Discussion of Frederic Beigbeder's Windows on the World (with the participation of the novelist) starting on April 16, 2007.

Although I have not finished Windows on the World yet, I must say that I like the book. I find that naming the chapters for the time (8h30, 8h40, etc) was powerful. We all know what happens at 8h46, so there is suspense as to what happens after.

I’m reading the French version of Windows on the World and I really liked how Beigbeder mixed French and American words, like “en glissant 25 cents,” (14), “les Large Coke” (15), and “le marché étant bearish” (17). Mixing words certainly happens when speaking French like “C’est cool,” or “le marketing.” I found this to be a truthful part of French culture; although most French people would never want to admit it (especially the Académie française!), many English words have become everyday parts of conversation.

I also appreciated this quote. “Anti-Americanism is in large part jealousy and unrequited love. Deep down, the rest of the world admires American art and resents the United States for not returning the favor” (18). I found this quote to be very interesting and true to European behavior. For all Europeans who scoff at American culture, many of them go home and plug into that same culture that they supposedly loathe. They listen to our music, see our movies, and pick up our slang and curse words. I feel that Beigbeder correctly diagnosed this hypocrisy in Europe.

Questions for Frédéric Beigbeder:

What motivated you to write this book?
How was your book received in France?
Did you like the translation of your book into English?

I first want to thank Frederic Beigbeder for participating in our forum and answering questions. I, admittedly, have many questions, and would be delighted if you could respond to any of them.


Question #1:

I am wondering about the veracity of some claims made by the narrator of "Windows on the World". Towards the end of the novel, he says: “Carthew Yourston was my grandmother’s family name. Take out a ‘u’ and you have Carthew Yorston, a fictional character” (Beigbeder 299). Is this true? If so, why use it for the novel's second main character? Does it give you a certain "right" (do you think) to tell Carthew's story?


Did you really visit Paul Virilio's exhibit "Unknown Quantity"? Did this exhibit motivate or inspire you to tell a story of equal horror (with words rather than visuals)?


Question #2:

There is also a critique of capitalism at work in “WOTW.” Even though Carthew is rich, he realizes that, in the end, his money (and real estate empire) are unimportant. They have taken him away from his family and cannot save him from a gruesome death within the towers. People from all classes suffer inside Windows on the World: stockbrokers, children, waitresses etc. Was this a deliberate critique of American capitalism?


Question #3:

Both the narrator and Carthew experience a great sense of shame. Was shame (as a theme of the novel) meant to perhaps mirror a “national shame” that was felt by some Americans after the events of 11 September 2001?

Question #4

The opening lines to WOTW invoke a twist on a classical literary relationship with the reader. Just as Jane Eyre says to us “Dear Reader, I married him” to open her concluding chapter, Beigbeder says this in his first: “You know how it ends: Everybody dies” (1). This immediate declaration from the narrator accomplishes two things: first, it upsets the temporality of the novel from the very beginning by starting with the end. Second, it creates a sort of intimacy between the reader and the narrator by this shared secret – this knowledge – that Carthew lacks. These ideas of intimacy and temporality are interwoven throughout the novel and never allow the reader to forget that this is a novel about a specific time, a specific event, an event with which we should be intimately acquainted. He furthers this by writing “…it is more appalling still to allow you to imagine what became of them [the victims]” (Beigbeder 272). It is in this way that Beigdeder confirms his statement that “books must go where television does not.”

This leads me to a more general question: What do you see as the most important difference between the literary and the visual representation of such a spectacle? Is it because readers are left to imagine while viewers are often not? Oppositely, what do you think can be gained from films (fiction and non-fiction) about 9/11?

What's really cool or unique about this story is that it offers a hypothetical minute-by-minute account narrated by the father who is with his two sons aged 7 and 9 who are having a tourist-style breakfast at Windows on the World restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001. What I also liked about this book that doesn’t get brought up much often is the historical memory of the WTC, not just the 9/11 memory. I mean as a part of our history, the protagonist remembers his childhood and reflects about the WTC during the cold war as a center of the world. I think that sometimes we don’t realize how much of a symbol the WTC was of America. I must admit that I am a little upset that I never got to go to this restaurant. It must have been a really cool view. I have some questions for Frederic, here they are:

1. Have you received criticism over this book by choosing the restaurant at the top of the world trade center as a subject for the story? The way you end the book by telling us everyone was incinerated, gased and burned to ash, don’t you think that was a little insensitive?

