Move Over Holden Caulfield
Happy To Be Here
Greta Johnsen
4.8 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 8 February 2019
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dana Czapnik has always been drawn to wanderers and wonderers, the kind of fictional characters who are always contemplating who they are and the world around them. But aside from the work of Virginia Woolf, Czapnik said she hasn’t come across many female characters who get those kind of opportunities.
“That was one of the things that I was thinking of when I was working on this,” Czapnik says of her new novel, The Falconer. “That I wanted to write a female character who has the space to just be and wonder.”
Salman Rushdie called The Falconer "a deeply affecting tale of a young woman coming of age in a man’s world." The book has been favorably compared to The Catcher in the Rye. And the main character, 17-year-old Lucy Adler, is "a much better person than Holden Caulfield," according to Nerdette's own Greta Johnsen.
Czapnik talks with Greta all about the book, the nuances of feminism, and nostalgia for the 1990s.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This fall, W bez invites you to our upcoming live events. |
| 0:05.0 | Join us in person for smart discussions, heartfelt storytelling, and more. |
| 0:09.0 | Check out the full calendar now at W be easy.org |
| 0:12.6 | slash events. |
| 0:13.6 | Hey y'all before this episode starts I just want to warn you |
| 0:18.0 | there are some curse words they are all for the sake of feminism but there's also |
| 0:21.8 | another F word involved so just be warned at this moment. |
| 0:25.0 | From W.B. E. E. E. Chicago, this is Nurdette. |
| 0:30.0 | I'm Greta Johnson and Nurdette is a podcast where we talk to your favorite or soon to be |
| 0:34.4 | favorite people sometimes about your favorite or soon to be favorite books. |
| 0:39.5 | And this week we are talking with a debut author about her novel the Falconer which I so wish had existed when I was a 17 year old. |
| 0:47.0 | A book review magazine recently compared this book to one of the most famous coming of age novels of all time. Here's exactly what the |
| 0:55.5 | Kirkus review said. Coming of age in Manhattan may not have been done this |
| 1:00.1 | brilliantly since catcher in the rye. That comparison has been made before but this time |
| 1:04.8 | it's true. Get ready to fall in love, unquote. I don't know about y'all, but when I was about |
| 1:11.5 | 14, I loved Catcher in the Rice so much and even at that point it was already |
| 1:16.0 | over 50 years old I couldn't believe I was reading something that had that much age to it that I could |
| 1:20.8 | still find so utterly relatable. |
| 1:23.0 | But Holden Kaulfield, the main character of Ketchro in the Rye, is kind of snarky, |
| 1:28.0 | right? Like he's pretty pessimistic. He has a tendency even to be cruel at times. |
| 1:32.0 | And I have to tell you Lucy, the 17-year-old |
| 1:34.7 | protagonist of the Falconer, is so curious and open-hearted and willing to learn |
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