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Summary: Underworld
Review: Throw it all together like a blur and it comes out the last fifty years of our lifetime and it feels real and unreal at the same time. Wonderful book. Wonderful prose.I think I could just read it for the prose alone. Ed
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Summary: Underwhelmed by Underworld; pretentious; mental masturbation
Review: No way for 800 words of self-indulgence and overwrought prose to keep even the enlightened reader on task. I did last 300 pages. The writing is,of course, good--but give me a break.
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Summary: The Unconscious Civilization
Review: The soul of a people must lie in those things that indelibly connect them. Most often we are unaware, or perhaps deliberately blind, to these connections, but a keen eye and piercing intellect can reveal what is hidden, what makes up the "Underworld" we unknowingly inhabit. And that's just what Delillo has done here. From popular culture, to waste management, to our universal secrets & lies, Delillo offers an ambitious and weighty tome that is as much about a popular "us" as it is about the individual characters who populate the novel. Those on the hunt for a plot - at least the kind easily condensed into a 200 page screenplay - are best advised to steer clear. There's as much plot here as in a Picasso masterwork. This novel is a triumph for those who believe that there is more to say about life than can be expressed with the crude tools of tension, climax and denouement.
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Summary: Underwhelmed by Underworld. Mental masturbation. Wasted time
Review: Underwhelmed by Underworld. Mental masturbation. An overly-long conceit of 800 pages of insufferable prose that wasted my time. I stopped at page 300.
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Summary: Delillo's is the penultimate chronoshocker
Review: Underworld is perhaps the most startling, unorthodox example of the writer's art published in the past two decades. Comparisons to Pynchon and Gravity's Rainbow are inevitable, but what a difference! With a clarity of sentence construction that can leave a reader gasping at his audacity, Dillo has taken five decades of pop culture and everyman cliches and cuisinarted them into a confection that destroys the definition of imagination. A single word can be (and frequently is) ripped from it's natural context, placed in an alien chronological landscape and deliver its intrinsic information load with the force of a landmine. Verbal bombs that jar the reader form one time to the next with the calculation of a well-planned artillery assault. Not for the faint-hearted or the easily distracted, I bought a copy of "Underworld" for my 80 year old mother to demonstrate what a writer could aspire to, given extraordinary talent, a great ear and the eyes to unflinchingly witness the human condition.
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Summary: Whether you like this depends on who you are.
Review: Why the diversity of reviews for this book? I wonder if it's something where lit majors love it, general readers hate it, if boomers love it and Xers hate it, and so on. DeLillo is speaking to the American experience, but only through a particular set of lenses. If you identify with him, this book will resonate with you. But if you don't share his perspective, you probably won't like this book.
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Summary: An Incredible Work of Post Modernism
Review: Don DeLillo has fashioned a hefty novel. Do not let the length of it fool you, though. Its meaning and subtext are but the tip of the iceberg concerning the past fifty years. "Underworld" will take you to places that you never knew existed; a place that time has forgotten. Nick Shay and Klara Sax, the protaganists (antagonists?) of the novel speak to us in the way only humans can: through the experiences of their own lives. DeLillo's achronological writing adds a heightened sense of drama to the book. By peeling back the layers of decades past, he reveals his characters' lives through the wrong end of a telescope, accentuating their mortal existence. The back drop of the cold war is only incidental, on the contrary, it is the sum total of the characters' decisions that makes for the spine of the novel. Personally, I believe that "Underworld" is one the ten greatest novels in the past twenty years.
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Summary: The best American novel of the decade
Review: All you need to know to make an assessment of this work is to read the first three pages. Read them more than once. Read them aloud. DeLillo's fervor and talent explode as he views a scene that last perhaps one minute. When I heard criticisms of Cold Mountain's selection as the National Book Award winner, I wondered. But I hadn't read Underworld yet. This book is in the tradition of our greatest storytellers and is one of the few novels of the last 20 years that fits in that category.
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Summary: Unreadable
Review: Largely about garbage and waste, this huge book (deceptively seductive in its jacket copy and ardent reviews) is essentially a waste of money. If you are a lover of fiction in search of a good story line, avoid UNDERWORLD. Delillo's prose reads like an experiment for a creative writing class. Although I enjoyed the first chapter, I soon found the story not a story at all but a ramble from topic to topic. Delillo sprints without warning from character to character, and time frame to time frame. In a word, I found UNDERWORLD to be: "unreadable".
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Summary: Our History
Review: Don DeLillo's literary hero, it seems (especially so in his first and most recent works) is that grand patriarch of 20th century English (Good Lord, don't call the language <that>) literature, James Joyce. While Joyce, in what at times seems an infinite brilliance managed to place the entirety of the human condition into one character, one book, DeLillo has only (poor soul) managed to place the last half century into several characters and a novel of the same dimensional stature. He has written a beutifully written, lyrical novel on Our History, but not its grand moments. That, apparently, is Martin Gilbert's new job. Kennedy and Nixon, Stalin and Glasnost are only referenced interms of Us. We, (dare I say it?) the little people, have our personal histories documented here. The everyday, underground atitudes and moments are here. The focus is on the lives and histories of the average Amercain Joe, and on his world. This isn't about the Cuban Missile Crisis, it's about the jokes cracked at its expense in an attempt to deal with it. We are defined by our past, an element which, as our world enters a new era, is often forgotten. Underworld is structured so as the beginning (or nearly so) is at the end and the end is at the beginning. The resolution we seek, the moments that will define our future, have occured, we have just forgot about them in our rush for the Undiscovered Country, but let us not forget that the Old World still guides our movement. I missed most of the moments in this book in real life; I'm only fifteen, but know those fifty years that have defined America, and much of that knowledge, the knowledge of the fears and loves of the generation, came from this novel.
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