2. I was wondering if you had ever been there or what motivated you to choose this place?

3. Each chapter represents one minute from the time the building is hit at 8:30am to its collapse at 10:29am. I think that the worst time was 8:30 to 8:40. I think it's cool how you arranged it. What was the message you were trying to send out with that?

4. I don’t know if this is true or not but someone said that when 9/11 was being broadcast on Fox News during the attacks that a man jumped from that restaurant as he was trapped from the plane slamming into building and blocking the exit, were you aware of this if that was true of course?

I translated into English the brief excerpt below from an interview I conducted with Frédéric Beigbeder in Paris in December 2006. The integral interview will be published, along with several essays on Beigbeder's works and a Beigbeder's original text, in 2008 by Rodopi in a volume I am currently editing.
A-P Durand

Naomi Mandel: Had you read Jean Baudrillard's "Spirit of Terrorism" before writing "Windows on the World"? Did Baudrillard influenced you? Do you see similarities between his texts and your novel?

Frederic Beigbeder:
I like a lot all Naomis : Naomi Campbell, Naomi Watts and now this Naomi, and Naomi Klein who wrote a great essay entitled « No Logo ».

No, I did not read Baudrillard’s "Spirit of Terrorism" but I read many others, including "America", I like Baudrillard a lot. I think that "Cool Memories" is a great diary. On terrorism, I had read articles published in the French press. I think that the text Naomi Mandel’s is referring to is probably a collection of essays. So it is possible that I read excerpts here and there. In any case, I believe it is a true influence because I find interesting the taste for paradox of someone who says that the war in Irak did not happen. Baudrillard’s theory is that everything is a simulacrum but try to explain to someone who dies burnt alive in the World Trade Center that terrorism is a simulacrum, it’s difficult. What is true, however, is that there is a derealization of the event, that’s for sure, that’s where my idea of writing a fiction on that topic came from: to enter in the real. What is 9/11? It’s a building which explodes and we see objects, we see a plane which are destroyed. We do not see human beings - except on a few very rare images of jumpers but other than that we do not see the human beings - and that’s what makes it that we are into Baudrillard after all, the fact that we see artifacts burning, exploding. It is somewhat beautiful. In fact, it looks like a Hollywood movie, it looks like special effects. Consequently, we do not suffer. My goal in writing a novel taking place inside this bawl of fire was to suffer, to feel something, in the end it was to humanize, to return something human inside that simulacrum. Perhaps, this is where Baudrillard and me we complete each other. We need someone to denounce the simulacrum but we also need someone to humanize it. And that is the novelist’s role.

A-P Durand: although it is, as you mention it in the novel when you talk about the Paul Virilio’s exhibit in Paris, at the risk of indulging into voyeurism and even to end up liking this kind of images.

Of course, but it is important to face this part of inhumanity that persists inside the humanity. All the witnesses of the attacks or those who saw them on television admit that there is a beauty in this horror, there is a fascination, that we cannot take our eyes away. The same way one likes to watch horror movies, there is an attraction for violence, that’s for sure, especially in a place completely protected and sanitized like New York City. That’s even more brutal in that context. I would not say like Stockhausen that 9/11 is a work of art but it is certain that Virilio’s exhibit, just like Ballard’s novels ("Crash", "The Atrocity Exhibition") where he describes car accidents, the pleasurable sensation of a carbonized corpse, are provocations similar to Warhol when he paints the electrical chair. This chocks us and attracts us at the same time. It is true that, on some levels, "Windows on the World" is an unbearably obscene novel. There is for example a sex scene in the French version that the American publisher cut off. It is unlikely that the victims of 9/11 violently sodomized each other in the WTC offices before dying. Even if it is true that during the periods immediately following a terrorist act, in the days immediately following an attack or bombings, in Israel for example where I have friends, I know very well that when there is a terrorist attack, the following days, there is an aphrodisiac effect. The danger’s proximity inspires a certain hedonism.

A-P Durand : Another thing that Anglo-Saxons publishers asked you to remove from the French original is the reference to owing to the victims of the Windows on the World the same kind of respect, duty of memory, we owe to the victims who were gazed in Auschwitz.

