Fiction/Windows on the World By Frédéric Beigbeder: Frédéric Beigbeder is a publisher, literary critic and broadcaster working in Paris.
His creative output includes five novels including Vacances dans le coma (Grasset, 1994) and L'Amour dure trois ans (Grasset, 1997), and a collection of short stories, Nouvelles sous Ecstasy (Gallimard, 1999). Now he presents us with a gripping, insightful, humorous and nightmarish reflection on 9/11.
The premise is that the only way of knowing what happened in the 107th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center, between 8.30 a.m. and 10.29 a.m. on that fateful day is to invent it. To do so, Beigbeder gathered transcripts of victims' mobile phone conversations as published by the New York Times.
His main narrator is a Parisian novelist, Frédéric Beigbeder, named after himself, who enjoys daily breakfasts on the top of the Tour Montparnasse Ciel de Paris restaurant, tries to survive in the Parisian literary scene and reflects on the state of French and American cultures and their interaction - and who finally decides to visit New York's Ground Zero.
This narrative alternates with that of divorced Carthew Norston, a middle-class Texan real estate agent, and his two young boys, who, because they went for pancakes at the Windows on the World restaurant on a particular day, now have less than two hours to live.
The architecture of the book is like that of the Twin Towers: twofold; ethereal and doomed to collapse: each vignette corresponds to a minute leading towards the end of time, each floor is a latent catastrophe leading towards the end of space.
The spectrum of issues at stake in this novel is broad ranging: What is a nation? What is a belief? What is the true nature of the relationship between parents and children? Who is at fault? Is anyone at fault? Is there a right way to die? How do you deal with chaos? How do you deal with reality? Can language deal with reality?
Beigbeder avoids pathos or anecdote, while raising many questions about the overall limitations of mankind and the specific limitations of literary fiction as a means to account for an ungraspable reality. He doesn't make the mistake of providing answers, thereby transferring the issue on to us, his readers. Nor does he let us forget the nature of true evil, acknowledging nevertheless that "the end of the world makes people kind".
For a contemporary French writer to take up the challenge of fictionalising the very moment that turned the world upside down was courageous in itself; the bonus is that his novel - cleverly executed, and beautifully translated by Frank Wynne - forces us to face the unfathomable in a new and unexpected way.
Jean-Philippe Imbert lectures in French and Comparative Literature in Dublin City University
Windows on the World By Frédéric Beigbeder Translated by Frank Wynne Fourth Estate, 312 pp. £9.99