There is one thing that can honestly be said about Salinger's remarkable novel: Anyone who has read "Catcher in the Rye" will NEVER forget it, and probably will -- unlike our experience of most novels read years back -- remember salient parts of it in detail.
I have gone through three phases -- or is it two? -- with the novel: Passionately liking it as a youth, finding it irksome upon rereading it in middle age, and liking it enormously on rereading it again in my autumnal years. Perhaps, if I live long enough and reread it one more time, I will shift again, but I doubt it.
As for the short stories, they are among the best by an American writer of the 20th century. "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" has few peers.
I must have read it at the wrong time - after high school, because I never liked it. Just some over-privileged twit kvetching. I didn't like the style, either. I didn't talk like that, and nobody I knew did, either.
There is one thing that can honestly be said about Salinger's remarkable novel: Anyone who has read "Catcher in the Rye" will NEVER forget it, and probably will -- unlike our experience of most novels read years back -- remember salient parts of it in detail.
ReplyDeleteI have gone through three phases -- or is it two? -- with the novel: Passionately liking it as a youth, finding it irksome upon rereading it in middle age, and liking it enormously on rereading it again in my autumnal years. Perhaps, if I live long enough and reread it one more time, I will shift again, but I doubt it.
As for the short stories, they are among the best by an American writer of the 20th century. "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" has few peers.
I must have read it at the wrong time - after high school, because I never liked it. Just some over-privileged twit kvetching. I didn't like the style, either. I didn't talk like that, and nobody I knew did, either.
ReplyDeleteWell, perhaps you're right, at that.
ReplyDelete