Yes indeed, I did not understand why one refuses to make the comparison, especially since it is not an identification, I am not saying that Auschwitz and 9/11 are the same thing. I am only saying that the people who died in that restaurant, were gazed, because most of them died of suffocation after breathing toxic emanations. Therefore, they had the same experience that people who were in a gas chamber. This is why they were fighting to open the windows and jump. Corpses piled up close to emergency exits were found exactly like in Auschwitz’s gas chambers. We now know that people were piled up because they were trying to find air. If it is chocking people, well, it is because it IS chocking, inevitably. My role is not to embellish reality.

I felt a line in the beginning of the book was poignant, when Beigbeder is talking about how reality has outstripped/destroyed fiction. He says, “It’s impossible to write about this subject, and yet impossible to write about anything else. Nothing else touches us.” I felt the last line of that was powerful, especially coming from a French writer, in demonstrating the impact that September 11th had worldwide. (Certainly I don’t believe that NOTHING else touches us, but in the days/weeks/months immediately following 9/11, I think the event flooded the thoughts of most people.)

There were a few references throughout the book to the idea that we are traumatized by not having anything traumatic happen to us. The first was on page 43, when Carthew says, “Why am I complaining when there’s nothing wrong with me? I haven’t been raped, beaten, abandoned, drugged. Just divorced parents who are excessively kind to me, like every kid in my class. I’m traumatized by my lack of trauma.” That same sentiment was echoed on page 165, when Beigbeder says “I wish my life was more complicated. Sadly, life is humiliating in its simplicity…” I used to think that this was an American dilemma, but am convinced now that it is more the plight of the middle class, non-Americans included. Maybe this is why we (Westerners) have been the target of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism? Outsiders look at us pitying ourselves for being bored with our comfortable, upper middle-class lives?

An interesting scene took place in the basement of Beigbeder’s publisher Grasset which reminded me of a debate we had in class. He stated, “The role of books is to record what cannot be seen on television… Literature is under threat, we have to fight for it, this is war… People who enjoy reading and writing are more and more scarce, that’s why we have to hedge our bets… Use every weapon at our disposal to defend literature…” Then they are informed of the second plane hitting the WTC and they decide to put the show on hold. Does this mean that literature and the arts take a backseat to “real events” like bombings, terrorism, etc? I really liked how Beigbeder continued this scene with a variety of reactions- narcissistic, statistical, etc. Everyone is thinking about how the attacks will affect them individually.

This leads into another passage that I read twice: on page 107, “And so it happened: all those things I didn’t understand, that I didn’t want to understand; the foreign news stories I preferred to skirt, to keep out of my mind when they weren’t on the TV; all these tragedies were suddenly relevant to me; these wars came to hurt me that morning; me, not someone else; my children, not someone else’s….” It ends with, “You didn’t want them {those “other” people} to be part of your life? They’ll be part of your death”. I think this chapter is so reflective about the culture I live in. Whenever you turn on CNN, you see something tragic happening thousands of miles away and you feel sad for a moment then you can change the channel. Yesterday when I found out about the Virginia Tech shooting, I was glued to the television and thought, God, this happened on a college campus- I spend five days a week on a college campus- this could have happened here. I also felt the relief that it was somewhere else, and not here. Then I remembered a friend from high school who is in his last year at VA Tech, and it suddenly felt closer to home. I still have no idea where he is or if he is okay, all I know is that his AIM name hasn’t been online. (Another example of how pervasive the internet is in our lives, in my life anyways.)

I apologize for the extensive quoting of the book, but I just had to put them up there to give my reactions.

Questions for Beigbeder:
1. I thought I had heard that no children (besides the children on the airplanes) were killed in the WTC attacks. Do you know if this is true or not, and why did you choose to have two children in the WTC as main characters in your novel?

2. At first, Carthew tried to convince his children that the attack was an amusement park ride. This is similar to the way the father in the film “Life is Beautiful” pretends that the Holocaust is a game. How did you think of that element of your story/were you inspired at all by “Life is Beautiful”?

3. You refer to the Tower of Babel as the first attempt at globalization, and you make reference to the idea of religion being reborn in the WTC- the temple to atheism. How do you feel about the WTC attacks as a symbolic event? Carthew makes his point clear when he says, “Terrorism does not destroy symbols, it hacks people of flesh and blood to pieces” on page 167. As a nursing major, this is closer to the way I viewed the attack and I believe it is the way victims/families of victims would feel as well. I don't believe that means we cannot view 9/11 as symbolic, but does it take away from the true horror of the actual event?

