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    Salinger

    I'm reading his daughter Margaret's: 'Dream Catcher: A Memoir' (published in 2001 when he was still alive). There's nothing like reading a family member's account to put you off a writer. I knew he was a recluse and all, but didn't know anything about him being a cultish, controlling, misogynistic nut-job with a penchant for teenage paramours.

    Before he died, I was intrigued for 25 years about what his unpublished works were going to be like once they finally saw the page upon his death. I don't know what's happening with the reputed tranche of still unpublished works, but I'm no longer so arsed to find out. Given that he spent decades hiding in the woods from reality, what insights can he possibly offer into the human condition that weren't already expressed by Holden Caulfield?

    #2
    The decline was already there is the Glass family novels, the pseudo-Buddhism and over-idealization of childhood. I'm also intrigued by whether he meant Holden Caulfield to be taken as a good role model or as a narcissistic oddball, but Salinger was an enigmatic interviewee to say the least.

    Salinger went to court to prevent his unpublished letters from being quoted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saling...dom_House,_Inc.

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      #3
      Originally posted by Satchmo Distel View Post
      The decline was already there is the Glass family novels, the pseudo-Buddhism and over-idealization of childhood. I'm also intrigued by whether he meant Holden Caulfield to be taken as a good role model or as a narcissistic oddball, but Salinger was an enigmatic interviewee to say the least.

      Salinger went to court to prevent his unpublished letters from being quoted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saling...dom_House,_Inc.
      Fixed link.

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        #4
        I've read one bio of Salinger - the one that prompted the court case. I have Dream Catcher, the official bio and the new bio based on the film on my shelf.

        He was working in US army intel based in Devon during the war and most likely engineered the cover up of the Slapton disaster when 700 men drowned in a practice for D Day.

        I can see how that kind of thing could fuck you up as a person.

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          #5
          I didn't know about this forthcoming movie, either, The Rebel in the Rye.

          @PT, I haven't seen any mention of Slapton at all in connection with JDS. Where did you read/hear that?

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            #6
            Originally posted by imp View Post
            I didn't know about this forthcoming movie, either, The Rebel in the Rye.

            @PT, I haven't seen any mention of Slapton at all in connection with JDS. Where did you read/hear that?
            Such a trite and unimaginative name for the film.

            I don't rate Catcher in the Rye the way other people do. Of course, I didn't read it when one is supposed to. I read it when I was about 25, having heard so much hype about how it's the definitive story of teenage angst. But as somebody who felt mostly alienated from everything as a teenager and (and still do), I knew by then that railing against "phonies" and all that wasn't particularly insightful or helpful. I also had a "well, this is just a rich white kid so who cares what his problems are" reaction to it, which I've come to see is not a valid criticism of a single novel.

            But maybe I should read it again with a fresh perspective. Somewhere I read an interesting hypothesis about it - that it's really a story of a kid suffering PTSD. As PT mentions, Salinger had witnessed some horrifying shit in the war and Holden witnesses a kid kill himself at prep school, which was shitty and full of bullying (as prep schools often were/are). That's a more interesting take than "youth tells it as it really is, man!"

            But Salinger himself was a knob. That's one of the reason why the film Field of Dreams is actually better than the book it's based on, because in the book Ray Kinsella goes east to abduct JD Salinger, not Terrance Mann. And the fictitious version of Salinger just doesn't line up at all with what we know of him now.

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              #7
              Originally posted by imp View Post
              @PT, I haven't seen any mention of Slapton at all in connection with JDS. Where did you read/hear that?
              Looked the book out. 'In Search of Salinger' by Ian Hamilton. Read JDS's short 'For Esme - with Love and Squalor' and he fictionalises his experience. Hamilton connects the date in that story where a profoundly broken military intelligence officer encounters a young girl to the day after the Slapton Sands disaster.
              Last edited by Patrick Thistle; 29-08-2017, 06:48. Reason: Satchmo saw how autocorrect cocked up

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                #8
                Essex is presumably an autocorrect of Esme?

