Kolya on 29/1/2010 at 22:44
Do you promise that you will speak to your sister? She won't get up from the couch and I can't even smoke any more for worrying about her!
*fumbles a cigarette from deep pockets, lights it and stares accusingly at the curtains*
Kolya on 30/1/2010 at 13:18
Well now that the old man can't be bothered by his own fame any more, maybe he'll let us see some of his other works. Would be nice.
Quote Posted by http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100128/ap_on_en_ot/us_obit_salinger
...1965. By then, he was increasingly viewed like a precocious child whose manner had soured from cute to insufferable.
This, I think, must be largely due to "Seymour — An Introduction" where JDS dropped the ever so thin veil of separation between his fictional ego Buddy Glass and himself almost completely and directly addressed and bored his readers in an insufferable patronising tone.
I never quite understood what got into him there. Holden Caulfield and the Glass family had always been elitist, but for self-preservation and against other characters in the books. The author still let his readers in and share their feelings. In "Seymour — An Introduction" the reader was intentionally excluded and addressed as one of the phonies.
Degrading his readers may have been therapy for JDS, but an article in the New Yorker would have sufficed. Releasing this as a "book" and hence having to attack readers from behind a fictional Buddy Glass mask was incredibly phony by himself. Guess he was just sick of it all.
"Hapworth 16, 1928," while being not completely convincing as a child letter was a much better read.
Enchantermon on 30/1/2010 at 16:43
Quote Posted by The Alchemist
Sadly the first thing I thought of was The Laughing Man, too.
I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing, though. But considering that I've never read
Catcher, that's pretty much the only connection I have to him.
