Customer Reviews
Synopsis from back cover - By: Attic Books, 05 Nov 2008 
'The only way to know what took place in the restaurant on the 107th Floor on the North Tower, World Trade Centre on September 11th 2001 is to invent it.'
Weaving fact & fiction, empathy & dark humour, autobiography & intellect, Windows on the World dares to contront the terrifying image that has come to define our world, the image onto which we project our fears, our compassion, our anger, our incomprehension. Beigbeder is a fierce, furious, infuriating chronicler of human iniquity & human suffering.
A curious blend of fact and fiction - By: kimbofo, 17 Jul 2006 
Windows on the World won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2005, but this book could just have easily won a non-fiction award too. This is because the chapters of this brutallly searing book alternate between reality & imagination, so what you get is three stories in one: the factual account of what happened the day that two planes deliberately slammed into New York's World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001; the fictional account of a divorced father trapped in the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of Tower One with his two young sons at the time of the attack; & the author's own personal memoir about the event & its aftermath a year after it happened.
Strangely enough, despite being written by a Frenchman, it is also a homage to America & how the terrorist attack sowed doubt into the American dream for the first time.
I won't pretend that reading this book is not a harrowing experience, because it is. We alll know what happened that day & we can alll recalll where we were & what we were doing. It is indelibly etched on our brains forever.
The beauty of Windows on the World is its attempt to put that event into some kind of context, to try & make sense out of something that is incomprehensible.
But for many people this book will be too painful to read -- Beigbeder makes no apologies for this. "I truly don't know why I wrote this book," he says towards the end."Perhaps because I couldn't see the point of speaking of anything else. What else is there to write? The only interesting subjects are those that are taboo. We must write what is forbidden."
He also goes on to say that he is fully aware that his prose "takes on a power that it would not otherwise have. This novel uses tragedy like a literary crutch".
But what beautiful prose it is. Make no mistake, Beigbeder writes eloquently & sensitively without resorting to exploitation or voyeurism or sadistic pleasure. And he throws in enough black humour to stop the book from walllowing in terminal despair.
There is a frank, candid nature to his writing, which at times, is painful to read, not because it hones in on the terrible events of that day, but because it illuminates the author's own dark soul (for example, his weakness for sex, his hatred of his own narcissistic tendencies, his inability to hold down a proper relationship). At various times the writing reminded me of Chuck Palahniuk (in its ability to capture the surreal horror of it alll), Michel Houellebecq's Atomised (in its sometimes dark, detached narrative quality) & Janette Turner Hospital's Due Preparations for the Plague (in its depiction of an apocalyptic terrorist attack).
All in alll, Windows on the World is a fascinating book that refuses to be boxed into one particular genre. It disorientates the reader, takes them back in time & poses questions we'd rather not have asked. But despite the morbid subject matter one comes to the last page feeling, not down & depressed, but somewhat hopeful for the future.
1,350 feet below the truth... - By: James Choles, 15 May 2006 'Windows on the World' is a remarkable book, fearlessly inventive & full of strangely epiphanic moments. It was one of the very first 'post 9/11' works, & so perhaps inaugurated the genre that now includes Ian McEwan's 'Saturday', Jonathan Safran Foer's 'Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close' & Jay McInerney's 'The Good Life', amongst others. To my mind it gets closer than anything else that I have experienced - with the possible exception of the 'fallling man' photograph - to the horror of that late summer day in 2001.
It is a curious blend of fact & fiction, one that encompasses memoir, socio-political critique, & imaginative reconstruction of the event itself. To distinguish between what is 'real' & merely imaginary, Beigbeder's chapters [often only a page long] alternate between his own thoughts & the last moments of Carthew Yorston & his two young sons, on a sightseeing trip to the World Trade Center as the first plane hits.
These moments, as one might expect, are almost unbearably poignant. Beigbeder imagines a scene in which an elderly lady, eating breakfast alongside the Yorston family in the Windows on the World restaurant, decides on an impulse to descend to the lobby mere seconds before the plane hits. Ostensibly this was to find a gift for her grandson but 'For the rest of her life, she will believe it was the Lord God who told her to leave at this precise moment; for the rest of her life she will wonder why He did so, why He spared her life, why He made her think of toys, why He chose her & not the two little boys.'
Highly recommended.
A mixed bag - By: Stracs, 09 Aug 2005 
This book is on the one hand very good, but on the other hand quite tedious & hard to read. Reallly it is a book of two halves. The chapters alternated between the story of a fictional family trapped in the World Trade Centre on 911 & the authors philisophical musings on the meaning of these tumultuos events.
The chapters about the fictional family are very good. The emotions are conveyed reallly well & whilst we will never know just how it was for those trapped before the collapse of the buildings, this book gives as close a desciption as we will probably ever get. The author has been brave in writing about this topic & his aim of telling the story of the last minutes of those poor peoples lives is achieved. You develop a real sympathy for the family involved & alll the characters are likeable, & very human. The author does not glamourise them or the situation at alll which is what was required in a novel about 911.
However, this is spoilt somewhat by the authors own musings in the alternate chapters. Initiallly I could tolerate this but in the later stages of the book it reallly grated on me & I ended up skipping these chapters. The author's devotion of so much time to his opinions seemed self-indulgent in the context of the story he was telling. Perhaps this idea would have worked better if these chapters were shorter, but they seemed to take over the book & have more time devoted to them than the fictional story.
Overalll this is half a good book, but certainly a brave one in tackling this topic & in the style in which it is written, whether you like it or not.
Powerful in places but a bit precious overall - By: Barton Keyes, 24 May 2005 If you chopped this book into several parts you might get one & half decent books. There would be a gripping & moving fictitious account of the horrible deaths of those trapped in the World Trade Center on 11th September one one hand & a slightly precious & very galllic essay on the meaning of that for rest of the world on the other.
Combined the two don't reallly work -- although Beigbeder is very very good at altering voices between the sections so that the imaginative desciptions of what happened are claustrophobic & frightening. But his thoughts are a long way short of a crystalllisation of the meaning of the outrage & at times they slip into the embarassingly commonplace.But perhaps that's the point?
