Windows on the World (Spanish Language Edition) [Paperback]

Frederic Beigbeder (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Anagrama; Spanish edition (July 2004)
• Language: Spanish
• ISBN-10: 8433970399
• ISBN-13: 978-8433970398
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,535,079 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

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13 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Far more tasteless than you could possibly imagine, October 18, 2004

By 

MartinP "MartinP" (Nijmegen, The Netherlands) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Windows on the World (Spanish Language Edition) (Paperback)

Far greater authors than Beigbeder must have considered the option of writing a novel on 9/11. And each of them must have concluded that there were (as yet?) few good reasons why to do it, and many good reasons not to. Thus, this unknown French opportunist could claim it for himself. Of course Beigbeder knew quite well he would have to explain why. And he does. "The only interesting subjects are those that are taboo. You have to write what is forbidden." It's only one of the many feeble excuses Beigbeder comes up with to justify this shameless piece of exploitation; though probably the cleverest, as it allows him to defuse all criticism - those who do not like the book are the guardians of a taboo. He has other excuses too: 9/11 is the only important thing that has happened in his generation's lifetime; it signifies the end of capitalism; the suffering of the victims must not be disguised... etc. If this weren't the man who once said that his only motivations in writing are fame and fortune, you might almost fall for it.
It might have been acceptable in the end had he at least written a good novel. But, to quote Kerman on Tosca, this basically is a "shabby little shocker". Beigbeder puts us in the Windows on the World restaurant on the WTC North Tower's top floors, with a Texan real estate agent and his two young sons on the morning of 9/11, and intercuts scenes of their agonizing deaths with his own search for meaning in a vapid and sex-obsessed life. The undisguised narcissism with which the author, who has no particular connection to the events at all, downgrades 9/11 to a symbol for his own vain little existential crisis is probably the most tasteless aspect of this book. As a result, it keeps meandering between attempt at a novel, tangled political pamphlet, an essay for an undergraduate philosophy assignment, and an adolescent diary, and remains, as the Dutch saying has it "meat nor fish".
Literary metaphors are of the crudest kind - the airco roars like a plane-engine, the hamburgers are of raw meat, that kind of thing. Beigbeder's depiction of America is self-consciously laboured and at the same time cliché-ridden, and when it comes down to describing the catastrophe itself he takes refuge in quoting blockbuster disaster movies. Quotations from the Tower of Babel texts from Genesis are inserted as a lame attempt to suggest higher meaning.
The writing is sloppy too. Things go "completely dark", yet the Texan father goes on describing what he sees. He stares at the door handle of the emergency exit, that in fact had been destroyed several scenes earlier. And it seems rather unlikely that a Texan real estate agent would refer to a fifties French movie about the holocaust in search of a metaphor. But of course, the Texan IS Beigbeder, as he over-emphatically points out at the end.
The characters are sketchy and uninvolving, yet a welcome relief from Beigbeder's whining, self-pitying self-analyses, that are puerile and tedious at best, and often utterly laughable. A flashy advertising guy who made 30,000 euros a month needs to come up with better than this to sell himself off as a tragic hero.
And if only, then, in Brett Easton Ellis fashion, he had succeeded in communicating the utter horror of the events - but even at that he fails; not surprisingly, because what is there to tell that we haven't all already heard, seen or imagined many times? There is no taboo about what exactly happened on 9/11. To suggest that there is, the author applies a facile trick that at the same time defuses his attempt at iconoclasm: as soon as the final minutes of his protagonists arrive, he starts omitting paragraphs that would be "insuperable" to the reader. The text is strewn with blanks headed "paragraph omitted". I doubt they were ever written. Typically, the scene that he doesn't omit and turns out to be the climax of the novel, is a hardcore pornographic encounter between two business executives who want to have one last go at it before they die, and are watched with lustful relish by the Texan father whose young son died only minutes ago. Puh-lease! You can just imagine the author gleefully penning this scene, thinking it quite risqué - but it is merely stale, absurd, and in bad taste - the sex and death cliché all over again. Had Beigbeder been as passionate about his characters as he is about four-letter words, this novel might have amounted to something. As it is I would advise you to wait until a real writer is ready to tackle this subject.