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Falling Man

3.16 of 5 stars 3.16 · rating details · 5,946 ratings · 853 reviews

There is September 11 and then there are the days after, and finally the years.

Falling Man is a magnificent, essential novel about the event that defines turn-of-the-century America. It begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and tracks the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few people.

First there is Keith, walking out of the rubble into a...more

Hardcover, 246 pages

Published May 15th 2007 by Scribner (first published 2007)

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Aug 16, 2007 Peter added it

Don DeLillo's novel Falling Man has more unspecified pronouns than I care to read.

It's written in that postmodern style that calls for rapidly changing vignettes; the reader bounces from one scene to another to another in just four pages, and as if to drive us mad, DeLillo hardly ever tells us who is speaking or acting. The sections begin with sentences like: "He missed the kid" or "She missed those nights with friends when you talk about everything." We're left in the dark, and the characters,...more

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May 31, 2007 Johnathan rated it 1 of 5 stars

Did Don get hit by a cheese truck? What a disappointment! This novel is impressively bad. UNDERWORLD and LIBRA are two of my all-time favorite books, but I barely made it through FALLING MAN. In fact, with ten pages left, I considered putting it down. DeLillo offers little new insight into an already exhausted topic. The characters are flaccid; there's little to no plot; DeLillo neglects his usual ingenious details and fills the novel instead with vague suggestions at what his generally listless...more

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Jan 05, 2013 Jonfaith rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I did not care for Falling Man. I found the characters undeveloped and the assembly indifferent. I do care a great deal for Beth Orton's recent album Sugaring Season. My listening of such has been serial, in fact, my wife remains somewhat incredulous that there is "popular" music by someone other than Regina Spektor or Yo La Tengo which entrances for me hours on end. Central Reservation was one of Ms. Orton's previous albums. It haunted the late 1990s for me, as did Delillo's Underworld. I can't...more

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May 29, 2010 K.D. Oliveros rated it 3 of 5 stars

Recommended to K.D. by: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2010 edition)

Shelves: 1001-non-core

You pick up a book. You read the blurbs. Those in front, at the back and perhaps those in the first few pages. Then you form an impression. Maybe this book is good. Maybe this is about this and about that. Then you pay for the book and start reading at home.

We all know about The Falling Man. On September 11, 2001, a man was photograph falling, or some people say flying, from the north tower. He appeared to have, in his last instants of life, embraced his fate. He departed from this earth like an...more

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Sep 27, 2007 Bart rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Readers who find value in postmodern writing

Being clever, that's how DeLillo does it.

Falling Man, a sparse work that is better than The Body Artist and much much better than Cosmopolis, does about as much as it can hope to do. Don DeLillo's powers simply aren't up to the task of making a new statement about a national tragedy like 9/11. He is an assembler of words and sentences and paragraphs and - at times - chapters, but he is not a thinker. What, then, has made him considered such an important voice in American letters?

Being clever, th...more

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Oct 12, 2008 Julia rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: someone who enjoys different or difficult styles of writing, not for those upset by 9/11 depictions

Recommended to Julia by: book club

Although I understood that the writing style was fractured to reflect the fractured lives of the characters, I found the style annoying and frustrating. Though the topic was interesting, the author would switch from character to character and it was hard to figure out what was going on. In the beginning I would keep going back and looking for clues in the text so I could figure out which character's story I was on, but it became so annoying that I gave up and just would read, not always knowing...more

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Jun 17, 2008 Cameron rated it 1 of 5 stars

Unnecessary 9-11 book. Here's my review from the Greenwich Time last year:

Review of “Falling Man” by Don DeLillo, published May 20, 2007
On 9/11, more than 200 people reportedly jumped to their deaths from the World Trade Center buildings, and this after facing an unfathomable choice: Remain in the building and die from the fire; or jump out the window and die from the fall.
On 9/12, newspapers worldwide carried an Associated Press photograph of a man in a white shirt and black pants, falling head...more

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Sep 26, 2007 Ben rated it 4 of 5 stars

The thing with DeLillo is the what. The conversations. The sentence fragments. The writing style.

