"The "Catcher in the Rye" turns 59, but it doesn't show at all: it hasn't aged a single hour since I first read it when I was nineteen and 42 years have passed in between.

Holden Caulfield is not an easy case. He doesn't allow you to sympathize with him, he doesn't want you to love him, to make him your friend, to identify with him even: his loneliness is impenetrable. He sees the world as a relentless thirty-year-old, but expresses himself with the vocabulary and syntax of a kid. He doesn't sell revolution. He doesn't sell anything at all. He despairs, but doesn't say it out loud. He resigns, but doesn't make a big deal out of it. His despair and resignation have an incredible grandeur. Maybe that's why he has resisted until now the school analyses of American children, denial and adoration, the pathology of his fanatics, and above all, time: because he speaks to what is most desperate within all of us."

Holden, a hunter (thanks to his hat), has been condemned to wander through the suffocating time of a book: two days and three nights. Salinger, a hunted man, had been condemned to wander for half a century, day and night, within his own walls, which never protected him enough. I always think of them as one and the same.

In the list of the most popular fictional heroes from the beginning of the twentieth century until today, Holden firmly holds the second place in the preferences of the public. That's where I would put him too. And in the very first place, Salinger. Because he, too, with time, became a fictional hero. And not just for me."

Jenny Mastoraki