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Loading... The Names (1982)by Don DeLillo
It has been a long time since I read this book so perhaps I shouldn't review it, but the negative review posted gave me pause and I felt like including a bit of a counterbalance. A very uncomfortable, foreboding, experience which I can still relive some 15 or so years later. An exploration into magical thinking which is at the core of all religions and most pathologies. Like going through survival training. Glad I did it but wouldn't necessarily want to repeat it. I would suggest trying "White Noise" for an equally profound but less difficult read. A miss for me: I eagerly began reading The Names, my first Delillo novel, assuming I would be adding him to my rotation of can't-miss authors. I agree with other posters, Delillo's characters are very well developed, complicated and believable, and Delillo demonstrates true skill as a writer. Unfortunately, as a coherent story, this book was a miss for me. I consider myself a sophisticated enough reader to handle most fiction but this novel was confusing - perhaps esoteric? It was hard at times to figure out who was speaking to whom and to remember characters that were introduced earlier in the novel. I plodded through hoping to find links that would pull the story together but they eluded me. I won't rule out giving Delillo another try, however, based on my experience with The Names, I'm in no rush. no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0679722955, Paperback)Set against the backdrop of a lush and exotic Greece, The Names is considered the book which began to drive "sharply upward the size of his readership" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Among the cast of DeLillo's bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator's estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses. A thriller, a mystery, and still a moving examination of family, loss, and the amorphous and magical potential of language itself, The Names stands with any of DeLillo's more recent and highly acclaimed works."The Names not only accurately reflects a portion of our contemporary world but, more importantly, creates an original world of its own."--Chicago Sun-Times "DeLillo sifts experience through simultaneous grids of science and poetry, analysis and clear sight, to make a high-wire prose that is voluptuously stark."--Village Voice Literary Supplement "DeLillo verbally examines every state of consciousness from eroticism to tourism, from the idea of America as conceived by the rest of the world to the idea of the rest of the world as conceived by America, from mysticism to fanaticism."--New York Times (retrieved from Amazon Wed, 20 Apr 2011 12:50:03 -0400) Set against the backdrop of a lush and exotic Greece, The Names is considered the book which began to drive "sharply upward the size of his readership" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Among the cast of DeLillo's bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator's estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses. A thriller, a mystery, and still a moving examination of family, loss, and the amorphous and magical potential of language itself, The Names stands with any of DeLillo's more recent and highly acclaimed works.… (more) |
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Reading THE NAMES is like reading the original template for the world. It's the Rosetta Stone for, y'know, civilization as we know it, NBD. Delillo has this insane, skull-pounding virtuoso talent for distilling into a single, effortless throw-away parenthetical observation a topic that's amassed an electron cloud of buzzing contradictory arguments and thoughts and pages and articles and column inches.
And that talent is humbling and catastrophic and you turn the last page and it feels like a privilege. A grand unearned privilege to sit and bask in the interrogation-lamp brilliance of this book and watch Delillo just peel away skein after skein of, well, what DOESN'T this book cover? Of every layer of human interaction: love, affairs, children, terrorism, tourism, money, murder, marriage, death. All of it. Just atomized and scrutinized then blown away. For you. Jesus Christ, this was good good good. (