Lastly, thank you for participating on our forum!

I know it is the first sentence but it was the most important sentence to me, “You know how it ends: Everybody dies.” I find this sentence so compelling because it is the truth and it is stated at the beginning of the book. The reason I found this sentence so compelling as well is that I felt as the reader I was immediately reminded that this was an event that really occurred, and the ending is not going to be a happy one because in reality not every story was a positive one.
A couple of questions for Frederic Beigbeder:
Question #1: were you hesitant to write a book that discusses a very sensitive subject for Americans?
Question #2: If you wrote “Windows on the World” what would you do different?
Question #3: Do you feel that if you were an American author that the reviews of the book would have been a lot different?
I also found it very interesting that the book did not just cover one side of a story but looked at what occurred from different views. Many people would be nervous to write a book like this especially with a beginning such as this one, so I most definitely will give you a lot of credit for writing it. I also wanted to add I thought it was a really effective approach to make the chapters short and titled with a time. Truthfully the idea of time was very important during the attacks of September 11th and I think that in a subtle way it was brought about in “Windows on The World”. Every minute or for that matter every second was important to those trapped in the towers, and by separating the chapters by time from 8:30 am to 10:29 am, really shows how time was so important to the victims and the survivors.
Lastly I just wanted to say that I did really enjoy the book, and I really think it was very gutsy for you to write about September 11th, 2001 when it is such a major debate in America, whether or not it should be talked about. Thank you again for participating in the forum!

I honestly had some major trepidations about this novel. First off, I was not sure how I was going to feel about reading a novel that basically stakes its claim in 9-11, but is not written by an American. Secondly--I generally find that works in translation drive me absolutely crazy since there are subtleties to prose that is very easily lost in translation. Lucky for me, neither of these were a problem.

Beigbeder's work is a wonderful piece of meta-fiction, transposing the real events of 9-11 with imagined characters in the towers whose actions carry emotional weight and believeability; and also including himself as the writer in France. In this way, he gives us the most three-dimensional portrayal of the day we have yet to read--he hits you hard with the details like the eyes of the kids watering, being stung by the smoke, but in reading something like that you also know that they are also scared as hell by what is happening. He is able to both inhabit the building and be an ocean away, perhaps to create a buffer zone for himself, so he can write these heart-breaking stories of inside--for lack of a better explanation--Hell. An apt image, the more I think of it as B, uses a quote from, I think, Genesis just after the planes crash into the buildings from what I think is the story of the Tower of Babel "And they said, Go to, let us build ourselves a city and a tower, whose top may read into Heaven..." That shook me.

My only problem with the novel was that his avatar, the writer, seemed to be to be a little resistant. It was as if he was writing himself, but attempting to limit what he can and can't say. However, I recognize, from our discussions in class about the editing of this work, that this may very well not be Beigbeder's intention, but rather the sad side effect of a worrisome editor.

I find this novel hard to put down. There is something very sinister about it, yet I know that the intentions were good. After reading the interview with Beigbeder, it helped me understand the role of placing a father and children in the restaurant doomed by inevitability; the story of humanity inside something too grandiose to understand. In the beginning of this novel, and throughout, I found it ironic that Beigbeder felt compelled to describe his love for America, almost a disclaimer for how this novel could be interpreted. The writer’s narrative mixed with the father’s gave much more of Beigbeder’s opinion than could be expressed purely by a fictional novel of the restaurant. The description of how America views the rest of the world, and vice versa is right on. Although I do feel America may be slipping into a more and more censored realm that will prevent it from creating this art and dissent that is necessary for future progress.

A question I have:
As you describe Virilio’s exhibit on page 124, “Isn’t it too early to make art of such misery? Of course, art is not obligatory and no one is obliged to visit an exhibition or read a book.” Can art ever be obligatory? If you are obliged to view art or expression of ideals, is it less or more effective?

I wanted to raise the question of the editorial process that removed the sex scene under the desk just before the towers collapse. It is interesting that although there is an humiliating simplicity (as Lauren has pointed out) to human life, that some of the most basic and trivial acts of the living are too much for audiences to handle. If this book had not been censored would you guys have liked the novel any better/less? What do you think a scene like that adds to a work speaking directly from the attacks? Is it appropriate?

