Libra (Penguin Modern Classics)

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DeLillo's concerns about the position of the novelist and the novel in a media- and terrorist-dominated society were made clear in his next novel, Mao II (1991). Influenced by the events surrounding the fatwa placed on Salman Rushdie and the intrusion of the press into the life of J. D. Salinger, Mao II earned DeLillo significant critical praise from, among others, John Banville and Thomas Pynchon. [6] It won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992. permitted him to go where the facts could not. ''In this version, we know how it happened, so the novel, working within history, is also outside it, correcting, clearing up, finding balances and rhythms. I think readers are The book follows two related but separate narrative threads: episodes from Oswald's life from his childhood until the assassination and his death, and the actions of other participants in the conspiracy. A secondary parallel story follows Nicholas Branch, a CIA archivist of more recent times assigned the monumental task of piecing together the disparate fragments of Kennedy's death. Libra received critical acclaim and earned DeLillo the inaugural Irish Times International Fiction Prize, as well as a nomination for the 1988 National Book Award for Fiction. In November 2015, DeLillo received the 2015 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 66th National Book Awards Ceremony. The ceremony was held on November 8 in New York City, and he was presented his award by Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan, a writer profoundly influenced by DeLillo's work. [59] In his acceptance speech, DeLillo reflected upon his career as a reader as well as a writer, recalling examining his personal book collection and feeling a profound sense of personal connection to literature: "Here I'm not the writer at all, I'm a grateful reader. When I look at my bookshelves I find myself gazing like a museum-goer." [60] In February 2016, DeLillo was the guest of honor at an academic conference dedicated to his work, "Don DeLillo: Fiction Rescues History", a three-day event at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. [61]

At the end of the novel, Oswald is buried under an alias in a grave in Fort Worth in a small ceremony attended by his immediate family members. Nor presumably would you want to. You’re right. Will I be looking at the presidential debate? I may be watching baseball.asked if it's true, as the novel states, that President Kennedy's brain has been missing from the National Archives for more than 20 years: ''This, evidently, is fact.'') Mr. DeLillo relied heavily on the This section needs to be updated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. ( January 2023)

did she want her Alpo. He parked in a lot across the street from the Western Union office. He opened the trunk, got out the dog food and a can opener and fixed the dog her meal, which he left on the front seat. He took two thousand dollars The huddled uphill arrangement of whitelime boxes, the street mazes and archways, small churches with blue talc domes. Laundry hung in the walled gardens, always this sense of realized space, common objects, domestic life going on in that sculpted hush. Stairways bent around houses, disappearing. verbalize it either way. In other way of saying it, the evidence was weak.'' Both of these remarks were uttered in private - not recorded, we have to assume, but created, or at least re-created from hearsay, by a writer with This breakthrough of form in Libra produces a stunning, dark lyricism. It is present in the passages told through Oswald’s eyes: “Crowd of about a thousand. Walker stood up there in his tall Stetson and moaned and groaned about the United Nations. Clap clap. The UN was an active element in the worldwide communist conspiracy. Clap clap. Lee slipped into a seat about midway down the aisle.” It is equally visible in other sections, a paranoid, postmodernist poetry of analogies and metaphors and allegories in the service of domination and concealment:

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DeLillo's work displays elements of both modernism and postmodernism. [68] [69] (Though it is worth noting that DeLillo himself claims not to know if his work is postmodern: "It is not [postmodern]. I'm the last guy to ask. If I had to classify myself, it would be in the long line of modernists, from James Joyce through William Faulkner and so on. That has always been my model.") [70] He has said DeLillo was born on November 20, 1936, in New York City and grew up in an Italian Catholic family with ties to Molise, Italy, in an Italian-American neighborhood of the Bronx not far from Arthur Avenue. [6] Reflecting on his childhood in the Bronx, DeLillo said he was "always out in the street. As a little boy I whiled away most of my time pretending to be a baseball announcer on the radio. I could think up games for hours at a time. There were eleven of us in a small house, but the close quarters were never a problem. I didn't know things any other way. We always spoke English and Italian all mixed up together. My grandmother, who lived in America for fifty years, never learned English." [7] slant forward from distant sources to be channeled into a single moment in history: six seconds in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

