J D Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye"This is the story about 16 year old Holden Caulfield who runs away from the boarding school he is attending, goes into Manhattan and stays alone in the metropole for 3-4 days. Already before this he is a rather disillusioned young man regarding most of the society around him as superficial and phony. In no way he is getting any less disillisioned by the stay in the city. I read this story the first time when I was about the same age that Holden is in the book. I can absolutely sign under what stands on the cover, this is a book you will never forget. It is a book that changed my life, and gave me another view on the world and the society around me than what I had had up to then. It was published first time in 1951 and very soon became a so called modern classic, a book that generation after generation of youth have recognized as something they can relate to. It has been translated to 30 languages and has up to now (2017) been sold in more than 65 millions copies all over the world. Much of its success is probably due to Salinger's ability to give it a language that is so direct that it has been recognized by generation after generation of youth, even though young Holden, if he were alive today, would have been around ninety years old. Just read the very first sentence: If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. J D Salinger was born in New York in 1919. Besides "The Catcher in the Rye" he wrote during the nineteenfourties and -fifties some short stories, but that is all. It is this single novel that has made his name a part of the World Litterature. After the publishing of it he became a rather retired person, engaged in zen-buddhism and giving absolutely no interviews. Nothing is known as to whether he continued writing, but we know nothing has been published. He rejected a long row of questions about buying the movie priveleges to the book. He died in 2010. |
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