The Names

Like looking into the face of God. What can you possibly say? How the hell do you describe the pieces? Describe the fit? It's a weird alchemy. Delillo's prose is (as always) weirdly flat-footed and purposefully awkward, but somehow, he cuts it in a way that's searing and prophetic and Old Testament and just gorgeous in its steady, matter-of-fact pacing.

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 show more 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. show less

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.

DeLillo scrive questo tomo dopo anni passati nelle stesse zone descritte nel testo: Medio Oriente, India, Grecia. Passa attraverso quei luoghi con occhi che spesso potrebbero ricordare le sequenze silenziose e profonde di Malick; descrive paesaggi e stati d'animo con la grazia di un illuminato; affronta un tema assolutamente improbabile per la razionalita' occidentale, ma del tutto coerente con quelle terre medio-orientali (l'uso di Google Maps per cercare quei luoghi nel mondo è stato illuminante).
Non mi è parso un thriller nell'accezione comune del termine, ma lascia ad ogni modo un senso di inquietudine, di sprazzi di verità paurose - verita' malate, ma non per questo false.

Testo lento, avvolto su se' stesso, difficile.

Polvere che show more copre un rubino, che a volte si raggruma e va tolta con il bulino, a volte basta un soffio.
A volte cosi' attaccata che ci vorrebbe lo stesso sguardo di DeLillo per riconoscere questa scoria come rubino stesso. show less

3.5 rounded up. Loved the writing and was fully engrossed for the first half of the book. There isn't much plot but things petered out by the end.

I like DeLillo quite a bit, and I don't mind "plotless" books. But man, I had to drop this one. The writing, while great, bordered on rambling in spots, and DeLillo's knack for making all of his characters (including a child) all sound exactly the same really stuck out here. I'll hopefully go back to this sometime down the road, but not any time soon.

First DeLillo book on recommendation by a friend. I enjoyed the writing style. I also enjoyed the ambling-ness of the story. It has a strange obsessive-nostalgic element to it that works well.

Reason read: 1001 special event; word of the month, May 2024
This was not my favorite DeLillo novel. I had a hard time finding a reason to like this one. It is a story that had potential and I liked some aspects but mostly I did not like this one. There are themes of language, marriage, religion, politics, writing. There is a bit of mystery but it’s not enough. This just wan’t my thing. I d think the “politics” was spot on.