Of any list of candidates to write about the horrors of 9/11, DeLillo must have shown up. Underworld of course has the famous photo of the towers by Andre Kertesz. (Falling Man has another photo on its cover by Katie Day Weisberger. It is taken from the sky, where one sees a cyclopean vista of clouds but for the two towers peeking out, dwarfed. It's as breathtaking and emotive as the first, but with...more

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Mar 20, 2009 Kristiana rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: at-work

This is the best book I've read all year and I hope it stays that way for awhile. It's about sept 11th, but it's DeLillo so it doesn't seem like he's taking advantage of the past to further his literary career. He's an amazing story teller and Falling Man was unbelievable. I read a lot of crap and I sometimes forget how good literature can be. The writing is flawless and at times poetic and the story is not compelled by a plot, it's driven by its characters and their development. It's amazing. A...more

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Mar 16, 2008 Matt Gordon rated it 3 of 5 stars

Read it on a trip to SF for work, mostly on the plane. Found parts of it moving, but short of DeLillo's best. As usual, amazed by his dialogue -- it reads to me like real conversations would.

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Mar 18, 2011 Sharon rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: family, mystery, suspense-thriller, boring

A Good 9/11 Story

I read Falling Man after my co-worker and dear friend had finished reading it. Together, like so many other Americans we had our eyes and attention glued to the TV (in our case it was located in the employee lounge) that horrible day on Sept. 11th. So, back when this book was released and I found out that the author used 9/11 as a backdrop I could hardly wait till she passed the book on to me. In my opinion, I thought Don Delillo created an excellent story that gave me an insig...more

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Sep 14, 2011 Emir Never rated it 3 of 5 stars

Ten years ago, on September 12, I was one of the millions of people who were shocked by the news of the September 11 terror attacks in the United States. The Philippine Daily Inquirer, for which I was a Southern-Luzon bureau-based correspondent then, carried the images of the burning Twin Towers of the World Trade Center along with report about the series of attacks. The shock registered upon seeing the images along with the headline, in bold all-caps, superimposed on one of the images: TERRORIS...more Ten years ago, on September 12, I was one of the millions of people who were shocked by the news of the September 11 terror attacks in the United States. The Philippine Daily Inquirer, for which I was a Southern-Luzon bureau-based correspondent then, carried the images of the burning Twin Towers of the World Trade Center along with report about the series of attacks. The shock registered upon seeing the images along with the headline, in bold all-caps, superimposed on one of the images: TERRORISTS HIT U.S.

The attacks, stilled in images and the words, form an incongruous connection to the reality we were used to. The world is never the same after 9/11.

In Falling Man, published on May 15 2007, author Don DeLillo touches on the incongruous 'new world' through yet another image, the Falling Man, based on a photograph by Richard Drew for the Associated Press, another powerful image of 9/11.

The novel opens on the same fateful day of the terror attacks with one main character, Keith Neudecker, as a survivor, and follows through the days after as he reunites with his son Justin and estranged wife Lianne. DeLillo examines the lives of his characters, main and minor ones, victims and terrorists, and weaves them in 9/11, a bizarre frame date like burning Twin Towers. As the novel's title suggests, imagery is paramount and they come in vivid, raw, painful forms:

"The bomber is blown to bits, literally bits and pieces, and fragments of flesh and bone come flying outward with such force and velocity that they get wedged, they get trapped in the body of anyone who's in striking range. Do you believe it? A student is sitting in a cafe. She survives the attack. Then, months later, they find these little, like, pellets of flesh, human flesh that got driven into the skin. They call this organic shrapnel."

Organic shrapnel. This is what the novel's characters carry within themselves; this is what the survivors and the family of victims carry within themselves; this is what the world will carry ten years, more, many, many years after the terror attacks.

In the novel, the Falling Man is a performance artist who appears "unannounced, in various parts of the city, suspended from one or another structure, always upside down, wearing a suit, a tie and dress shoes. He brought it back, of course, those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump."

Along with the images of 9/11, DeLillo's Falling Man is a bid to memory, to awareness.
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Sep 20, 2008 Paul rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2008

When this book was first published in May last year, the arts editor of The Stranger, Seattle's premiere hipster weekly, said I could write a few hundred words on it (along with, incidentally, a full review of Only Revolutions). Meantime dude got promoted to Editor, ate my two reviews, and never got back to me. Thanks, dude. So, having another opportunity to review a book, I decided to re-read this one, since I had conflicting thoughts. Second read, same as the first, and here's my new review:

--...more

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Apr 05, 2008 Rossrn Nunamaker rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Don DeLillo's "Falling Man" is a book about a man who 'survives' the attack on the World Trade Center.

Keith had been estranged from his wife and son, but after the attack and his descent from the tower, he finds himself at the door of his wife's home and slowly they come back together in their own way.

The book ends on the day it begins with years passing in between.

During that time the reader is given a glimpse into a variety of perspectives on the event from those inside, to those with loved on...more

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May 06, 2008 Deirdre rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: bookclub

This book was disappointing (for a DeLillo novel.) I became a fan of DeLillo after reading "White Noise" as an undergrad and picking up "Underworld" and "Mao II." Ironically, I began reading "Mao II" during the first week of September of 2001. DeLillo's words haunted me as we all watched the tragedy of 9.11 unfold. Like many others here, I found "Falling Man" forced. At times during "Falling Man," I appreciated the quiet prose I found myself searching in this novel for a similar premonition. I l...more

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Sep 26, 2007 tim rated it 3 of 5 stars

In some ways, DeLillo seemed the perfect candidate to write a novel about 9/11. In White Noise there was the idea of terrorists flying a hijacked passenger jet into the White House. In Underworld, the construction of the twin towers lumed large in the background for a good part of the book. The cover photo itself focuses on the twin towers rising into clouds (smoke?), with a bird (a plane?) flying close by. It may be a stretch to read a connection with 9/11 into Underworld's cover (not to mentio...more In some ways, DeLillo seemed the perfect candidate to write a novel about 9/11. In White Noise there was the idea of terrorists flying a hijacked passenger jet into the White House. In Underworld, the construction of the twin towers lumed large in the background for a good part of the book. The cover photo itself focuses on the twin towers rising into clouds (smoke?), with a bird (a plane?) flying close by. It may be a stretch to read a connection with 9/11 into Underworld's cover (not to mention it has nothing to do with DeLillo's writing), but it was hard not to imagine these connections while in the middle of reading Underworld when 9/11/01 happened. Moreover, many aspects of DeLillo's writing deal with major world-changing events such as 9/11. How drastically the world changed after JFK's assassination is a topic that threads through several of his books (most magnificently in Libra).

And so maybe not unsurprisingly, immediately following 9/11 DeLillo was accosted by people who thought, for some reason, he would have answers to why 9/11 happened. He responded by writing Cosmopolis, a book which passed over the topic of 9/11 altogether and instead tells the story of a billionare stock market genius engaged in the intentional sabotage of his personal assets as well as those of his clients--all of which occurs over the course of one day in the year 2000 (how quickly everything can change in a day). It is a story of our own undoing from the inside, as opposed to our undoing by outsiders (bringing into question our role as the unprovoked victims of foreign terrorism).

Letting a few more years pass, DeLillo finally took on what many thought he eventually would, despite high expectations difficult for anyone to live up to.

To be fair, I didn't want to give in to these expectations. I wanted and tried to read Falling Man because it is DeLillo, not because it's a novel about 9/11. Yet after reading Falling Man, I felt something missing in the fragments of the super-charged dialog, vivid settings, and empty characters tossing about in my head--because like the sooty, scattered tons of paper from the fallen World Trade Center, DeLillo's fictional fragments were nearly devoid of emotion. This may very well have been DeLillo's intention, however, that the reader walk away just as vacant and lost as the shells of his characters living on after 9/11.

For me, the incredible dialog DeLillo often creates as well as the way he writes about art and history are reasons enough to read any of his books. Yet these reasons will not be enough for everyone. Ultimately, if you feel compelled to read Falling Man--whether because it is a book by DeLillo, or simply because it is about 9/11--you should. Although, I will recommend that it not be the only book you read written by DeLillo. (less)

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Dec 06, 2008 Ryan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Stylistically this is what I would expect from Delillo, clinical prose used to scrutinize the ((post) modern) human condition. At times, such as during the writing class or when the children searching for 'Bill Lawton' it works. I didn't find it convincing when he dealt with Keith and Lianne's relationship. Then again, I've often felt that to be in a Delillo relationship is as far apart as two people can be.

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Jan 13, 2009 Kathleen Hagen added it

Shelves: 2007-audio-books, 2007-general-fiction

Falling Man, by Don DeLillo. A.
Downloaded from audible.com.
In the opening scene of Falling Man, Keith Neudecker emerges from the smoke and ash of the burning tower where he worked and makes his way to the apartment
of his ex-wife and young son uptown. Throughout this bold and haunting novel, DeLillo traces the way the events of September 11 kindled or rekindled relationships,
reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory, and our perception of the world. Falling Man is a direct encounter with t...more

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May 08, 2013 Bianca Martucci rated it 3 of 5 stars

Falling Man allows a personal look into 9/11. DeLillo makes you feel empathy for the Islamic extremist group called Al-Qaeda. He uses a character named Hammad to convince the reader that this extremist Islamic group brainwashes their members. DeLillo makes you feel empathy towards Al-Qaeda. I enjoyed this portal of Al-Qaeda. People tend to forget that there are harmful radial Christian groups in America. An example would be the Westboro Baptist Church. I could see the Westboro Baptist Church doi...more Falling Man allows a personal look into 9/11. DeLillo makes you feel empathy for the Islamic extremist group called Al-Qaeda. He uses a character named Hammad to convince the reader that this extremist Islamic group brainwashes their members. DeLillo makes you feel empathy towards Al-Qaeda. I enjoyed this portal of Al-Qaeda. People tend to forget that there are harmful radial Christian groups in America. An example would be the Westboro Baptist Church. I could see the Westboro Baptist Church doing something unspeakable like Al-Qaeda. They already protest at funerals for soldiers and speak against the gay community.
What I liked about Falling Man was DeLillo’s ability to describe in detail the towers falling on 9/11. I felt like I was watching the towers fall again. DeLillo’s description in the beginning of the book makes you believe Falling Man is about a post-apocalyptic world. It isn’t until you read to the second chapter, that it is revealed the towers have fallen. When I realize it wasn’t about a post-apocalyptic world, I was disappointed.
What I hated about Falling Man, the book is slow moving, the characters are terrible human beings and the chapter’s switching perceptive are outputting. Lianne and Keith are the main characters. Lianne helps Alzheimer’s patient with writing and remembering who they are. This sounds like something a good person would do. Wrong, Lianne does it for herself. She feels connected to her dead father through these older people. Lianne gets a sense of empowerment because she is able to remember things unlike the older people. Lianne is a horrible person and Keith is even worse. Keith is a cheating husband. He married Lianne and then cheated on her non-stop. Keith moves out because their married is failing. Then after 9/11 Keith moves back in, but he cheats on Lianne with a women across the street from them. I felt like I was reading a novella. These main characters irritated me, so badly I almost put the book down.
If that wasn’t bad enough the novel is slow moving. When reading you feel like time in the book is slowing down and dragging. I’m sure if this is done on purpose, but it makes the novel hard to finish.
Save your time and pass this book by. It isn’t worth the read.
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May 07, 2013 Bjorn rated it 3 of 5 stars

One of the most fascinating comments on 9/11 that I've come across is Laurie Anderson’s album Live In New York. It’s recorded in September 2001, just over a week after the event, and she’s on stage performing a set of songs – written years or even decades earlier – dealing with paranoia, dogmatism, survival. And of course the centrepiece is an unusually emotional and cathartic version of her 1981 single "O Superman":

This is the hand, the hand that takes.
Here come the planes.
They're American plan...more One of the most fascinating comments on 9/11 that I've come across is Laurie Anderson’s album Live In New York. It’s recorded in September 2001, just over a week after the event, and she’s on stage performing a set of songs – written years or even decades earlier – dealing with paranoia, dogmatism, survival. And of course the centrepiece is an unusually emotional and cathartic version of her 1981 single "O Superman":

This is the hand, the hand that takes.
Here come the planes.
They're American planes. Made in America.
Smoking or non-smoking?
And the voice said: Neither snow nor rain nor gloom
of night shall stay these couriers from the swift
completion of their appointed rounds.
'Cause when love is gone, there's always justice.
And when justice is gone, there's always force.

9/11 is obviously a huge trauma which needs to be addressed in fiction, but so far just about every one of my favourite authors who has tried to tackle it has ended up writing around it; Auster’s Brooklyn Follies, Rushdie’s Shalimar The Clown, Gibson’s Spook Country, McEwan’s Saturday, Pynchon’s Against The Day... surely it can’t be too big a subject? Surely the absence of two towers can’t only be tackled by leaving them out of the story? While some writers have done great work in a post-9/11 world, I think the only completely successful and meaningful novel I’ve read about the event itself and its fallout has been youngster Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close.

DeLillo should be the ideal writer to deal with it. As someone put it, he’s been writing 9/11 novels for decades; Mao II, Underworld, White Noise... if anyone can take a huge event and the underlying tendencies in society surrounding it and turn it into a novel, it should be him. Yet I’m not completely sure he manages as well as I had hoped - and all of this review should be read with the knowledge that I consider Underworld and White Noise to be absolute masterpieces and I expect nothing less.

