Underworld

I love reading James Wood on the novel. For me he’s up there with Virginia Woolf as a critic who genuinely enriches the experience of reading the novel. Even though he often denigrates authors I love. Don Delillo for example. Underworld for Wood was gratuitously obsessed with paranoia as if this was a concern peculiar to only Delillo. But one could say paranoia was a state of mind invented by America. Did it even exist in the 19th century? The Cold War saw the invention of paranoia as a mass m [...]

seriously, why does everyone suck this book's dick so much? this book was recommended to me by an ex (who also recommended zuleika dobson and the joke, so he had a good track record until then) who knew how much i liked infinite jest so he thought i would like this one. and if i only liked infinite jest because it was a long book written by a white male, then i suppose i would have liked this book. but i didn't, so it must be something else i'm drawn to in the wallace.i remember i was reading th [...]

THE PILGRIM 'S HEART IS LIGHT AT THE COMMENCEMENT OF HIS JOURNEYSo I will strap on my backpack and don sturdy walking boots, an oxygen tank might be useful, and a supply of plasters and animal pelts - and then I will begin to scale the North Face of Modern American Literature. Let's see how far I get before I fall off one of its jagged cliffs or collapse choking with one of Mr DeLillo's sentences wrapped around my neck.BUT DISCOURAGEMENTS ARISE UNBIDDENUpdate - Not even on page 100 and I have a [...]

i've only put down three books in my entire life. the first was Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," which i absolutely loved but got terribly sick of after about 700 pages of the same goddamn philosophy being crammed down my throat. (which sounds like its awful, but i really did adore those first two thirds)e second was a speed reading book. it wasn't a very quick read, and i got borede third is now Don DeLillo's Underworld, supposedly one of the greatest masterpieces of 20th century literature.i have [...]

People married, were born, and died in the time it took me to read this book. A kid sitting next to me on a plane commented "that's the fattest book I've ever seen. What's it about?" I told him "I have no idea--I'm only 580 pages into it." Having finished I still don't know what it was about but reading it was an extraordinary experience. The novella that introduces the book is perfect and complete in itself. What follows is discursive and ephemeral like some new kind of music. Reading it was li [...]

Submundo es una obra autodestructiva, decadente, regresiva, un suicidio literario que moldea a su antojo el espacio-temporal inalterable desde lo real pero posible desde las letras. Don DeLillo nos ha obsequiado un magnum opus que recorre cincuenta años de historia, manipulando cuerpos solitarios con un temor inquebrantable hacia la muerte y la falta de respuestas, que va a hacer del lector un dolido testigo de lo que no quiere ver; todo esto a partir de un juego narrativo en el que el autor no [...]

I'm surprised to see how many people here had the exact same reaction I did. They start reading, they find a few bits that seem quite gripping and well-written, they lose momentum, and they stop. Some hypotheses:- None of us are smart enough to get the point.- There is a clear point, but you have to reach the end to discover what it is, and we didn't have the requisite fortitude. (Also, it must be like The Mousetrap: readers who find out are sworn not to reveal it).- The point is that life feels [...]

Elegy for Left Hand AloneTitle of Part 2 [*4.5 stars*] [footnote added on 10/21]I just read what to me is likely the most far-reaching American novel in terms of its scope, spanning the 1950s through the 1990s and covering a wide range of American topics, from baseball to solid waste disposal, U.S. nuclear weapons and the Soviet atomic weapons program (i.e nuclear proliferation), guns, graffiti, the U.S. Roman Catholic Church, the Cuban Missile Crisis, drug addiction, AIDS, marital infidelity, a [...]

I'm on page 387 of Underworld. Please. Help me decide if I should finish. Yeah you. Here's a few things I think are better than Underworld:1. The song Born in the USA by Springsteen2. The blonds on the Danish women's Olympic curling team3. Opening a third beer4. A clean stove5. Any 5 pages of War and Peace6. The Greek flag7. When I catch an attractive woman looking at me8. Picking my teams for the NCAA basketball tournament9. An afro10. Any 15 minutes of Shawshank Redemption11. Deja vu12. A good [...]

I felt like this was one of those books where you kind of start getting drunk on the words and then you begin to think everything is super deep and has about 100 meanings and everything is interconnected. Then you start reading every sentence about 5 times and get lost in a daydream about how everything is related to waste, nuclear energy, more waste, and nuns. When you finish the book you feel like you've gone on a journey but it's hard to talk about it and your not really sure exactly what hap [...]

