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Look at
Me by Jennifer Egan Recommendation: ••• |
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Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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A Model’s Life In Jennifer Egan’s new novel, Look at
Me, Fashion model Charlotte Swenson’s face changes its appearance
following an automobile accident, and she begins to search for her identity.
At that level alone, the story is fascinating and engaging to readers.
Another Charlotte, the teenage daughter of Swenson’s former best friend in
her long abandoned hometown, also searches for identity as she comes of age.
Egan’s playful switches back and forth between the Charlotte’s, and the ways
their lives intersect, make this book quite a pleasure to read. On top of that, there is the reporting on
Swenson’s life for a web service that creates a playful new set of
perceptions and images in the way one is seen by others and presented to them.
Here’s an excerpt: “It was not until
late January that I finally made a lunch date with Oscar, my booker. By then
my have had been healed, or ‘settled,’ as I thought of it, from the second
operation, for almost a month. But I’d postponed its reckoning with the world
for the simple reckon that I still didn’t know what I looked like. I’d spent
as long as an hour staring through the ring of chalky light around my bedroom
mirror; I’d held up old pictures of myself beside my reflection and tried to
compare them. But my sole discovery what that in addition to not knowing what
I looked like now, I had never known. The old pictures were no help; like all
good pictures, they hid the truth. I had never kept a bad one – this was one
of my cardinal rules, photographically speaking. One: never let someone take
your picture until you’re ready, or the result will almost certainly be
awful. Two: never keep bad pictures of yourself for any reason, sentimental
or otherwise. Bad pictures reveal you in exactly the light you wish never to
be seen, and not only will they be found, if you keep them, but invariably by
the single person in the world you least want to see you that way.” Look at
Me approaches identity, growth, change and trauma with cleverness and
perception, and Egan’s skills make reading this book a pleasure. Steve Hopkins, November 7, 2001 |
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ă 2001 Hopkins and Company, LLC |
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