The French author's latest novel is set in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001.
Critic Reviews
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
It is, on all levels, a stunning read.
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Favorable
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Kirkus Reviews
Sometimes slight, but always impressive: an important addition to the chorus of heavier, more lifeless tomes on the subject.
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Favorable
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Library Journal Patrick Sullivan
It is a powerful, earnest, and in some ways playful novel that successfully blends tragedy and pathos with an irresistible exuberance for life. [1 Jan 2005, p.93]
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Favorable
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Salon Laura Miller
The book staggers from full-fledged storytelling to barely veiled memoir to essay to random, canny observation. It's a discombobulated, contradictory work, but it rings true in a way that other stabs at the same topic haven't.
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Favorable
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The Spectator Patrick Skene Catling
Perhaps the essential purpose of this terribly clever, powerful, fatalistic book is to make you feel lucky. So far.
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Favorable
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The New York Times Book Review Stephen Metcalf
Strangely moving.
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Favorable
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The Economist
Now that the international sympathy that the attacks first generated seems to have run dry, many Americans will find this foreigner's fresh grief and incredulity a welcome relief.
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Unfavorable
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The Independent Gordon Burn
Beigbeder's direct address to the reader - sardonic, brattish, drillingly autobiographical, with a constant undertow of breezy self-loathing ("Will I be able to look myself in the eye after publishing this book?") - has the distancing and cooling effect that makes his material nearly bearable.
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Unfavorable
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San Francisco Chronicle Sylvia Brownrigg
While we expect some postmodern teasing about whether Beigbeder's self- portrayal is accurate, the persona who emerges is vain, ambitious, shallow, faithless and self-promoting -- by his own account.
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Unfavorable
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Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
While serving up a few clever insights and pretentious inanities ("People who don't understand lap dancing will never understand America"), this ambitious mess revives the horror of 9/11 but sheds no new light on that day.
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Terrible
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Daily Telegraph James Francken
But this book doesn't grapple with the grim truth of 9/11 - it recounts its terrible events in a shamefully reassuring and pious tone.
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Terrible
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The Guardian Josh Lacey
Beigbeder is a smart, sarcastic writer who likes to shock; confronted by 9/11, he is not only cowed, but cowardly. When he comes to the climax of his novel -the deaths of his characters, the collapse of the north tower - he refuses to write about it.
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