Rating: 
Summary: Grandiose self-absorption
Review: This is my first experience with author Don DeLillo, so I will review this book without comparison to previous works. I found the protagonist, Lauren Hartke, to be an introverted, egotistical, masochistic bore. The author depicted this complex, unhealthy character with precise attention to detail, extreme care, and emotionless observation.
However, I found myself fascinated with the "little man", Mr. Tuttle. I wondered if he was an hallucination brought upon by the stress of grief in an unstable psyche. I never thought he was really flesh and blood, even while watching the erotic encounter in the bathtub. [Actually, the entire book has a voyeuristic quality.] Perhaps Tuttle was an alien being: "From a long way off what would he look like, walking the way he walked, narrowly, in curved space?" As short as it is, this is a ponderous work which offers the reader little insight or gratification, but a lot of curious unanswered questions.
Rating: 
Summary: A Sensual Feast
Review: Unquestionably this is one of DeLillo's finest works, yet it lacks the wonder and gravitas that I think is evidenced in his best work, namely "Underworld" and "White Noise". Still, this is a fascinating look at relationships between men and women as seen through the eyes of the body artist, Lauren Hartke. DeLillo gives us lyrical passages of how she spends her life in a crumbling house, newly widowed, meeting a mysterious stranger who will help her take into a thoughtful journey into her past. It is truly a visual feast for the eyes, and one well worth reading.
Rating: 
Summary: his best book
Review: i think this is his best book. all this about delineating the national psyche stuff bores me; what i like about delillo is his struggle to make language convey the randomness and chaos of real experience, which is what we invented language in the first place to overcome. the opening scene here is just that kind of furious effort at shattering language into actual experience. it doesn't always work but it works enough. the whole rest of the book is commentary on that one scene. it's wonderful. it has none of the flaws of white noise and all the originality and honesty.
Rating: 
Summary: Metaphysical garbage
Review: Having read this book, I wonder what the furor is about. I fail to see much merit in this metaphysical book which fails to excite, energize or interest me. What is the point of this book? The story is depresssing, obtuse and completely circular. I'm only glad that I didn't buy this book and that I got it at the library because it was a complete waste of my time.
Rating:
Summary: A poem about loss and grieving
Review: If Underworld put DeLillo on the map as one of the great contemporary writers in America, this little book confirms his stature in a very different format. Tiny as it is by comparison with Underworld, this book compresses the art of imagination into a dense and dizzying narative about loss and grieving and what it does to a person on what always seems like an endless road to recovery. Anyone who has had a loss (and few of us haven't) will find themselves rivetted to this beautiful poetic book.
Rating:
Summary: Self-Management For Artists
Review: Wordsmith Don DeLillo has done it again! After treating his audience to probably the most comprehensive study of Waste Management techniques and stocking it chock-full of some of the most noisome management tips this Associate in Packing Rotation Assembly has ever stumbled over, he's come back with yet another Management blockbuster that's sure to Top those Charts for many weeks to come. Told in the simple, plainspoken allegorical style that's won DeLillo "converts" from some of our most prestigious Fortune 500 Brontos, The Body Artist limns the despairing tale of Lauren Holfrock, a young woman who discovers that after having made art for most of her adult life she is fully and incontrovertibly "in the red." What to do? She lives in a crumbling house, has very little savings, suffers from wine anxiety, has a nudgy friend who writes things in a notebook when she doesn't think Lauren's looking (but Lauren's always looking!), and has a husband who apparently has metamorphosed into a George Segal sculpture up, of all the insulting things, at his ex-wife's house. Lauren's cunning plan to fight her way to financial solvency while avoiding the pitfalls of sell-outism is a marvel of the mechanical age. Here's who we'll meet, in addition to Lauren: I. Magninary Friend, a boy-man with a tumescent secret; Fernando Lamas, the terrific swimmer; Rhoda McGevna, a mysterious Castillian emigre from the Isle of Malaga; and an old man with a shakemop, who appears on various porches around town. Lauren's plucky, pretty, and more talented than Sondra Bernhardt, and DeLillo has you cheering for her by novel's end! I really learned a lot about how artists make money!!
Rating:
Summary: Tedious
Review: One stage performance of "the diary of Ann Frank" was said to be so bad that when the Gestapo arrived in the last scene the audience as one said "their in the Attic". This book raised a similar reaction in me and after one character suicided in the course of the novel I said to myself one down two to go. The main attraction of this book is that it is very short. It is only about 160 pages with an enormous type face and is in fact little more than a short story. Something which becomes a virtue when one starts reading. The male character in the book is a thrice married man who makes experimental films. The female character is a body artist. What that means is that she is a performance artist. She bleaches her skin, cuts her hair badly and does performances pretending to be an elderly Geisha and a castrated man. The performances have a high number of people walk out who are bored by the lack of activity. As the novel is about two totally self absorbed people it is free of any communication or internal dialogue. The opening scene consists of these two drop kicks having breakfast not talking to each other and looking at the shape of Corn Flakes. A bit later the male commits suicide and then a mysterious possibly retarded person turns up in the house. The normal response of a person in these circumstances would perhaps be to call the police. The female drop kick however has a number of long unsuccessful attempts at conversation. This book is experimental literature at its very worst. The writing in no way describes people but rather it describes things. It is excruciating.
Rating:
Summary: His Best Work
Review: I've read all his novels, and I liked this one the most. Outstanding, delicious prose.
Rating:
Summary: I Wish It Were Shorter
Review: I think I am going to cease reading books that have a Caravaggio, or in this case a portion of his work, on the cover. This is the second book I can recall that does this and it is spectacularly absurd. This is the type of work that gets published by accomplished, and established Authors only, for if this was written by a new Author it would never see copy number one. This is a bit of pretentious scribbling that is so vacuous and insipid that it must, "mean" something. Pour a gallon of paint on the floor of The Metropolitan, and hordes will coming running to seek meaning, likely with this book in their pocket. Like the performance that the body artist offers in the book, were it not for the extremely short time this thing takes to read, people would walk out on the book as they walked out on her performance. Label me a cretin if you like but the idea that metaphorically, I hope, this woman creates paintings with her genitalia strikes me for what it is, garbage. I enjoyed the jacket blurbs as they could be placed on virtually any book ever written. However they are very appropriate as they lack any form of specificity to this work, and that is as it should be. However if a hallucinating widow who spends her time bleaching her body to that of an albino is of interest, by all means read and enjoy. I will pass, for the image of this aberration standing in a shower holding the trigger of a bottle of pine scented solvent to her head, and meditating upon the act is beyond my ability to take seriously.
Rating:
Summary: Definately intriguing...
Review: This is definately an interesting book! Despite appearing to be a rather brief read it is incredibly intricate in both its context and DeLillo's writing style. The rhetoric gets a bit complex at points and can be rather odd, yet it seems to add to his respective themes relating to human perception of time, death, life, and oneself. I certianly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys analyzing literature or deliberating upon it. If you don't want to think at a relatively 'deep/reflective' level then I wouldn't recommend this book as it would basically be just odd.
|