Falling Man gets off to a great start, a dazed, shell-shocked account of the minutes and days immediately following the attack itself, focused on estranged spouses Keith and Lianne as they both try to piece their life back together (and their life together back together). The disjointed scenes, the out-of-focus dialogue, the sketchy and quickly-abandoned scenes from ground zero all serve to highlight the way the attack not only destroyed lives and buildings, but shocked people to their very core – nicely tied in to Lianne’s work with Alzheimer’s patients trying to hold on to a Self that’s being eroded away.

But at some point, it feels like the shell shock wears out its welcome and we’re going to have to get to know the characters – and to me, at least, that’s where the novel stumbles. There are bits that have me fearing that someone’s going to try to film this with Sandra Bullock and Matt Dillon as Lianne and Keith. He, especially, largely remains a mystery, and not even a very interesting one. While his development later in the novel makes sense from a symbolic perspective (the illusion of being in control of your fate; “Call or raise, call or fold, the little binary pulse located behind the eyes, the choice that reminds you who you are. It belonged to him, this yes or no, not to a horse running in the mud somewhere in New Jersey”) I don't think it does from a narrative point of view. The rather abrupt skip forward in time, the plot lines that show up here and there but never really have time to develop... it feels a bit like a fragment of a longer novel rather than a complete work in its own right, and as chillingly poignant as he can be at times, the novel remains curiously (for DeLillo) locked inside itself, if you catch my drift; it rarely makes those huge vertical leaps (sorry, sorry) through the layers of society, from religion to politics to popular music etc, that he usually does so well. (Remember the Elvis=Hitler discussion in White Noise?) The details are often great, there’s tons of great observations – the aforementioned paranoia that has people Lianne hitting a woman for playing Arabic music and little kids looking for this Bill Lawton character, for instance – but I’m not sure it quite ties together into a whole. It’s as if the terrorist’s quote

They felt things together, he and his brothers. They felt the claim of danger and isolation. They felt the magnetic effect of plot. Plot drew them together more tightly than ever. Plot closed the world to the slenderest line of sight, where everything converges to a point. There was the claim of fate, that they were born to do this.

is somehow a theme for the whole novel; everyone is tied together in a plot, but we don’t need to see the whole plot in linear fashion, we don’t get a fixed script telling us how to live and die - in a world of wars and dogmatism, thinking we've seen through it all and that we’re the heroes of the whole piece is the last thing we need. And while that’s an admirable point, using it as a literary technique doesn't work entirely in this case.

Which sort of brings us to the (slightly underused) falling man himself, the performance artist turning up here and there to hang in the air like a never answered question mark, always arrested but never explaining his motivations, just suspended somewhere between take-off and landing, available for whatever interpretations you want to hang on him... like a gravity’s angel, if you will. (Yes, I’m all about the obscure Laurie Anderson references today.) Lianne refers to him as a fallen angel – here’s a bit of religious symbolism turned upside-down, methinks: it’s all very easy to shoot the messenger, blame the fallen angel/Satan/The Great Satan, yet the world is made of people and we’re the ones actually doing anything. Again; Falling Man is great at symbolism, great at metaphor, perhaps not so great at actually drawing characters and telling their story. As if DeLillo got just a little too caught up in Saying Something about his big subject (which can also lead to rather hokey lines such as the one about children not needing white crayons since they have white paper).

The ending is stunning, though, even more so than the beginning. He takes the B plot that’s been popping up here and there and fuses it with the main one in one of the most incredible scene shifts I’ve read – I went back and read the last few pages at least three times. Let X = X. He almost – almost – brings it all together, the symbolism of the attack and the reality of the people affected by it.

'Cause when love is gone, there's always justice.
And when justice is gone, there's always force.
And when force is gone, there’s always... Mom. Hi, Mom! (less)

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May 01, 2013 Shahd Salaam rated it 1 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I tried my best not to be biased whilst reading and reviewing this book, but let's be honest, we are all a little biased. This review is not intended to offend nor belittle anyone's experiences with 9/11. My thoughts honestly. Without having to question this, I am a Muslim. May contain Spoilers.

This book caters to American bred entitlement for the mere fact of just being "American" (and here american is basically White, excluding Florence whom is there in passing). Patriotism and nationalism ar...more

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Mar 30, 2013 Ruth Hull Chatlien rated it 3 of 5 stars

Falling Man by Don DeLillo.

