Catcher in the Rye [review]
 Author: J.D. Salinger |
There was a great deal of hype surrounding this book - hype with an almost enigmatic quality to it. Everyone I know who had read it provided me with a welter of rather diverse opinion. "The best book ever", said one. "Catcher in the Rye? It has no plot," said another. "Something you kind of have to read once, whatever you think of it" someone else averred. "Literary pathbreaker," one assured me. Of course, with that kind of peer review...and of course, the enigma of the book itself, which has not so much as a blurb, critic praise or summary on its cover... I wasn't disappointed. Catcher in the Rye is one of a kind. There's a little of Holden Caulfield in everyone, I think, which is a great part of its appeal. There is nothing in the entire linguistic construct of the book that your average literate layperson-on-the-street wouldn't understand and immediately grasp. You've the literary masters - Borges, with his jewelled prose, Dostoyevsky, the epicist, Walcott, for the mindblowing metaphorical aesthetics, Eco, for the unbridled dry wit - but when it comes to speaking the most human of minds, in the most simple and honest of words, no one does it like Holden Caulfield. Really, such is the success of the book that Salinger is effaced entirely from the text - it is not Salinger we think of when we remember the Catcher, it is Holden, the gawky uncertain teenager that lurks in all of us, bubbling to the surface of this most prosaic, yet most inimitably human, of screeds. I had to buy a copy of the book for myself, of course. I'm kind of obsessive like that. |