Underworld (AUDIO CASSETTE)

Rating:
Summary: Reluctantly, I give this three-stars
Review: Excellent writing, of course, and fascinating material, characterization, etc. but I just gave out after about 600 pages. I just felt I was wandering around and around in a cornfield; like watching an Andy Warhol movie. I couldn't get a handle on any plot; couldn't see where it was going. Afraid of plodding through to the end only to find that there was no there there.

Rating:
Summary: This is a novel that makes you believe in reading again.
Review: It took me from March to May to read and it will stay with me forever. The '13' concept blew my mind. I didnt get all of it, but loved all of it. I'll never look at Lucky Strikes in the same way again.

Rating:
Summary: You can talk forever.
Review: Don Delillo's Underworld is one of the greatest efforts from any living writer to answer the most basic questions of all time, what is man. His charachters, his dialogue, his sense of time, sense of place, his weltanschaung, all join forces to make Underworld nothing less than a masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: I won't pretend that I got it all.
Review: I didn't. But that's okay. I won't pretend that everything meshed together. It didn't, nor did it need to. The 10-15 threading narratives had had interweaving themes at times, other times, not. Regardless, I think it's a great read. Characters and dialogues that I won't forget, moments of discomfort and unease along with the character, the way the dialogue in a new section was initially discreet, so that you weren't sure who was talking. It could have been one of several. And the odd ending, also with double meaning, speaking of the book and his fans, stating on the fourth-to-last page, "How do things end, finally, things such as this -- peter out to some forgotten core of weary faithful huddled in the rain?" Clever. Unlike others, I found the book very subtle, didn't detect a hint of pretension, and didn't take it out on Delillo when I didn't get things. Like most art, some parts worked while others didn't. Like very good art, most of it worked for me, entertained me. Hence, a four-star book.

Rating:
Summary: Embarassing
Review: Were we really like this

Rating:
Summary: Says more about its fans than America
Review: A good writer has written a deeply irritating and pretentious book. It has brilliant spells but at other times it is so pompous it's embarrassing. "Cosmologists of waste"...what does it mean? To love this book, you have to lack confidence in your own taste and understanding, the kind of person who goes to exhibitions (by the likes of Klara Sax?) because you think it's good for you, and because you are afraid your friends might get there before you. Go back to Saul Bellow for brainy thrills.

Rating:
Summary: A Classic - Ignor any review with less than 4 Stars
Review: This is one of the most thoughtful and creative novels I've read in years. DeLillo presents wonderful insights into the evolution of contemporary urban american culture and values. Yes it's a long, complex novel but well worth the time and effort. The one and two star reader/reviewers obviously did not finish this novel and should be ignored.

Rating:
Summary: Why Bother?
Review: DeLillo grabbed us with White Noise, and has dropped us ever since. This book, although poetic at times, and although is represents "the way people actually talk" is tedious, chaotic and difficult to stay with. If "reality" or "historicity" are the benchmarks of a good book, you'd have a better time sitting in the lobby of the Smithsonian and trying to eavesdrop on every person who walked by. I gave up on the cusp of part 5. Why bother?

Rating:
Summary: follow the bouncing ball
Review: I compare Delillo's book to its antithesis in style and structure, Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, and find Underworld both more complex and demanding, and, at the same time less successful than Wolfe's comic satire. Both are sweeping novels of the American condition at the turn of the Millennium. Wolfe deals forthrightly with the hubris and illusions of American society, his symbolisms unsubtle, primal and jarring. Delillo works at a much more esoteric level, weaving myth with symbol, in a metaphysical analysis of the mass and impulse of American culture, building on little more than a small sphere of leather and string as the talisman of this fable. In a way you can look at Underworld as a novelistic rendition of T.S. Eliot's Wasteland, the same theme explored, and Delillo falls into the poetic stream of novel writers, as a skilled wordsmith. I think though the book fails to meet the daunting aspirations of the author's intent, but it is certainly worth the (long) read as a noble attempt

Rating:
Summary: Who are you people?
Review: In these reviews, I've seen this book called "shallow." Also, some reviewers claim there is no "tension." Did you people read this book? The depth and the tension are too much at times. The layers and complexities of plot and subtle tension are too numerous to count. Underworld is a metaphysical book, refracted though the cultural heritage of late twentieth century America. The only legitimate negative critique is that it is too engrossing and demanding. But the highest art always is. This is not a "baseball book" and it sure isn't "summer beach reading." It is a book that comes back to you.