Rating: 
Summary: Captivating; a whirlwind literary trip
Review: I felt totally enveloped in the novel's plots and highways through the last half of this century. I could not put it down. Why do people make such a fuss over length. The Bronx section was very reminscent of my childhood in Philadelphia. Many late nites but a wonder to behold. One of my favorites in a long while.
Rating:
Summary: WHAT IS ALL THE FUSS ABOUT?
Review: I can't imagine why so many people are moaing about this tremendous novel. Sure it's long, but who picks up an 800 page tome and expects to be finished in two days. Having read the comments here, I was prepared for a very long, sluggish, even turgid read. My past experience with DeLillo was limited. I thought 'Libra' was terrific, but got bogged down by the obtuseness of 'The Names', which I ultimately didn't enjoy, despite being oddly compelled to finish it. So I was pleasantly surprised to find 'Underworld' very accessible, highly readable and fascinating. After four days, I was halfway through, and I'd only read in small doses. If you're one of those people who needs a story to follow a conventional narrative structure then stay away. For others, this is a journey that demands to be taken. It staggers me when readers who can't get on with a serious piece of literature always blame the book and never themselves. Grisham and Clancy Fans, you have been warned.
Rating:
Summary: Thomas Wolfe revisted
Review: I just finished DeLillo's Underworld. It took quite an effort to get throught it but it was worth the effort. My head is still reeling from dealing with the levels of this book. It is a a backdrop of my own life. All those events lived but reflected from a perspective only the passing of time can provide. It was remeniscent of Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River or more his Web and the Rock. The sheer facility with the language is in both of their writings. A similarity exists in characters names. Wolfe had an Esther with a husband named Jack as his protagonist's friends in New York artistic circles as does Delillo's character, Klara. Both writers tend to wear you down but then you come upon some marvelous piece of writing. As this example: on page 180 DeLillo's description of a cheescake, " The cheese cake was smooth and lush,with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a hundres dirty jokes and dwill die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress." I know I will have to work on this book to try to get to all the levels. I won't succeed but the challenge is worth the effort. I didn't give a 10 because the lengh put it beyond many who just don't have the time to read a novel of this magnitude and that's a shame.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: Quite simply, I found this book to be every bit as enthralling as I've been told. I find it inconceivable that anyone can gripe about length. Can't you see it's a long book by looking at it? Reader's digest is available and recommendable for those of the MTV-generation whose attention spans have waned to the point of boredom at paying attention to anything longer than a six-panel Sunday comic. This is an excellent, if lengthy, novel. (Sorry if this got a bit long.)
Rating:
Summary: Rich and subtle... and rewarding
Review: An 817-page novel, a tome on the last half century, on the cold war and waste disposal and how lives are connected in subtle ways, told backwards for the most part. I found it hard to appreciate some passages: the characters for the most part share the same heavy-handed angst-ridden viewpoint, with little differentiation between characters' outlooks. And certainly the novel could have been shortened a bit. But the writing is sharp, the prose sure, the descriptions poetic and the observations witty. The truncated, jazzy dialogue (conversants never responding directly to the previous statement, incomplete sentences, heavy repetition of one's own speech and that of one's interlocutor) did wear thin a little. And the glorious whole of the novel - jumping from the Bobby Thomson home run (the Shot Heard Round the World) to the explosion of an atomic device on Russian soil to the meeting of two old lovers in the American desert, from Lenny Bruce's sickly adroit observations on the sixties to J. Edgar Hoover's neurosis, from highway serial killers to Vietnam bomber pilots, from the absurdity of condom shops to the triumph of rampant capitalism to the pehenomenon of recycling, from the erotic enticement of advertising something as simple as orange juice to miracle visions within such an ad, finally to (aptly) the World Wide Web. Certainly, a musical, tightly-wound novel, that brings out magic in the most quotidian comments from street kids. Brilliant and demanding, but rewarding. END
Rating: 
Summary: Nicely done
Review: Yeah, it's very long. It takes a while to get through. But really, how can people write negative reviews of a book they didn't FINISH? The disparate threads actually do all have a purpose, do connect to each other in subtle and astonishing ways. DeLillo's writing style is superb; I admit a few passages could have been excised, but by no means is this a collection of unrelated short stories. As long as you're willing to put in the effort it takes to keep it all together, this is a very satisfying book at the end.
Rating:
Summary: Rich, relaxed, patient masterpiece
Review: Yes, I loved this book. And I don't think I've anything to add to all other remarks by enlightened 10's --- but -- have mercy! Couldn't Scribner's have considered publishing it in 3 volumes (like Jane Eyre was first), I can't read it lying in bed, I can't fit it in my perspex recipebook holder I use to lie in bed and read, and I can't get in the bath with it. Yes, the author was right to write a long book -- but can't publishers give a sore back a break!!!
