Frederic Beigbeder - Windows on the World

This is the first of what I suspect will be several postings about contemporary French literature. I recently discovered amazon.fr, the French amazon website. Not very difficult to discover, it has to be said - but it had never occurred to me to look there before. I was struggling to get hold of new material to read in French - I was a bit bored with the 'classics' which is all most British bookshops stock by way of French language books - and wanted to try something more contemporary. I think this was also a reaction to the French/American stand-off earlier in the year over Iraq. Anyway, I was looking for a Michel Houellebecq book, and finally found it on amazon.fr - and they ship to the UK. So I am now officially an amazonaute! And I am enjoying some contemporary literature - it's a good antidote to the american lit that I read a lot of.

Windows on the World

The first Beigbeder novel I have read - I saw a brief mention in the Guardian Review last month. I have also ordered Luc Lang's book but not read it yet.

There are two first-person narrators in the novel - one is FB himself, the other is an invented Texan called Carthew Yorston, who is visiting Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center, with his two young sons. We are presented with alternating chapters from each narrator - the Carthew Yorston timeline is linear and takes place within two hours on the morning of September 11 2001, whereas the FB narrator covers more than one day during the period that the author is writing the book.

FB is a hyperrealist like Houellebecq. This comes through most clearly in the chapters written in the quasi-factual author's voice: the fictionality of the Carthew Yorston character is made explicit in these sections, and we are even told how the author invented the character's name by slightly changing his American grandmother's name. When describing places and events, FB uses some similar hyperrealistic techniques to Houellebecq: he gives the price of the food he is eating, even the telephone number of the restaurant he is sitting in as he is writing, giving the reader the illusion that he could step into FB's world just by picking up the phone. In fact the FB chapters come very close to a blog written by the author, discussing his divorce, his young daughter, and his relationship with his girlfriend, and his last novel.

The effect of the hyperrealist FB chapters is to consciously fictionalise the chapters written in the voice of CY. This is a very useful technique for tackling the book's controversial subject: the last two hours of the lives of the people who died at the top of the WTC, unable to exit the building because the plane had crashed into it several floors below them. As FB says early on in the novel (and is quoted on the dust-jacket of the book): "The only way to know what happened in the restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Centre on September 11 between 8.30AM and 10.29am, is to invent it". To my mind, by admitting to the reader that he has invented a father and two sons, rather than leaving us to wonder whether these people really lived and died, he is cleverly sidestepping potential criticism from the relatives and friends of those who died, who might understandably not be happy to find a fictional acount of their last two hours.

The account of the last two hours in the Windows on the World restaurant is incredibly vivid and populated by cartoon-like characters, for example, the Texan narrator himself, who is a real-estate agent (what could be more American?); his two young sons, who constantly bicker with each other, but who poignantly believe for most of the novel that the whole experience is a tourist attraction like Jurassic Park; the two traders sitting at the next table in restaurant who are in the middle of a passionate affair but still avidly discussing the latest hot stocks; and later on, the black waitress who looks after the little boys. By dealing with these stereotypes, FB creates a super-fictional world at the top of the WTC that contrasts sharply with the super-real world described in the author's chapters. This is most clear in the final pages of the book: as Carthew Yorston's last moments alive are described, in the first person, the reader canot help but question "who is writing this?" because we know that the author did not survive. But then he does say, at 8.31am, "Dans deux heures je serai mort, mais peut-etre suis-je deja mort".

I found this book very moving without being overly sentimental - indeed, one of its strong points is that it is describes the world mourning that took place after 11/9/2001 in a critical way, but deals sensitively with the personal grief of those people who were touched directly by the tragedy.

I also find it very interesting that the first authors to dare to tackle 9/11 as a subject are French, not American.

I look forward to reading more of FB, and to reading Luc Lang's book, which should be an interesting comparison.