Look at Me

Zusatztext 51430701 Informationen zum Autor Jennifer Egan Klappentext A National Book Award Finalist In this ambitiously multilayered novel from the acclaimed and award-winning writer Jennifer Egan! a fashion model named Charlotte Swenson emerges from a car accident in her Illinois hometown with her face so badly shattered that it takes eighty titanium screws to reassemble it. She returns to New York still beautiful but oddly unrecognizable! a virtual stranger in the world she once effortlessly occupied. With the surreal authority of a David Lynch! Jennifer Egan threads Charlotte's narrative with those of other casualties of our infatuation with the image. There's a deceptively plain teenaged girl embarking on a dangerous secret life! an alcoholic private eye! and an enigmatic stranger who changes names and accents as he prepares an apocalyptic blow against American society. As these narratives inexorably converge! Look at Me becomes a coolly mesmerizing intellectual thriller of identity and imposture. Leseprobe Chapter One After the accident, I became less visible. I don't mean in the obvious sense that I went to fewer parties and retreated from general view. Or not just that. I mean that after the accident, I became more difficult to see. In my memory, the accident has acquired a harsh, dazzling beauty: white sunlight, a slow loop through space like being on the Tilt-A-Whirl (always a favorite of mine), feeling my body move faster than, and counter to, the vehicle containing it. Then a bright, splintering crack as I burst through the windshield into the open air, bloody and frightened and uncomprehending. The truth is that I don't remember anything. The accident happened at night during an August downpour on a deserted stretch of highway through corn and soybean fields, a few miles outside Rockford, Illinois, my hometown. I hit the brakes and my face collided with the windshield, knocking me out instantly. Thus I was spared the adventure of my car veering off the tollway into a cornfield, rolling several times, bursting into flame and ultimately exploding. The air bags didn't inflate; I could sue, of course, but since I wasn't wearing my seatbelt, it's probably a good thing they didn't inflate, or I might have been decapitated, adding injury to insult, you might say. The shatterproof windshield did indeed hold fast upon its impact with my head, so although I broke virtually every bone in my face, I have almost no visible scars. I owe my life to what is known as a "Good Samaritan" someone who pulled me out of the flaming wreck so promptly that only my hair was burned, someone who laid me gently on the perimeter of the cornfield, called an ambulance, described my location with some precision and then, with a self-effacement that strikes me as perverse, not to mention un-American, chose to slink away anonymously rather than take credit for these sterling deeds. A passing motorist in a hurry, that sort of thing. The ambulance took me to Rockford Memorial Hospital, where I fell into the hands of one Dr. Hans Fabermann, reconstructive surgeon extraordinaire. When I emerged from unconsciousness fourteen hours later, it was Dr. Fabermann who sat beside me, an elderly man with a broad, muscular jaw and tufts of white hair in both ears, though most of this I didn't see that night -- I could hardly see at all. Calmly Dr. Fabermann explained that I was lucky; I'd broken ribs, arm and leg, but had no internal injuries to speak of. My face was in the midst of what he called a "golden time" before the "grotesque swelling" would set in. If he operated immediately, he could get a jump on my "gross asymmetry"--namely, the disconnection of my cheekbones from my upper skull and of my lower jaw from my "midface." I had no idea where I was, or what had happened to me. My face was numb, I saw with slurry double vision and had a...

Report

Brilliantly unnerving. . . . A haunting, sharp, splendidly articulate novel. The New York Times

Comic, richly imagined, and stunningly written. . . . An energetic, unorthodox, quintessentially American vision of America. The New Yorker

Look at Me is so engrossing, energetic, sharp, and funny, it reminded me of Ralph Ellison s masterpiece, Invisible Man. Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air (NPR)

Arresting. . . . Look at Me is the real thing brave, honest, unflinching. [It] is itself a mirror in which we can clearly see the true face of the times in which we live. Francine Prose, The New York Observer

Egan limns the mysteries of human identity and the stranglehold our image-obsessed culture has on us all in this complicated and wildly ambitious novel. Newsweek

Intriguing. . . . An unlikely blend of tabloid luridness and brainy cultural commentary. . . . The novel s uncanny prescience gives Look at Me a rare urgency. Time

Egan has created some compelling characters and written provocative meditations on our times. . . . [She] has captured our culture in its edge-city awfulness. The Washington Post Book World

Look at Me is a complicated novel . . . but the questions it raises are worth following a lifetime of labyrinths toward the answers. Los Angeles Times

Ambitious, swiftly paced. . . . Egan writes with such shimmering élan that it s easy to follow her cast on its journey. The Wall Street Journal

Prescient and provocative. . . . The characters . . . jump from the pages and dare you to care about them. . . . The prose is crisp and precise. . . . The pieces fit together at the end with a satisfying click. Philadelphia Inquirer

Impressive. . . . Few recent books have so eloquently demonstrated how often fiction, in its visionary form, speaks of truth. Salon.com

Look at Me makes us think about our trust in the images that bombard us, and what we give away in the process. Chicago Tribune

Egan s rich new novel . . . is about bigger things: double lives; secret selves; the difficulty of really seeing anything in a world so flooded with images. The Nation

Stunning. . . . This is more than a story, it s a thought-world, a novel of ideas brilliantly cloaked in the skin of characters. The Sunday Oregonian

Egan s take . . . is surreal and profoundly ironic and exaggerated, but it still rings true. . . . Beneath it all, she finds characters worth saving. Hartford Courant

Breathtaking. . . . Combines the tautness of a good mystery with the measured, exquisitely articulated detail and emotional landscape of the most literary of narratives. . . . Sure to leave readers thinking about these very real characters for some time to come. BookPage

An imaginative, well-paced read with serious questions about the elusiveness of meaning inside the gilded cage. Egan has intelligence to burn but plenty of feeling too. People

Part mystery, part cultural critique, [Look at Me] . . . build[s] to a conclusion that is unexpected and disturbing, and mak[es] an incisive statement about our society s obsession with fame and glamour. San Francisco Chronicle

Riveting. . . . As the book gains momentum, Egan s writing is both fluid and driven, with wonderful slashes of satire. . . . A remarkable study of our culture . . . and of our palpable need to be known. O: The Oprah Magazine

Egan has created a compelling world. . . . With [her] graceful prose and vivid characterizations, she navigates her plot lines churning waters with admirable skill. Seattle Weekly

[A] scintillating inquiry into the complex and profound dynamics of perception. . . . Egan . . . animates a superb cast of intriguing and unpredictable characters, and tells an elegantly structured, emotionally arresting and slyly suspenseful story. Newsday

Dark, hugely ambitious. . . . As riveting as a roadside wreck and noxiously, scathingly funny. Elle

Intelligent and refreshingly dark, Egan s eerie tale has the same mesmerizing pull as the culture it skewers. Us Weekly

This masterfully plotted work bears the stamp of a perceptive if not clairvoyant writer whose disturbing vision . . . rings all too true. SF Weekly

Egan s ability to move with ease between sincerity and satire sets Look at Me apart. . . . Her authentic-feeling details give a sense of unusual immediacy. Vogue

Product details

• Authors: Jennifer Egan, Egan Jennifer
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 08.10.2002
• EAN: 9780385721356
• ISBN: 978-0-385-72135-6
• No. of pages: 544
• Dimensions: 130 mm x 202 mm x 22 mm
• Series: Anchor Books
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), FICTION / Literary, Fiction: general and literary, Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary