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Title: Cosmopolis: A Novel by Don DeLillo ISBN: 0-7432-4424-9 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 14 April, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.18 (44 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Some sentences worth reading; whole book is not
Comment: I went to see DeLillo read from this at the Steppenwolf in Chicago and left half way through. A friend who had attended the reading with me had bought a copy of the book. He read it then passed it on to me. I thought I'd try to read because I've like DeLillo's earlier books (except End Zone).
The characters don't interest me, they're flat. All in all, the book has the quality of a take myself too seriously TV series and a shock-fest like American Psycho. This one seems to borrow too much from the saccharine world of Bret Easton Ellis but I don't think that DeLillo really lives in this kind of world (thank heaven's for that). Easton's work is overwrought and it seems as of late that he's written himself out. Compared to other DeLillo works, this is lackluster. He's such a fantastic writer, the sentences he contructs are fantastic. Such a shame to waste that talent on a tale such as this.
Rating: 4
Summary: A Yen is not just a unit of currency.
Comment: The dismissive reviews I read of Cosmopolis made me hesitate to buy it. After reading a library copy, I bought Cosmopolis to read a second time. I figure buying the book is the best vote cast in its favor.
Cosmopolis is not a facile entertainment. It requires work on the reader's part. Delillo is exploring territory that, by its nature, eludes description. The mind has well-evolved strategies for perceiving and reacting to the world; non-rational strategies largely inaccessible to waking consciousness; strategies that worked for millennia, now effectively shunted aside and concealed from view - even while they operate continuously in clandestine ways. How do you view or talk about this hidden stuff? You can't name it because language by nature is rational and this, by its nature, is not.
Delillo gives us a metaphor. Cosmopolis. It is incongruous. It doesn't match our world or its usual fictionalized portraits. The reader tries to fit the world s/he knows with the metaphor - it can't be done, it's incongruous. But in trying, the reader starts to sense an opening into something that is neither our world nor its metaphor Cosmopolis, something rising out of the tension between them.
The book is an exploration into the tension between the normal surface of things and an animating underworld we know is there but hardly know. Reading, rereading Cosmopolis, thinking about it is like opening a door in the mind that leads to rooms not often visited.
Rating: 3
Summary: A Pastiche of Fascinating Set Pieces
Comment: DeLillo's latest novel continues his tradition of being more interested in the ideas his characters represent than in the characters themselves. This is not necessarily a criticism; it just means that one must come to his novels with different expectations. DeLillo is a master of writing brilliant scenes, and often likes to lead off a book with a particularly wonderful set piece. In Mao II, it was a Moonie mass wedding; in Underworld, it was the fateful baseball game in 1954 which decided the World Series and which occurred simultaneously with the explosion of the Soviet Union's first H-Bomb.
Cosmopolis does not lead off with such a set piece, but contains many wonderfully executed scenes, such as the anarchist riot, the funeral cortege for a dead rapper named Brother Fez, and the movie shoot involving hundreds of naked people lying in the street.
But for all the brilliance of these individual scenes, the whole is somewhat unconvincing; characters talk to each other in abstractions, their actions not always believable. In particular, the scene where Eric Packer shoots another character in an off-handed, impulsive manner did not fit the person who in other scenes shows compassion, for example, for his limo driver. That scene in particular felt like the author's hand forcing the action out of a desire to derive delicious irony from it, but without regard to whether it fit what the character would actually do.
Yet despite these faults, this book is so compelling in some of its scenes that it is definitely worthy of reading and reflection.
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Title: Bay of Souls : A Novel by Robert Stone ISBN: 0395963494 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 22 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: The Fortress of Solitude : A Novel by Jonathan Lethem ISBN: 0385500696 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Libra (Contemporary American Fiction) by Don DeLillo ISBN: 0140156046 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: May, 1991 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Vernon God Little: A 21st Century Comedy in the Presence of Death by D. B. C. Pierre ISBN: 1841954608 Publisher: Canongate Books Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: Drop City by T. Coraghessan Boyle, Boyle T C. ISBN: 0670031720 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 24 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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