By SUSAN RIFE [The Ticket/Sarasota Herald-Tribune] – Airplane Novel (Raw Dog Screaming Press, $14.95) tells the story of the destruction of the World Trade Center through the “eyes,” so to speak, of the South Tower, outlining the history and future of the Twin Towers to the moments of their collapse…
When it came to the writing, he “really felt more like an actor than a writer,” [Paul] Toth said. “I had to put myself in the zone of being a building. Once I got there, when I had to make a decision, it was almost as if the building answered them for me. I began to think not so much as a person, but at least subtract that as much as possible, which allowed some of the stranger aspects.”
Finding an identity for the South Tower came out of an interview Toth did with an architect who had worked on the towers.
“I asked him to name two actors that from his viewpoint represented the two towers,” said Toth. “One of the names he gave me was Gary Cooper. I was dancing around the Internet and somehow came upon Cary Grant. It all just fit together and answered itself and gave a little bit of a human persona to it.”
Toth hired a Cary Grant impersonator to read the first chapter of Airplane Novel on his website, which is at www.airplanenovel.com.
“It just seemed a perfect match,” he said. “He’s not a bad guy, he just has this cool, not disengaged but slightly detached kind of attitude. That helped take it out of me and added a bit of human aspect to the building.”
Continued at The Ticket/Sarasota Herald-Tribune | More Chronicle & Notices.
