brooding over salinger

Knew only of JD Salinger’s passing through scanning the Metro pages on the way to work. My heartbeat skipped a beat as I read the boxed details. Salinger, of course, is the author of my all-time favorites The Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey. Catcher is high school fare but I only got to read the texts more than a decade ago. I bought my copy in Borders in Singapore. Introduced to me by Pete Sampras, it’s about the teenage Holden Caulfield and his sojourn in New York, his expulsion from his prep school and the nature of adolescent rebellion in the immediate post-war era of the late forties. As a boring conformist, I’m a far cry from being a rebel. But I am markedly muddled with adult angsts and have a tumultuous abhorrence of phonies so Catcher deeply captures the core of my anguish.

Franny and Zooey are two of the members of the venerable, highly-intelligent Glass family. Their thoughts, zen-like philosophies make me wish I could be as smart as them but that would be the ultimate impossibility. All I could do is read and try to absorb the knowledge imparted upon by Salinger via the Glass family. I’m stumbling upon hundreds of tributes of the reclusive author. In my obscure corner, across the pond, I’ll just re-read Franny and Zooey.