Oona is the cursed daughter of Eugene O Neill, American playwright huge and mediocre man with his family. This girl of 15 years shy, shy, brilliant research to better love flee. She met JD Salinger, the author of the catches heart.
They live a passion (not used) until the start of the war for Salinger. He seeks to follow in the footsteps of Hemingway and also heartbreaking Oona lexaspère whose mundane life. While Salinger involved in landing, falls in love with Oona Chaplin older. It's crazy love, love unto death.
Meanwhile Salinger, author taciturn already discovered the horrors of Dachau who send 6 months in psychiatry. He swears never to witness the war not to make heroes that make you want to die young. On the outskirts, the author writes beautiful lyrical pages on the age difference between men and women: young people do not know how to love, the woman does not age, unless an old man who is dedicated to the article dead to goodness, to love each other.
Beigbeder is Oona muse Salinger, one that was indirectly responsible for grabs heart. Salinger revolted by the end of this love that weep all his life, traumatized by memories of war and increasingly misanthropic become Holden Caulfield, the adolescent forever rebel who classify the world into two camps: the rebels, snotty , dirty, draft evaders, misfits and others ....
Beigbeder makes justicle to the muse of the greatest American novel of the last century. His novel is both a beautiful declaration of love where he spends pages describing the features, physical, expressions of Oona so much that he admits having married his wife because she resembled him.
Salinger is back to mid novel but Beigbeder find words of brevity, extraordinarily effective in describing the Second World War and to correlate these events with the current Western life, between the unpaid moral and financial debt great powers who participated.
Beigbeder takes the stage, yes, but always with sensitivity and derision. And a writer who publishes for 20 years has any legitimacy to do. You will meet in this fabulous novel other prestigious figures: Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, Chaplin, Eugene O'Neill or Mae West for a compelling chapter. You will learn how Chaplin was persecuted by Hoover.
As for Salinger, even in the center of the novel remains absent himself. And to quote Emily Dickinson Beigbeder with this beautiful sentence: no, it is the concentrated presence. Musty book is with regret that the player is leaving these romantic figures so alive. After working for 4 years, Beigbeder imagined their dialogues, their letters, their privacy.
His novelist activity allows to appropriate the life of his subjects as Mendehlson Daniel had, in another style (Proust), made life to his family exterminated during the war in The Missing.
Rigorous, funny, tender, remarkably relevant, Oona and Salinger is both novel of love, war, correspondence and historical biography of impressive fluidity of American culture monsters. Beigbeder can continue to leisure to make the Zouave at will if it is to lay that kind of wonders.
