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Don DeLillo

W

warm_enema

New Member
I finished Valparaiso, the other day. It wasn't as good as Underworld, but oh-so-much easier to get through. Still a wonderful afternoon read to keep you up at night.

Any thoughts on this work, or the man?

A passage I enjoyed:

" CHORUS
Please make your selection from the following menu
Then Place the mask over your nose and mouth
For automated flight information
Has anyone had access
Press or say one
Has anyone told you confidentially
Was there ever a moment on the foggy tarmac
When you thought that nothing mattered"
 
never read his any of his stuff, enema. my friends keep recommending him. they're all smarter and more clever than I am though ...

most of them work in bookstores.
 
I read The Body Artist which was pretty good. A nice length as well, made it easy to read. One day I'll get round to reading Underworld, but two things put me off at the moment: 1) I have little interest in baseball; and 2) its length.

Skycat
 
bobby, I doubt that. Don't listen to the bombastic fuckers. And besides, I'd be willing to bet they've all got paper-cuts on their genitals from to many readings of Grendel.

Skycat, I'm not a big fan of baseball either. Only the first part has a huge baseball theme. As for the length...consider how much money you'll save on bathroom reading material.
 
warm_enema said:
Has anyone told you confidentially
Was there ever a moment on the foggy tarmac
When you thought that nothing mattered"
Click to expand...

oh, what have you been reading recently, Warm_enema? :)
 
I finished Henry Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, awhile ago. Now I'm reading Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel or The Five Books, it goes by either title. :)
 
Henry Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare-------

ah, he wrote that Tropical of Cancer. is this one, the one you finished, about WW2? it was rated 4 stars. umm, may i ask what do you think about it?

good weekend. :)
 
He's a fabulous writer. I read White Noise over the Christmas holiday. I just picked up End Zone, which sounds fantastic. A football player becomes obsessed with the similarities between nuclear conflict and football, during the football season. haha, Delillo is great. I need to check out Underworld, which is supposed to be his biggest one. I like all these other ones so this one should really be good.
 
I LOVED White Noise but I thought Underworld was a bore. It was too long and it didn't have the constant zingers White Noise delivered.

Examples from White Noise:

"'They've grown comfortable with their money,' I said. 'They genuinely believe they're entitled to it. This conviction gives them a kind of rude health. They glow a little.'
'I have trouble imagining death at that income level,' she said."

Another one went something like this:
"No man can escape his own data."
 
I really enjoyed White Noise but haven't read any others yet. Even when I wasn't quite sure what was going on in the book, I remained entranced by it and wanted to keep reading.
 
Funny, I actually bought a paperback of Underworld today!
Anyhoo, I've read "The Body Artist" which I didn't think much of as I read it, but I find that it has staid in my head to some extent. Not the plot so much as small things like the Finnish webcam (a strong enough memory that I thought I was remembering it from a movie)

I've also read White Noise, albeit a Norwegian translation, and found that to be much stronger. What I don't see many mention about it is how funny it really is. The discussions have a sort of absurd quality to them at times that I -hope- is intended to be funny at the same time as he gets some things said (but then, I also found "Waiting for Godot" to be a riot; others tell me that I'm an idiot who obviously didn't omg understand it OH NO!)
A friend of mine read it at the same time as me and came out of it rather less positively inclined. His biggest complaint being that the kids talked like adults, but frankly, I'm not sure if even the adults did; their discussions were too damn odd and silly. Maybe I'm actually actually liking things that might arguably be faults - but what do I care what the author might've intended.
What stands out most clearly from the novel are two things: the comedic climax of the advertisment white noise, namely the kid contendtedly muttering some car brand in her sleep, and that stupid discussion at the start where the wife talked about how she hates it when erotic stories talk about men "entering" a woman.

It's safe to say that if I were to take an arts degree, my literature teachers would despise me.
 
Yeah, White Noise is one of my favorite books; after you read it you think, "Don Delillo hit the nail right on the head--the American culture is really that screwed up.
 