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                  #9
                  Dammit yes

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                    #10
                    Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                    I don't rate Catcher in the Rye the way other people do. Of course, I didn't read it when one is supposed to. I read it when I was about 25, having heard so much hype about how it's the definitive story of teenage angst.
                    I read it when I was 16, and thought it was pants.

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                      #11
                      It was published in 1951, which should be kept in mind. There's a lot that would have been fairly groundbreaking / shocking for the time.
                      In the same sense that Sgt Peppers might fail to impress now because all music sounds like that; at the time, no music sounded like that.

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                        #12
                        I too haven't read it since I was about sixteen (1964-5.) It didn't leave a particularly strong impression — certainly not as much as Catch 22, The Trial or The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, which I read at about the same time. I remember it mainly as a book I was supposed to like. Perhaps because people who were that little bit older than me did.

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                          #13
                          I think I was 12, and thought it was great.

                          The familiarity of the locales certainly helped.

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                            #14
                            I think objectively it's not a book that lives up to the hype. But then I felt that way about The Great Gatsby and also On the Road. A longstanding friend who is in my book group said it was nothing like what he expected it to be. Mrs Thistle said the same when she read it. I'm not sure what they thought it would be about. Like the other books mentioned it's one that most people have heard of and never read so when they do read it they think 'What was the fuss about?'

                            There are some bits that have really stuck with me like Holden's frustration and disappointment with himself for dropping the record, and the whole bit about being the catcher and saving children.

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                              #15
                              I'm not a fan of JDS but I have read all 4 of his books published by Penguin and the short bio published in his lifetime. I have three other books about him waiting to be read. I can't really explain why.

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                                #16
                                I've read 'Catcher' three times, and perhaps inevitably was increasingly less impressed with each re-read. Reading passages quoted in Margaret Salinger's memoir now makes me think that I was so impressed with my first reading at 18 in the same way that I was impressed with lots of other things at the age of 18. It had that 'I can see through everyone and everything' air that makes it irresistible to a certain type of teenager, especially one who was putting on a fake face of confidence and superiority like I was at the time.

                                The memoir dragged on, it was way too long, but I finished it - it's certainly worth reading if you're as fascinated by JDS as I always have been (though I think I'm largely cured after reading this). Otherwise, not so much. I read that her brother renounced the memoir, saying that it did not remotely resemble the childhood he experienced. But I doubt if my sister and I would give even remotely the same account of our respective childhoods - she was four years older than me, and we rarely shared or talked about anything while growing up. It was until we were in our 20s that we started talking to each other like human beings.

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                                  #17
                                  Despite your warning I am more tempted to read it now than I have been in the couple of years since I bought it.

                                  If Catcher hadn't been such a hit, he would have had to keep publishing stories to earn money. Fame enabled his total withdrawal from the world, which is kind of ironic.

                                  His earlier stuff was published in prewar copies of the New Yorker etc. Apparently fans have excised them from record editions held in many public libraries.

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                                    #18
                                    So Mrs Thistle found a copy of 'My Salinger Year' by Joanna Rakoff in a charity shop and bought it for me. Joanna apparently worked at Salinger's literary agency for a year in the 90s, including taking calls from "Jerry".

                                    I don't know how true it is, but it is fascinating. I'm about halfway through. Although her contact with him is peripheral (so far in the book), it underlines my suspicions that he was a PTSD victim and never recovered from his wartime experiences, including the Slapton Sands cover up.

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                                      #19
                                      OK. I've finished the book. It gets a bit effusive about halfway through when she finally reads Salinger's books, but there are a lot of insights into both the man and his work.

                                      The book is equally about a young woman, fresh out of college, finding her way in the world. It's aiming at a literary, melancholic feel, which works sometimes. I'd recommend it as another perspective on JDS and quite interesting in its own right.

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                                        #20
                                        I read and really enjoyed Rakoff's book too. I was especially fascinated by the insight into the old-world agency struggling to keep pace with the idea of the coming technological revolution, and how they were resistant to buying their first computer. And how the writer lived in rented accommodation in Manhattan with her partner, either without a bathroom or a kitchen - can't remember which one it was.

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                                          #21
                                          A kitchen with no sink

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