J.D. Salinger RIP

Franny and Zooey is my personal favorite

another wrote:

Those were Salinger's words, my friend, not mine.

Touche

Some Coked Up Brit wrote:

"The Catcher in the Rye" is truly wonderful.

I like his other stuff too, especially "Seymour: An Introduction".

...

Agreed on "Seymour: An Introduction"

In my opinion it is the greatest telling of a love story (very different than greatest love story) that I have ever come across.

Agreed but you wont agree wrote:

Some Coked Up Brit wrote:

"The Catcher in the Rye" is truly wonderful.

I like his other stuff too, especially "Seymour: An Introduction".

...

Agreed on "Seymour: An Introduction"

In my opinion it is the greatest telling of a love story (very different than greatest love story) that I have ever come across.

It's certainly a great telling of a love story. There is a terrible background tragedy around that story - the reader knows Seymour's fate. (I'd read "A Perfect Day For Bananafish" beforehand.)

crap

Comic Math wrote:

I'd say something nice about JDS, but he'd probably think I was a phony.

Nice.

What were his PRs for 400, mile and 5K?

I lean toward the overrated camp (I was an avid reader in general, but never felt compelled to pick up Salinger's work unless it was assigned), but I think his overratedness is no fault of his own. Basically, The Catcher In The Rye is read by everyone some time between eighth grade and sophomore year of high school, and it is a book that speaks to that audience so well that it becomes many people's favorite book. Because that audience is so wrapped-up in their own problems (mostly identity issues that come with beginning to really grow up), and also because so many of them have not yet learned that you really can't always trust the narrator, many of them feel that the book really speaks to them personally--and often a part of this belief is that Catcher neither has spoken nor could ever speak to anyone else in the same way--and thus discussions of his work with these people are insufferable. For many of these people (mostly the ones who don't do much reading), Catcher remains among their favorite books for the rest of their life, despite the fact that it really is about a malcontent, maladjusted, self-involved adolescent.

This isn't to say that some very smart people don't also like Catcher. And it's also not to say that Salinger isn't (wasn't, I guess we have to say now) a very good writer, because he was clearly a gifted craftsman. However, what I do mean to say is that because it is so accessible to and well-liked by so many idiots, Catcher has been pretty much spoiled for me. This, in turn, discouraged me from reading any more Salinger.

Not An Expert wrote:

This, in turn, discouraged me from reading any more Salinger.

Your loss. Although some of his short stories are uneven, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", "Teddy", and especially "For Esme With Love and Squalor" are fantastic.

I read "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" in another lit class and liked it fine, just not enough to overcome my anti-Catcher In The Rye bias.

Ah, everyone's a critic

An honest contribution. None the less , a great advertisement !

Literature aficiandos ,like runners need to start somewhere.

Thanks.

KenBo wrote:

“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know. I had a telegram from home: ‘mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Yours sincerely.’ That doesn’t mean anything. It may have been yesterday.”

Pure genius.

Another great , 'The Stranger', by Albert Camus .

Catcher In The Rye was rubbish imo. I honestly don't see what was to like about it. Was just a depressed kid who I wanted to hit the whole way through the story. I read it this year and everyone in my english class seemed to think they were hard core deep thinkers getting into his mind and it just sucked. He wasn't even rebelious. Just a loner who thought he was. Might be good for depressed loners who nobody likes with no social skills so they can hear from someone else in that boat. Also good for people who think they are deep thinkers and try to grasp the deeper meanings of everything someone says. Even though they are wrong half the time but just think they have hard core deep minds. But for someone who isn't in one of those situations it was just useless. My opinion anyway.

See more glass wrote:

Not An Expert wrote:

This, in turn, discouraged me from reading any more Salinger.

Your loss. Although some of his short stories are uneven, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", "Teddy", and especially "For Esme With Love and Squalor" are fantastic.

I loved that bit in "For Esme With Love And Squalour" when Esme says to the narrator:

"You're quite intelligent for an American".

The other brilliant story in that collection (other than the ones you mention) was:

"Just Before The War With The Eskimoos".

Most of those stories are, in a sense, love-letters to his siblings and eulogies of their characters. "Franny and Zooey" are of course longer examples of the same literary device.

Salinger identified more with his siblings than any other individual: shared experiences in childhood have for him a profound shaping of one's identity and childhood love is almost Salinger's definition of happiness. A lot of the critics of Salinger (among them some of those writing on this thread) see Holden as a mere social malcontent and a typical teenage angst-filled rebel. He is much more subtle than that: his disgust for phonies is the reverse side of the coin to his love for the people he identifies with: children, those on the margins of society/victims such as Joan, the nuns and the boy who through himself from a window, and more than anyone else in the novel, his siblings.

Holden's love for D.B., Allie and Phoeboe falls just on the fiction side of a blurred dividing line where fiction and auto-biography meet. Almost all the rest of Salinger's published work falls just the other side of the same line.

I was interested that one poster mentioned Meursault and those infamous opening lines: "Aujoud'hui ma mere est morte. Ou peut-etre hier: je ne sais pas." from The Outsider. While a great book too, I don't know if I much care for the comparison, they are in my mind two very different kinds of strangers and Holden is much more sympathetic.

"Catcher in the Rye" is genius in the fact that it can make you absolutely HATE the protagonist for being such a whiny little fag.

I think David Copperfield is a wonderful magician

In his reclusiveness he wrote 15 other manuscripts. One of the 15 is bound to be just as good as 9 Stories or Franny & Zoey.

pheobe weatherfield caufield ftw