The book primarily concerns Keith, a survivor who was in the Two Towers, his estranged wife Lianne, and their son Justin. After 9/11, Keith returns to his family, but he is unable to return to the life he knew before. Lianne and Justin have their own trouble making sense of events. Their confusions are played out in incidents such as Justin and his friends trying to interpret what they've overheard from adults about Bin Laden and Lianne feeling anger toward a neighbor...more Falling Man by Don DeLillo.

The book primarily concerns Keith, a survivor who was in the Two Towers, his estranged wife Lianne, and their son Justin. After 9/11, Keith returns to his family, but he is unable to return to the life he knew before. Lianne and Justin have their own trouble making sense of events. Their confusions are played out in incidents such as Justin and his friends trying to interpret what they've overheard from adults about Bin Laden and Lianne feeling anger toward a neighbor who is constantly playing loud Middle Eastern music in their apartment building. In one series of episodes I found moving, Lianne works with a group of Alzheimer's patients, helping them to write down their memories and experiences for as long as they can. As they gradually lose the ability to make meaning of their lives, it resonates with the general uncertainty Lianne is experiencing.

Throughout the book, the characters either hear about or see a performance artist calling "Falling Man" who falls off structures and hangs in a harness upside down in a pose that imitates a well-known photograph of a victim falling from one of the Twin Towers. This raises questions about symbolism, art, manipulation. One thing I liked is that DeLillo doesn't really tell you how to feel about what this performance artist is doing. He just puts it out there.

Another subplot is told in flashback, incorporating episodes before 9/11. It shows how one of the hijackers was trained to sacrifice himself to his cause. He is forced to wean himself from ordinary human connections and activities. There are interesting parallels and counterpoints to the kind of reforging of identity that Keith has to do after 9/11.

I've read only one other book by DeLillo, and I never finished it because I find his style somewhat off-putting. My biggest complaint is that he starts many scenes with a pronoun—he or she—so that you really have to work to figure out if the scene is about Lianne or her mother, about Keith or Justin or Falling Man or the terrorist. I understand and applaud including some obscurity in the text if it serves the thematic purpose of the book, which it does in this case, but I think DeLillo takes it too far. In my view, he comes very close to pissing off the reader in a way that is counter-productive.

The book is also non-linear (not told in straight chronological order), which is something I like because it helps the reader link past and present. I think the disjointedness between scenes and the non-linear structure works well for this particular story. I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but its structure near the end helps to drive home that point that, in many ways, for the rest of his life Keith will always be in that office at the moment the plane hit.

The tone is what I'd call fairly matter-of-fact. There's no over-emotionalism here or "purple prose." When the topic is something as upsetting as 9/11, a dryer tone can work to the story's advantage. The reader already has a lot of emotion to attach to the events, so the author doesn't need to manufacture more.
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Mar 01, 2013 I Am Vertical rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Ma in questo caso, con questa gente, non puoi nemmeno pensarlo. Non sai che fare. Perchè quelli stanno fuori dalla tua vita, a un milione di chilometri di distanza. Senza contare che sono morti. (p.67)

Distanza seppiata. (p.143).

Kierkegaard le offriva il pericolo, un senso di prossimità al baratro spirituale. "Tutta l'esistenza mi angustia". In quella frase si rivedeva. Kierkegaard le dava la sensazione che il suo viaggio nel mondo non fosse l'esile melodramma che a volte sembrava a lei. (p. 12...more

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Feb 24, 2013 Elsa Gavriil rated it 4 of 5 stars