Skycat said:
I read The Body Artist which was pretty good. A nice length as well, made it easy to read. One day I'll get round to reading Underworld, but two things put me off at the moment: 1) I have little interest in baseball; and 2) its length.

Skycat
Click to expand...

'Underworld' isn't a baseball lover's book. I have just about zero tolerance for baseball, something that springs from my single season of playing the game. I had a zero batting average (I hit a couple, but fouls apparently don't count). The coach said the ball couldn't hurt me, but being hurt with the ball was just about the only way I got on base, because I generally closed my eyes and swung in terror at anything, even pitches that were scarcely aimed at the backstop. And my fielding, if anything, was worse.

That opening scene, you do get a sense of baseball as the consuming passion and unifying cultural force it once was. Poor black kid playing hookie and gate-jumping has some common ground with a middle class white guy who took the afternoon off. But aside from the mythological ball coming back and some other scenes set around latter-day ball games, it's really not a baseball book.

As far as the length thing goes, I totally understand. But it's a lot of fun. The waste management stories, the scatalogical train ride into central Europe, the saintly manifestation on the billboard seen only in the headlight of the subway train in the Bronx, it's a wild ride and worth every page IMHO.

Øystein said:
Anyhoo, I've read "The Body Artist" which I didn't think much of as I read it, but I find that it has staid in my head to some extent. Not the plot so much as small things like the Finnish webcam (a strong enough memory that I thought I was remembering it from a movie)
Click to expand...

I didn't enjoy 'The Body Artist' as much as I did 'Cosmopolis.' But then:

Øystein said:
I've also read White Noise, albeit a Norwegian translation, and found that to be much stronger. What I don't see many mention about it is how funny it really is. The discussions have a sort of absurd quality to them at times that I -hope- is intended to be funny at the same time as he gets some things said (but then, I also found "Waiting for Godot" to be a riot; others tell me that I'm an idiot who obviously didn't omg understand it OH NO!)
Click to expand...

I have no idea how DeLillo translates. But I have always thought 'Godot' was funny and Eric's limousine in 'Cosmopolis' is hilarious. I laughed to tears in the scene where he's getting his daily physical, including postate exam, while seducing one of his advisors without touching her.
 
Chixulub said:
...it's a wild ride and worth every page IMHO.QUOTE]
Click to expand...
Chixulub said:
I agree with you, Chixulub; it's really not a book about baseball at all, although you can tell that he really does love the game. (And at first I thought it was going to be a book about a baseball!)

Underworld may be one of those books that's worth a reread, because there's such a lot going on in there. I've got Cosmopolis lined up for next -- or for soon, anyway... but maybe after a short breather, I think.

I can hardly believe I have only recently discovered DeLillo. He's quite the writer; I especially admire his dialogue, which is incredibly well done.

We bounced around a lot (in Underworld), visiting the decades between the fifties and the nineties, and his feel for each of those time frames seemed flawless to me.

From the book:

"...you’re missing something and you don’t know what it is. You’re lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash. You used to have the same dimensions as the observable universe. Now you’re a lost speck. You look at old cars and recall a purpose, a destination."
Click to expand...
 
I've read Libra, which I found hugely impressive and almost as bewildering - though, as JFK assassination conspiracies go, a damn sight easier to follow than Ellroy's American Tabloid - but nothing else until now (if we don't count the first fifty pages of Underworld: everyone's read those...).

So now I'm a third of the way through his first novel, Americana (1971), and I'm hugely impressed. It puts me in mind of Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Heller's Something Happened and Ellis's American Psycho, without disgracing the memory of any of them (indeed, Americana came before two of them). However it's in one sense better written than any of those: the sense, that is, which applauds the burnished, rhythmic, superprecise prose of someone like Martin Amis. Which I admit includes me. Whether it will turn out to have any content to match the surface brilliance, I can't yet tell - at the minute the subject matter is male modern-life angst with all the contemporary trimmings, blah blah - but frankly I'm not sure I care. He really is good.
 
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