I thoroughly enjoyed Underworld by DeLillo. I was a bit scared of it for years, but after having successfully tackled two other post-modern über-works Infinite Jest and Gravity's Rainbow, I decidedly it was time (admittedly, I have not been able to bring myself to attempt The Recognitions by Gaddis yet). I enjoyed the writing style and loved the story. The background of the postwar 50s and 60s was interesting and I loved the image of the open art exposition in the desert (no spoilers). It was m [...]

The central metaphor in Underworld, as I saw it, revolves around trash. One of the main characters, Nick Shay, works for a waste-disposal company. No matter how many different recycling bins his family divides their waste into (seven and counting), it cannot all be reclaimed. The trash builds up – and what holds true for the physical also holds true for the personal and the historical. No matter how we might try to reprocess, recast,or ignore our history/memory, our past accumulates, and the w [...]

I giorni del disordineUn homerun e la bomba atomica: l’inizio della guerra fredda coincide con la fine della partita, due eventi collegati da un caso che diventa destino e che innesca, in un certo senso, il meccanismo della trama. Ma, come De Lillo dimostra poeticamente, le trame ci portano sempre verso la morte. Mentre l'incompletezza si rivela in un legame d'amore, un evento misterioso e traumatico innesca una narrazione alla rovescia, un percorso a ritroso nel tempo segnato da complessità [...]

This is now my favourite novel alongside Blood Meridian, 2666 and Infinite Jest. I'm too fatigued and mentally exhausted to write a decent review now, which fact is a shame. Underworld is, to use a quote from Roberto Bolaño's 2666 to illustrate my take on this DeLillo novel, one of "the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown."Those who will tell you that White Noise is DeLillo's best, or some other short, compact, precise DeLillo work, "want to watch the gr [...]

There is no review here. I’m merely registering a score.It’s been years since I last picked up a DeLillo. This one’s been waiting far too long. I rewatched the Cosmopolis movie last week. It’s not good. Underworld is pretty fine.My motivation was this. There are Underworld detractors on gr who I’m almost certain should have known better. There are Underworld boosters on gr who have never (not quite) convinced me. So I set out to do that thing which I rarely need to bother doing myself, [...]

Don DeLillo is a first-rate modern writer: his clipped and adamantine use of words, his compacted sentences and digitalized detail, all come together to tell his stories in a taut and invigorating manner—and he can dissect the quirks and pathologies that are running through our culture, probe the leavenings that have adumbrated modern societies racing towards the western horizon, with impressive acumen. However, I am not convinced that he is a first-rate characterizer, and this aspect of his w [...]

With every DeLillo novel I read, I realize that Underworld is the pinnacle of the man's artistry. Every novel he wrote beforehand leads up to it, hints at it, contains thematic foreshadowings of it, and the sixty-odd pages of Cosmopolis I've read are so far from this that it seems DeLillo understood there was no going back to his older style, because he'd already perfected it. This, of course, invites the possibility that DeLillo could release another masterpiece in his later style, but with the [...]

An excellent example of the critical consensus being just plain wrong. Underworld is bloated, confused, and turgid - yet critics who should have known better drowned it in praise. I think this is due to a number of factors. One, pedigree: DeLillo is a critical darling, deservedly so. Two, Heft: just like in movies, critics assume size equals importance, and thus the longer it takes to get through something, the more that something must have to say. It's 854 pages, 600 of which could have been cu [...]

Seems like to most people, Delillo is a love-or-hate proposition. His pace is either relaxed, or his books are boring as hell. His prose is gorgeous, or it's stilted and awkward (or just plain bad?). His dialogue is pitch perfect, or it's unrealistic and/or wooden. His philosophical musings are either profound or so pretentious as to be laughable. His plots are either nonexistent in such a way that you don't even notice, or they're nonexistent in such a way that you want to throw the book at the [...]

Despite the award nominations and the praise from great contemporary authors like David Mitchell and David Foster Wallace, I didn’t go into this book knowing much about it. Pomo, writerly, and long: those were my only preconceptions. Now I can at least pretend to see what the fuss is about. The book starts with a resounding shot, as in the one “Heard Round the World” – a phenomenal account of the 1951 playoff game where the Giants took the pennant from the Dodgers thanks to Bobby Thompso [...]