On page 116, the authors running commentary about the Cold War complex and how with the dissolution of the singular enemy has led to the “American Goliath to be slain” and goes on to include biblical referencing, unveiling the hypocrisy of modernity. After going so far with technology and new media, what will be “after” if the US is ever submitted to take over? Can modernity ever really be taken back??

“Even if I go deep, deep into the horror, my book will always remain 1,350 feet below the truth.” (119) The reason this book is successful is because it is written in a sort of Tim O’Brien style: the author narrator who is safe to realize that life around him is terror, and gore but is able to craft a beauty within it, even out of the most sickening imagery.

I enjoyed reading this book. One of the first things I noticed (and appreciated) was the realness of the characters: the father is far from being a saint, the two businesspeople at the next table are cheating on their spouses, the black employee of the restaurant accuses the father of racism even in the midst of the tragedy (claiming that just because she's black doesn't make her a nanny). The children were more intelligent than their father gave them credit for, as is often the case with children in our culture. One used fantasy as a self-defense against the reality of his situation, and the other simply understood everything and tried his best to be strong.

So often in our society we refer to victims (or survivors) of terrible events as "heroes." This has nothing to do with their character or their actions - simply the fact that they were victimized. It has always seemed strange to me that we do this. After someone has been killed, we tend to focus only on their positive qualities, suddenly forgetting everything negative. Would we call Carthew a hero? He was an adulterer, a liar, a little bit of a scam artist with his real estate business. He left his family, and in the end he does not seem to regret having taken on a mistress, divorced his wife - if anything, he regrets only that he didn't do more of it. His one redeeming quality is his love for his boys - which he doesn't recognize until almost the very end. 9/11 aside, he would never have been called a hero. Does dying in a really tall burning building with his sons make him one?

There is a line near the beginning of one chapter that says "Those who don't have children of three and a half skip straight to the next minute: they couldn't possible understand" (98). I laughed at this, because I couldn't think that any of us would actually skip it, even though I don't think any of the students in our class have a three and a half year old child. Did anyone else find this amusing or interesting? It seems unlikely that Beigbeder actually expected us to skip over the rest of the chapter.

In fact, I am wondering how much of the narrator, who takes the author's name, is real, and how much is fictionalized. At the end of the book, Beigbeder says "A novel is a fiction; what is contained within its pages is not truth" (307). Is he referring only to the storyline in the WTC, or to himself as well? The "author" seems to be using writing this book as a way to deal with the torment of the memory of 9/11. His life also appears to be dominated by fear - he goes so far as to suggest that freedom is a bad thing and never makes people happy. He wants to live under strict rules and protection, watched over by a Big Brother of some sort. He also suffers a lot of amnesia, particularly about his early life - how much of this is based in reality?

The line between reality and fiction is blurred, and this blurriness is often referred to in the novel. Carthew says to himself, in a moment of desperation, "what would Bruce Willis do in my shoes?" (116). Bruce Willis is a real person, who is an actor, not a hero - but we do so often equate actors with their typical roles, in this case of the action hero. It seems to me that the fact that we see extreme situations and violence on television and movies on a regular basis - far, far more often than in real life - makes us exclaim "it looks like a movie" when we see it happen for real. It does look like a movie! There was a time when movies struggled to emulate reality, when special effects were still in early development. I imagine that when they finally started making things look realistic, people might have exclaimed "it looks so real!" Now the norm is the special effect that we see all the time, and such a spectacle in reality can only be related to through the medium we are used to - movies and television. What does this do to our psyche?

There is one more passage I would like to comment on. I will quote it here in its entirety:

"Under my feet, in New Amsterdam, the World Trade Center has joined the ruins of colonial buildings, the wine pitchers, the bricks, the glass and nails of centuries gone by, the fields of wheat, barley, and tobacco, the remains of pigs that gamboled through the dark streets of hovels, and the bones of sheep and men who came from the other side of the world to this land. Long, long ago, Indians planted rye here where the World Trade Center once stood" (260).

I particularly liked this passage. I see the world as all being interconnected, everything affecting everything else, and physically, everything we know was once something completely different. I feel like this passage puts things in perspective. 9/11 was important, it was tragic, it was terrible, it changed everything - I can't deny these things. But in the grand scheme of things, it is so small. Someday people will look back on 9/11 in the same way that we look back at the Revolutionary War... Just this thing that happened a long time ago, a bunch of people died, the world changed. Moving on.

But, of course, none of us will ever see it that way because we lived through it; it will affect future generations in ways they will never even realize.