DeLillo's vision never flinches, never looks away, which may be why his work can seem cold in its unsentimental approach to human horror. We see it in The Names, filming terrorist murders; in White Noise, separating Hitler from his actions through the academic fetish of Hitler studies; in Falling Man, where the book is centred on the iconography of one of the men who jumped from the twin towers. His books riff on cults and death and mass murder, which are a part of life. "Life must become more anxious, more surreal, more image-bound," says a character in Mao II; once again, DeLillo saw what was coming. DeLillo has stated that Libra is not a nonfiction novel due to its inclusion of fictional characters and speculative plot elements. [1] Nevertheless, the broad outline of Oswald's life, including his teenage years in New York City, his military service, his use of the alias "Hidell", [2] and his defection to the Soviet Union are all historically accurate. Both the Warren Commission and the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations implicated Oswald in the attempted assassination of General Walker. [2] [3] Many other characters in the novel, including FBI agent Guy Banister, Oswald's friend George de Mohrenschildt, and his wife Marina were real people. In an author's note at the close of the book, DeLillo writes that he has "made no attempt to furnish factual answers to any questions raised by the assassination." [1] I’ve obviously been reading too much Don DeLillo. Speaking of which, can I ask you a left-field “Ratner’s Star” question? I always wondered how much Thomas Pynchon influenced that book. To me it feels stylistically closer to his work than the rest of your own. My goodness. I don’t know if I can answer that question. I was enthusiastic about the Pynchon of that period. Did it have a direct influence? It probably did have some sort of influence, but I don’t know quite how to answer that.

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I have another style question: There’s an argument to be made that a book like “Zero K” embodies what might be thought of as late style. Do you see any validity in thinking about it in that way? When I think of “Zero K,” to the extent that I can remember it, I think visually. One of the characters, Jeff, walking along long corridors and then the secret desert compound and the underground chamber, cryonic suspension, people hoping to resume life at some point. There are famous athletes who did that. oddly nonprivate in tone: ''I won't answer questions about my family but I will say this for publication. Emigration isn't easy. I don't recommend it to everyone.'' His main ambition is ''to

like.''''Contemporary American life,''''fears and aspirations'' - we hear these phrases uttered in a slightly self-conscious voice, as if he's trying them on for size before In a February 21, 2010, interview with The Times, DeLillo reaffirmed his belief in the validity and importance of the novel in a technology- and media-driven age, offering a more optimistic opinion of the future of the novel than his contemporary Philip Roth had done in a recent interview: a homeless man who himself could not grip things tightly and hold them fast, whose soul-scarred loneliness and rage led him to invent an American moment that echoes down the decades.'' That Mr. DeLillo has been able to make chose the most obvious possibility - that the assassination was engineered by anti-Castro elements - simply as a way of being faithful to what we know of history. Will we ever know the truth? I don't know. But if someday evidenceOn January 29, 2013, Variety announced that Luca Guadagnino would direct an adaptation of The Body Artist called Body Art. [52] On April 26, 2013, it was announced that DeLillo had received the inaugural Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction (formerly the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction), with the presentation of the award due to take place during the 2013 Library of Congress National Book Festival, Sept. 21–22, 2013. [3] [53] [54] [55] In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of JFK will galvanize the nation against Communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped. Kennedy's life that would implicate Castro supporters? And what if they seized upon Lee Harvey Oswald - a onetime defector to Russia, sole member of his own unauthorized branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee - as the man to shoulder And how about the most important character of all? Lee Harvey Oswald has always seemed both much, much too familiar (his rabbity, weak-jawed face staring out of the grimmer sections of every city in America) and endlessly mysterious. To Mr. DeLillo's