Un mondo in pericoloUnderworld è un libro sovrassaturo di contenuti. E' ricco, straripante di riferimenti, di fatti, di concetti, di pensieri, di riflessioni, di arte moderna, di storia. Una carrellata di eventi che non segue apparentemente un filo logico e dove l'ago del tempo scorre su diverse direttrici.Nel 1951, più o meno all'inizio della guerra fredda, ebbe luogo la partita di baseball Dodgers contro Giants con cui inizia il romanzo; contemporaneamente gli americani fecero esplodere un o [...]

Underworld is concerned with history, with the inexorable passage of time, the ways in which events change and define us collectively, and how pieces of the past once misplaced can be irrevocably lost. When I reached page 382 of the novel, I was surprised to find that the next page was numbered 415, meaning that there were 32 pages of missing text. Never before had I seen an author tamper with page numbers: what an innovative and intriguing device! By creating intentional gaps in the text, Delil [...]

Underwear: l’abbigliamento intimo dell’America.Guardando Facebook, mi sono resa conto che il mio paese di mare (specifico di mare, perché di solito sto in un paesone di montagna, così quelli che sanno chi sono non vengono sotto casa a lanciarmi le uova marce) limita le scelte della gente. O la gente limita il paese, bah, chi lo sa!Insomma: curiosando nei profili degli amici degli amici ( dove “degli amici” non è una ripetizione, è proprio che ficco il naso nelle cose dei terzi), mi s [...]

Definitely not four, probably not exactly five. But sometimes five; fleeting moments, flickers, of five. The structure of Underworld was fantastic. It was an excavation novel. It was an extraction. It was a slow descent, a regression. I definitely have a pro-Delillo bias, but still think this novel (for me) fits among his best and strongest works. It was worth the time, the work, the emotional cost. Not Dostoevesky, but Underworld will be read, examined, analyzed throughout the next century whil [...]

Riletto con calma olimpica.Qualche pensiero, scritto male ma almeno per gradi.Più citazioni che altro. PrologoOnestamente, non direi ad un amico “leggiti le prime pagine di Underworld e vedrai che rimarrai lì incollato”. Non è malvagio ma nemmeno la miglior partenza possibile. Lunghetto, a tratti noioso, personaggi reali che non aggiungono nulla.Poi, ok, c'è una partita da vincere e noi ce la mettiamo tutta.La differenza arriva quando viene colpita la palla. Allora niente è più lo stes [...]

As primeiras 400 páginas, 5 estrelas, as segundas 400 páginas, 2 estrelas. A escrita de DeLillo é, neste livro, sublime porque profusa, erudita, eloquente, e atmosférica. Na primeira parte somos apresentados a um conjunto de personagens, eventos e épocas. Na segunda parte DeLillo desenvolve uma profunda análise crítica por meio de uma fragmentação articulada, tipicamente pós-moderna, na qual envolve acontecimentos mais e menos conhecidos da história dos EUA, para dar forma ao imaginá [...]

Voltaire is best known today for a novella and being a bit of a prick (in an enlightening way), but he also wrote a number of epic poems, including the first (?) epic poem in French, the Henriade. This was reprinted dozens of times during his life. The epic was the great literary genre of the eighteenth century, in theory. Now, of course, nobody gives a shit, because that stuff is utterly unreadable. Our 'epics' are long novels, and, like the Henriade, they get laurels aplenty, despite being all [...]

“Underworld” was published when I was in college, a part time bookseller who touched so many books in the course of a day, shelving new fiction, shelving classics, shelving How-To manuals and graphic novels and dictionaries. “Underworld” was something else, much buzzed about, a grey image of the World Trade Center buildings bisected with a church steeple. I directed many-a customer to its spot in the store and set it into hands. That’s one of the rules of bookselling: Make the customer [...]

I found this a stunning book, a reminder of what good writing can be. I was reading this book in September 2001, when I put it down to go on vacation in Switzerland. While on vacation, 9-11 happened. When I returned, I picked the book up again and the cover - which prominently featured a creepy, black and white picture of the World Trade Center taken from the cemetery at Trinity Church - had a new meaning for me. It was such a wonderful, sweeping, poetic book that it's hard to encapsulate. Someh [...]

Difficile non perdermi in esagitati commenti a freddo, dopo aver terminato Underworld, che sicuramente si annovera tra le esperienze di lettura più uniche e indimenticabili da me intraprese.È la storia, o più correttamente, una rivisitazione della storia dell'America del dopoguerra, attuata grazie al geniale pretesto della palla da baseball – il singolare filo conduttore, che insieme a numerosi altri collegamenti, dà vita a un gioco di incastri che nella loro genialità e accortezza spiazz [...]