I remember where I was when the planes crushed in the Towers. I can recall my exact position - I stayed in that position for hours that day. It was just after 16:00 (I was on the other side of the Atlantic, 7 times zones apart). The following days, I watched TV non-stop, taking in all the news, seeing the photos and the videos. And then, of course, there was the Falling Man -that little dot in the sky in that seemingly everlasting fall. It takes a few moments for the mind to register what the ey...more I remember where I was when the planes crushed in the Towers. I can recall my exact position - I stayed in that position for hours that day. It was just after 16:00 (I was on the other side of the Atlantic, 7 times zones apart). The following days, I watched TV non-stop, taking in all the news, seeing the photos and the videos. And then, of course, there was the Falling Man -that little dot in the sky in that seemingly everlasting fall. It takes a few moments for the mind to register what the eyes are seeing. For me there was only one question "What are these people experiencing that jumping to their own death seems like a preferable solution?". This question stayed within me for a long time. I watched Henry Singer's documentary "9/11: The falling man", and when many years later I visited New York, I knew I needed to visit the Ground Zero. In Saint Paul's chapel I got a glimpse of what happened that day.
So when last December I saw the title "Falling Man" on a book with the image of a bright blue sky on its cover, I knew instantly what it was about, as I knew that I had to buy it. The fact that it was written by Don DeLillo guaranteed that this book would not be some kind of a sentimental memoir.
The story begins with a man walking out of the Towers and returning home to his estranged wife. The story is about the aftermath of his survival, and the survival of his wife -the witness. The plot is not important. Questions like "what happens next" and "how will it end" are irrelevant. What is important is what is happening inside them, while outside everything -things and people- has fallen to pieces.
DeLillo introduces us to his characters slowly, word by word. The narrative is fragmented, as are their lives. They are the alive ones and they try to move on, to continue living, when their internal clock seems to have stopped. And the Falling Man? DeLillo does not speak of him, but in the last sentence of the book. His presence though is everywhere -the heartbreaking icon of the unfathomable.
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Jan 14, 2013 Edward S. Portman rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Quando arrivi all’anno domini 2013 e ti accorgi di non avere lasciato da parte per troppo tempo Don DeLillo, ti rendi conto di avere sbagliato qualcosa. Quando poi prendi in mano un suo libro e inizi a leggere, ti assale la vergogna nel capire quanto sia grave questo sbaglio. Nel mio caso si tratta di questo L’uomo che cade un toccante omaggio dell’autore americano alla tragedia dell’11 settembre.
Il libro non affronta di petto l’attentato alle torri gemelle, non subito, ma lo aggira ponendosi u...more Quando arrivi all’anno domini 2013 e ti accorgi di non avere lasciato da parte per troppo tempo Don DeLillo, ti rendi conto di avere sbagliato qualcosa. Quando poi prendi in mano un suo libro e inizi a leggere, ti assale la vergogna nel capire quanto sia grave questo sbaglio. Nel mio caso si tratta di questo L’uomo che cade un toccante omaggio dell’autore americano alla tragedia dell’11 settembre.
Il libro non affronta di petto l’attentato alle torri gemelle, non subito, ma lo aggira ponendosi un attimo dopo, negli occhi di un superstite e della sua ritrovata famiglia, e ci gira intorno in una discesa a spirale, fino a caderci nel finale, con tutta la sua brutalità e le sue ipotesi su cosa deve essere stato essere lì, presenti, dentro una delle torri, al momento dell’impatto. Il dramma, in tutte le sue mille sfumature catastrofiche, riesce a ricongiungere una famiglia (lui e lei separati e il bambino che poi si perderà un po’ nella narrazione), anche se il libro suggerisce che sia un ricongiungimento temporaneo, destinato a non durare ma a sfilacciarsi con il passare del tempo.
La prosa si alterna dal punto di vista di lui (il superstite) e il punto di vista di lei (la ex compagna di lui) guardando le loro vite in modo distaccato e solo in rari momenti vedendoli insieme. È come se la catastrofe terroristica abbia staccato la coppia, per ricomponendola, e l’abbia incapsulata in una bolla di vita privata, dentro la quale l’altro non riesce a entrare. Sotto questo punto di vista, lui che torna da lei e lei che lo accoglie, sembra ritrarre il vano tentativo di non sentirsi soli, di trovare qualcuno con cui condividere il significato degli aerei e di quanto successo. Un tentativo che però non scalfisce la corazza che i due protagonisti sono costretti a indossare.
DeLilo racconta tutto questo con una bellezza straordinaria nella scelta delle parole, delle frasi, dei periodi. Ogni cosa è calibrata e misurata, mai eccessiva, mai puerile: un modo di raccontare la storia e la Storia che riesce a entrare dentro e accoccolarsi in quel posto stretto e angusto che sta tra cuore e stomaco. (less)

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Nov 17, 2012 Shonna Froebel rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is a novel of the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Keith is a man who worked in the towers. He finds refuge in the home of his estranged wife and son, but also in sharing the events of the escape from the towers with another escapee, Florence whose briefcase he ended up bringing with him out of the building. He remains emotionally detached from all of them and ends up in a nomadic existence, living a solitary life of his own making.
Lianne, his estranged wife has accepted him back into the a...more

