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Title: Libra (Contemporary American Fiction) by Don DeLillo ISBN: 0-14-015604-6 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: May, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (60 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Constructing History
Comment: DeLillo's Libra is a fascinating read, not only because its topic is one of America's most traumatizing events in recent history--not the assassination of president Kennedy is the point of interest in the book--but the question: What made this event so terrifying, why had it such an impact?
In answering this question DeLillo leaves out the obvious reasons: JFK's popularity and people's hopes connected with his politics. Instead, he puts the focus on a more profound problem: With the assassination of JFK the American people were woken up from their dream of security and regularity. A conclusive explanation of the how and why of the event could have put them back to sleep. Such an explanation is not available though. It is just not the way history works, and DeLillo skillfully shows exactly that in his book. He depicts a conspiracy that gets out of hand and Oswald as a manipulated and constructed individual.
Presenting his version of the events, DeLillo at the same time questions its validity. Reading his novel we become aware of the impossibility of drawing the right conclusions of the mass of hard facts and vague hints--the infinite possibilities of what can be held for the truth. Therefore, any historical account can only be a possible version of the real. In so far, DeLillo's Libra places itself somewhere between fiction and history.
Libra is a novel that deserves every attention.
Rating: 5
Summary: Scales out of balance
Comment: Prior to 9/11, the assasination of President John F. Kennedy was the most public of American tragedies. Regardless of an individual's personal feeling toward the President, that person was emotionally drawn into the assasination by television and the other mass media. It might be argued that this event shaped the face of televison journalism for decades to come. The story had everything: drama, tragedy, conspiracy theories and the live televised murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Few of us who were alive on that fateful day in Dallas cannot remember what he or she was doing at the exact moment the news was first heard.
That Don DeLillo decided to treat the event in a "fictionalized" manner gave him great latitude to combine well documented facts with the novelist's own creative talents. The result is absolutely brilliant. Although DeLillo centers his narrative around Oswald, he uses real and invented characters to give his book the feel of a novel while at the same time the immediacy of journalistic reporting. Although the reader is well aware of what is to come, DeLillo builds up the suspence by his masterful manipulation of time. He interweaves chapters that deal with Oswald's early life with chapters that are in "present" time as well as with chapters dealing with the period immediately preceeding the assasination. As the reader moves through the book, Oswald and the plotters all move inexorably toward that day on which their fortunes were to meet. By the time of this meeting DeLillo has so developed each of the characters to a point that their actions and the scenario that the author presents are completly believable. Particularly impressive is the way the author developed some of the subsidiary characters such as the disaffected Cuban, Raymo; Oswald's mother, Marguerite; and the G. Gordon Liddy clone, Mackey. The testimony of Marguerite before the Warren Commission is one of the most riveting pieces of monologue I have read, completely defining the speaker's character and all her misconceptions, tenderness, and cunningness.
Thankfully, DeLillo avoids falling into the conspiracy theory trap and he neither preaches a particular point of view nor uses the hindsight of history to draw conclusions from events which followed the assasination (as did Oliver Stone). That there are among us "men in small rooms" who deliriously inflate their own importance and who by a single act of violence can insure their place in history is all too real. DeLillo sees it as his task not to try to "furnish factual answers", but only to "fill some of the blank spaces in the know record" so that these misguided individuals might be better understood. He has succeeded in his task.
Rating: 4
Summary: Delillo's Fourth Best Novel
Comment: A fun read, vintage Delillo, loaded with what we've come to expect from an American literary master.
A must read for any Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist.
Behind (in order) Underworld, Mao II, and White Noise, Libra is Delillo's fourth best novel.
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Title: UNDERWORLD: A NOVEL by Don DeLillo ISBN: 0684848155 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 09 July, 1998 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Mao II by Don DeLillo ISBN: 0140152741 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: May, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: White Noise (Contemporary American Fiction) by Don DeLillo ISBN: 0140077022 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: April, 1991 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Body Artist : A Novel by Don DeLillo ISBN: 074320395X Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 06 February, 2001 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Cosmopolis: A Novel by Don DeLillo ISBN: 0743244249 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 14 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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