. It is both an intensely personal account and a public grieving at the same time. Perhaps it takes a literary mind to understand what he is trying to achieve - or maybe it doesn't come across well to the average American. The novel was certainly popular in its original French, and I find that the translation is very good. There were only a couple of places where word choice tipped me off that it was a translation, but nothing major. I think perhaps those who are rating this book harshly expected something to make them feel good. Sometimes, however, understanding does not bring happiness.

It seems that not a lot of readers were as impressed by WINDOWS ON THE WORLD as I was. I found it compelling reading and very well done, but to tell the truth I wish I hadn't read it. Beigbeter does a great job; actually, too good a job. I felt like I was there with Carthew and his boys David, age seven, and Jerry, age nine. At one point Carthew wonders what Bruce Willis would do if he were trapped on top of a burning building. And that's Beigbeder's point- that this isn't an amusement park ride and the flames and smoke aren't George Lucas special effects. It's real. And worst of all, there's not going to be a happy ending to the story. These people are all- regardless of age or other factors- going to die in a very short period of time. Not because they're good or bad, just because they went to breakfast at a tourist landmark on the wrong sunny Tuesday morning. I'll admit it, it was the fact of the kids being there that got to me. I've got two daughters, two granddaughters, two cats, and three dogs. If I had a farm Lord knows how many animals we'd have in the barnyard. If we live long enough I guess we'll see stories coming out about 9-11 that have artificial happy endings for everybody. A few years ago there was a children's cartoon (thankfully it got almost no distribution) about the Titanic that had every passenger and crew member survive. A major studio did a cartoon that showed the murdered Russian Princess Anastasia grown to adulthood and haunted by the ghost of Rasputin the mad monk. Boys and girls, can you say historical blasphemy? The facts of history are facts and should be inviolate. End of rant. If you read WINDOWS ON THE WORLD I hope you've got thicker skin than I do. It hurt.

so how can you look at a book like this? being as it is a fictionalised account of the last hour and a half of the world trade centre? i say look at it practically - it's nothing we haven't wondered, talked about, tried to write ourselves. maybe away from the US things are different, I know in the UK and Australia, in Europre and Asia the response was different. I was in Bangkok a few months after the attacks and i saw tshirts saying 'Bin Laden 1 USA Nil' - this shocked me but not as much as the mawkish Sean Penn short film about the attacks. So the book - it's refreshing, it's challenging. Yes it fictionalises the last hour and a half but these passages are searing, they are evocative. The other chapters are from the author and he talks about his feelings, his reactions, his concerns. Reading someone openly discussing his thoughts on America and the attacks is better then the self sensoring we have all learned to do. I can't recommend this book enough. It is not distasteful, it is respectful and honest. It's a better tribute to a distaster then Titanic The Movie was ever going to be

Windows on the World is a French novel, translated into English, about September 11th. It follows two parallel storylines: one, an American father named Carthew Yorston and his two sons trapped in the Windows on the World restaurant in the north tower; and the other, a French novelist named Frédéric Beigbeder ruminating on September 11th over breakfast in the tallest building in Paris. One's immediate reaction even to just hearing the premise is "how French." But if the story is a French one, it is so only because American novelists are still too close to the tragedy of 9/11 to fictionalize it. No one is more aware of the sensitive nature of his subject than Beigbeder himself: call it naïve, call it exploitative, but Windows on the World is emphatically not an "anti-American" novel. It is a great novel, but a troubling one; or rather, its subject is troubling. Like any great novel, Windows on the World bores down through its grand backdrop (in other cases, war or revolution; in this case, the destruction of the World Trade Center) to focus on characters and tell their very human stories of love and redemption. In the final pages, the father in the burning building is able to tell his son he loves him-words that he was never able to say-just before they leap to their death; and the writer Frédéric, who throughout the text is cynical, alone, and all but unable to love, finds redemption and buys an engagement ring from Tiffany's to propose to his girlfriend. The structure of the novel is simple, but it works well: each minute between 8:30 a.m. and 10:29 a.m. is recorded in a separate short chapter-this minute-by-minute account is also a "minute" account, replete with the little details of life that matter so much in a novel of this devastating a topic. The chapters alternate between the two storylines. As the minutes pile up, clear parallels between Carthew and Frédéric emerge, until we realize that the two men are the same (they are both divorced; they both have young children; they both see a woman named Candace and are reluctant to marry again; their memories are often identical; and, the crowning example, Frédéric's grandmother, an American who moved to Paris when she married Frédéric's grandfather, was named Grace Carthew Yorstoun). Of course, in other ways the two men are distinct: but such a contradiction is deliberate and consistent within the world of this novel, in which objectivity is elusive and truth indefinable. Beigbeder has written a tour-de-force. Despite it's subject, it's not all grim. Humor-albeit of the black variety-abounds, giving the reader respites of laughter. And Beigbeder, in a nod to the reality of the 21st century, uses movie references like Milton might use biblical passages (there are well over fifty films mentioned in this book; modern life has become like the movies we watch, and our reality has fused with fiction). Appreciating Windows on the World requires the reader to distance himself from the ac