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Nov 15, 2012 Susan Schaab rated it 5 of 5 stars

How brave is Mr. DeLillo to take an event that so thoroughly pierced the heart of every American, walk into the memory with us and gently caress it with the poetry of his prose. Usually, a writer is in control of the story and can induce the desired emotional reaction in the reader. But here, Mr. DeLillo had to walk into a canyon-sized chasm of emotion and paint from the inside out. The images he creates with words can be compared to an abstract painting that requires the viewer to imprint his o...more

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Nov 13, 2012 olaszka rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

i've got a little masochistic obsession with everything 9/11 and i'm especially interested in how it's handled artistically, particularly in literature. 9/11 is obviously the holocaust of our century, or, more precisely, the unspeakable of our century. so how do you speak about the unspeakable? well, don delillo gives it a fair try and sometimes he gets it and sometimes he doesn't at all.
delillo, to me, is one of the most inconsistent writers i've ever come across. some of what he writes is spe...more

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Jan 27, 2012 Roger DeBlanck rated it 2 of 5 stars

DeLillo has always tackled challenging projects in his novels. It’s no surprise, then, that he is the type of writer who would feel necessity to address the events of 9/11. Falling Man begins on that dreadful Tuesday in 2001 with Keith Neubecker attempting to leave the World Trade Center site when the first tower collapses. Covered in the falling debris of broken glass and the ash of black smoke, he heads to the apartment of his ex-wife, Lianne, and his young son, Justin. he magnitude of the att...more

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Aug 13, 2011 Matt rated it 3 of 5 stars

Some random thoughts concerning Don DeLillo, his novel Falling Man and 9/11:

-I think I've finally realized why it's so hard to examine DeLiio's work, and that is because he does it for you. Reading DeLillo is like reading the novel and the CliffNotes version of that novel simultaneously. It creates an airtight literary structure, and I felt like I read most of the sentences twice.

-There is some haunting visual poetry in the double "L"s of "Falling" (and DeLillo).

-Later in this novel, one the mai...more Some random thoughts concerning Don DeLillo, his novel Falling Man and 9/11:

-I think I've finally realized why it's so hard to examine DeLiio's work, and that is because he does it for you. Reading DeLillo is like reading the novel and the CliffNotes version of that novel simultaneously. It creates an airtight literary structure, and I felt like I read most of the sentences twice.

-There is some haunting visual poetry in the double "L"s of "Falling" (and DeLillo).

-Later in this novel, one the main characters becomes obsessed with poker (Texas Hold 'Em it appears). Now, seeing as this book came out in 2007, I had to wonder: did DeLillo fall into the poker craze of the late 00s like so many other B-list celebrities, soccer dads, and Internet card-sharks? Or was he simply making a point about how America soothed it's post 9/11 wounds with this new fad? And, if DeLillo DID become a poker fiend in his personal life, would I even be able to tell, because he's so damn good at concealing his personal influences? Either way, whether for research or pleasure, DeLillo definitely took a trip to Vegas sometime 2003-2006.

-Performance art as a way to deal with unspeakable tragedy seems entirely to be a New York thing, and the parts dealing with this subplot had a distinctive NY feel, like it wasn't for "us", only for "them". Actually, the book as a whole kinda had that feel.

-I wasn't really wild about this book, but the man can write. Check out this description of a fellow 9/11 survivor:
"She looked at him and got up. She went past the front door and down the hall. She was plain except when she laughed. She was someone on the subway. She wore loose skirts and plain shoes and was full-figured and maybe a little clumsy but when she laughed there was a flare in nature, an unfolding of something half hidden and dazzling."

-There's a scene later in the novel when Keith is chatting with his poker buddy in a casino, and they have a discussion over whether the waterfall in lobby is real or fake, a digital illusion. And then they discuss whether it matters if it's real or fake, etc...This is awful similar to the famous World's Most Photographed House scene from White Noise, and similar to dozens of other scenes from throughout DeLillo's career. And this got me thinking that DeLillo's characters exist in a world outside of narrative. This book could have been about a local plumbers union and it still would have been the same.
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About Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo is an American author best known for his novels, which paint detailed portraits of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He currently lives outside of New York City.

Among the most influential American writers of the past decades, DeLillo has received, among author awards, a National Book Award (White Noise, 1985), a PEN/Faulkner Award (Mao II, 1991), and an American...more

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“These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after.” — 36 people liked it

“You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.” — 7 people liked it

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