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Loading... Underworld (1997)by Don DeLillo
Nick, who killed a man as a teenager, struggles with his ordinary life and the times in which he lives; the ball from Bobby Thompson's' home run links the past to the present  FKarr | Apr 4, 2013 |  There should be a "read-enough" shelf. I do not like this book. I didn't like it while I was reading it, I'm not liking it while I'm thinking about it, I resent it sitting on my bedside table taking up vaulable book real estate. I cannot recall what it is about and I don't think I even understood while I was actively reading it but it's been so long I just don't know. The writing, as it were, is on the wall. I'm giving up on this terrible, terrible book. To put this giving-up in context, this book is the only - the ONLY - book I haven't completed once it got onto my list. I don't know what it says about me that I will waste my time reading complete crap even after I realize the completeness of it crappiness, but it definitely says something about this book that even I will not waste any more of my time on it. Don DeLillo, you should be ashamed of yourself. (  ) cat-ballou | Apr 2, 2013 | (one of 24 books found today at 2nd hand shop...24 for $10!)  velvetink | Mar 31, 2013 | disposte in ordine apparentemente casuale, a dipingere personaggi che con la loro vita svelano piccole tessere spazio-temporali che proseguendo con la lettura s'incastrano tra loro dipingendo un affresco unico dell'America attraverso piccole quotidianità e grandi gesti... dell'arte e della spazzatura... Arenata a poche pagine dalla fine, i frammenti si sono mescolati troppo e non riesco a capire se fanno ancora parte dello stesso puzzle, la lettura è diventata decisamente faticosa, complice anche la lettura trascinatasi nei mesi. Questa confusione mi ha fatto scendere l'iniziale entusiasmo, il finale sembra un abbozzo incompiuto, gli appunti di un racconto più che la degna conclusione di un bel libro. (  ) vanlilith | Jul 25, 2012 | I first experienced the work of Don DeLillo in a college class on postmodern American literature. White Noise was easily my least favorite of the novels we read that semester...and yet, for some reason, I keep coming back for more of DeLillo's work. This is the fourth book of his that I've read, and it suffers from the same problems I have with each of the others. First off, DeLillo's style always leaves me with the feeling that he's just trying too hard. Yes, this does result in some amazing prose, but only in places, and not enough, in my opinion, to justify the off-puttingness of the rest of it. Most writers edit their work to make it more clear; I feel like DeLillo edits his work to make it more obscure. I feel like he's more concerned with the language than he is with the story. There's a balance to be found there, and he just rarely strikes it for me. On a somewhat related note is that I just never really feel like DeLillo's characters are real people. For me, good literature begins with vivid, real characters--not necessarily likable, but believable, flesh and blood humans in all their glory and fallibility. That's something I've never found in any of DeLillo's work. Now, I know that one theme of postmodern literature is disconnectedness, so maybe that's intentional on his part. I can respect that, but it leaves me cold. I get to the end of the book, and all I really feel is "eh." Now, all that said, there's definitely something about this book. It has a grand scope, painting a picture of America from the beginning of the Cold War through the beginning of the Internet age. There's no questioning its ambition. It also has some interesting things to say about waste, about war, about culture and environment, and about threads that run through our lives. It was worth reading; I guess I was just hoping for more from a book I had heard so many good things about. I think I'm going to give DeLillo one more chance. I haven't read any of his short fiction, so I'm looking forward to The Angel Esmeralda, which, from the title, I'm guessing has some connections to Underworld. Hopefully his short stories will grab me in a way his novels have failed to do. ( ) jonwwil | Oct 4, 2011 |
'"Underworld" is a victim of its own ambition: by trying to cover such a wide range of characters and situations, DeLillo loses track of some of them' ... 'Despite its faults DeLillo has created an ambitious and powerful novel...' This "is his best novel and perhaps that most elusive of creatures, a great American novel."
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0684848155, Paperback)While Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the cold war and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying. Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter--the "shot heard around the world"--and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand."It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball, and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria. Through fragments and interlaced stories--including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others--DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled. (retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:50:48 -0500) A 1950s teenage hood from New York is transformed by the Jesuits into a respectable man, managing hazardous waste. A portrait of the decade from the viewpoint of the garbage industry. |
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