Rating:
Summary: Only for those who can put in the effort
Review: Have you ever run a marathon? Have you ever climbed a steep mountain? Have you ever begun a chore of consequence where the initial euphoria of the event turns to the contemplation of your own exhaustion, only to conclude with the re-emergence of euphoria upon realization that you actually completed the chore? This was the experience that I had following completion of Don DeLillo's treatise on the last half of this century called "Underworld". DeLillo consumes over 800 pages following multiple characters, while jumping from time frame to time frame and from character to character in an effort to translate for the reader the meaning of the important, and not so important, events of the last half century. While a 17 year old kid from the streets of New York, and his 32 year old bohemian artist are the central protagonist in the novel, it would be wrong to conclude that the story follows a natural progression of the lives of these two individuals. This is not a work by James Mitchner, or even Gore Vidal. Instead, DeLillo moves from the present (or not too distant present) back to the '50s, then to the '80s, then to the '60s, and so forth. As if this did not create enough confusion, weaved within these various time frames, are multiple characters, many of whom we're given little introductory information, and some of whom are left hanging leaving the reader trying to figure out how they relate to the overall "story", assuming there is one (whatever happened to Chuckie Wainwright or the Moonman?). It would be wrong to say that DeLillo concludes by tying all of these characters, and their various time references together into a seamless plot that carries a satisfying denouement. While the major characters are presumably unified around the acquisition of the famed 1951 homerun ball, lesser characters seem to have little if any connection to this ball and, hence, the underlying story, unless, of course, all of us are connected by "six degrees of separation." Ultimate! ly, though, I found the novel satisfying. I'm still trying to weigh, however, whether the novel was satisfying because I was able to complete it, or because it provided a meaningful read. I trust it to be the latter for there was something that I felt inside that was rewarding while navigating through DeLillo's complex, yet often enjoyable, prose. This something was not only a sense of accomplishment for completing the journey, but, I believe, also a sense that the journey was worth the effort. I would, therefore, recommend this book only for those who are willing to put in the effort, without giving up, with full advanced knowledge that this is not a typical work of "pulp" fiction, but is, instead, a difficult book to read and one which requires careful attention and a good deal of patients. Only then will those who have completed the journey find it satisfying.
Rating: 
Summary: What the hell is this all about?
Review: The first 60 pages are spectacular! Then it goes downhill from there. I could not finish this book. I stopped at page 181 and couldn't go on. I have read a few other reviews here and agree with those who did not like it. It is bascially a bunch of unconnected stories that do not have any sense of purpose or narrative for that matter. I couldn't care less about the characters and cared even less about what they were talking about. A condom factory?! Why was that put in there? Can anyone explain this to me? I returned the book back to the bookstore and picked up "Lloyd What Happened" by Stanley Bing and a baseball book by Yogi Berra. If I want to know what REALLY happened to baseball in the '50's I'll listen to Yogi.
Rating:
Summary: No Solutions, Nothing Vouchsafed: The Nuclear Identity.
Review: This is a difficult book to review, there are so many ways into the text. I am going to pick one thread and pull at it. First, High art/ Low art. High art, the Mansfield paintings, exagerated, airbrushed catchall for 1950's desire, features exagerated, more monroe than monroe, plus perfect. A gesture of monroe. Planes, once used for dropping bombs, are no "ariel art", are re-seen, re-visited, an almost tourist attraction, (like the nuclear testing grounds, like a miracle on a billboard). Low art, graffiti, valued by some as high art. Expresses the post apocalypse of drugs, decay, destruction of a city, the underclass "downwind" from prosperity, pick amongst the rubble for trash that can be turned into cash. It is a war of kinds. The capitalist war. Capitalism "naturalises" garbage, turns it into mountains, into art. The environmental movement becomes subject to the rule of capitalism in that it must be made to pay. People don't have a singular identity, they sometimes change, do things they don't understand, driven by some "internal power" such as lust, or curiosity, or aggression. They do not have stable identities, they do not want responsibility for their own lives. The world is sown together with gestures, the ending is a gesture, the book is structured as a gesture, in this it reminds me of Kundera's 'Immortality'. But in Delillos world, fear is at the centre, and fear is side by side with resignation. Around the bed, there is the power of fame, the power of secrets, the world that happens without you. No relationship is vouchsafed, or any position: the innocent are raped by the random. Although this book may appear to some to be random, to him with the secret ( the author ) the "web" of the text shivers with relations, with objects caught and resounding beyond the scope of our immediate apprehension.
|
