Rating: 
Summary: The JFK Assassination Is Not Really The Issue For Me
Review: For me, what makes this book so great is not the light it may or may not shed on history; it is Mr. DeLillo's virtuosic prose and the singularly mesmerizing narrative voice produced by that prose.
As far as I can judge, DeLillo first achieved this degree of clarity and force with 'The Names,' his sixth (seventh?) novel, and he's continued to refine and improve it ever since. Reading to oneself is a special and private act; DeLillo engages and penetrates this privacy the way few novelists known to me have approached. He expresses a fearless grasp of human nature with language so wondrously charged with poetic energy that the act of reading it is like somehow experiencing fine music through print. This quality pervades his later novels and at least surfaces in all of them, and is the main reason I like DeLillo (not the JFK conspiracy junk that is 'Libra's' narrative pretext).
Critics have pointed out, with some justification, that DeLillo's characters are too often like one another. These objectors should be delighted with 'Libra'; the characters are distinct and superbly actualized: Boy Oswald, Win Everett, Jack Ruby, and Marguerite Oswald are all really amazing.
Rating: 
Summary: Delillo's Fourth Best Novel
Review: A fun read, vintage Delillo, loaded with what we've come to expect from an American literary master. A must read for any Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist. Behind (in order) Underworld, Mao II, and White Noise, Libra is Delillo's fourth best novel.
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Summary: "Plots carry their own logic" ...
Review: First thing, the larger of the two reviews (I think Publisher's Weekly?) featured by Amazon for this book is very good. Don't expect an explanation of an event disguised as a novel. In Libra, DeLillo is not trying to explain an event in history; he wants to drop us into the lap of that event in all its complexity and nuance. "If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. .. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. Or perhaps not." This is the ambiguous world of the Kennedy assasination, the subject of this jewel of a novel. Particularly vivid in these pages is Jack Ruby: explosive and insecure, cruel in one moment, caring the next. And of course, Oswald. We watch Oswald's slow loss of identity. In Libra he disappears from history -- gradually losing touch, direction, hope, meaning. He does not appear to drive himself, nor is he driven by CIA or FBI or other operatives who, try what they will, essentially find him impregnable. Yet, history it what he makes, or finds. It is the Russian character so much involved in Oswald's ersatz defection, Kirilenko, who best seems to understand Oswald as "some kind of Chaplinesque figure, skating along the edges of vast and dangerous events. Unknowing, partly knowing, knowing but not saying, the boy who had a quality of trailing chaos behind him, causing disasters without seeing them happen, making riddles of his life and possibly fools of us all." He is encouraged by an operative not to find a place in history -- "wrong approach Leon" -- but "to get out. Jump out. Find your place and your name on another level." Reading Libra is participating in a waking dream, a graceful juxtaposition of conspiracy and coincidence, coverging at a point in time, at a place in Dallas. Libra is evocative of the whole tragedy, a novel that puts you on edge, not because the outcome is uncertain, but because, at a deep level, one fears to follow DeLillo's exploratory threads. Not a pleasant ride, but a powerful read.
Rating:
Summary: "Plots carry their own logic" ...
Review: First thing, the larger of the two reviews (I think Publisher's Weekly?) featured by Amazon for this book is very good. Don't expect an explanation of an event disguised as a novel. In Libra, DeLillo is not trying to explain an event in history; he wants to drop us into the lap of that event in all its complexity and nuance. "If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. .. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. Or perhaps not." This is the ambiguous world of the Kennedy assasination, the subject of this jewel of a novel. Particularly vivid in these pages is Jack Ruby: explosive and insecure, cruel in one moment, caring the next. And of course, Oswald. We watch Oswald's slow loss of identity. In Libra he disappears from history -- gradually losing touch, direction, hope, meaning. He does not appear to drive himself, nor is he driven by CIA or FBI or other operatives who, try what they will, essentially find him impregnable. Yet, history it what he makes, or finds. It is the Russian character so much involved in Oswald's ersatz defection, Kirilenko, who best seems to understand Oswald as "some kind of Chaplinesque figure, skating along the edges of vast and dangerous events. Unknowing, partly knowing, knowing but not saying, the boy who had a quality of trailing chaos behind him, causing disasters without seeing them happen, making riddles of his life and possibly fools of us all." He is encouraged by an operative not to find a place in history -- "wrong approach Leon" -- but "to get out. Jump out. Find your place and your name on another level." Reading Libra is participating in a waking dream, a graceful juxtaposition of conspiracy and coincidence, coverging at a point in time, at a place in Dallas. Libra is evocative of the whole tragedy, a novel that puts you on edge, not because the outcome is uncertain, but because, at a deep level, one fears to follow DeLillo's exploratory threads. Not a pleasant ride, but a powerful read.
Rating:
Summary: Delillo's Fourth Best Novel
Review: For me, the great novel explaining a political event in the 1960's remains DeLillo's "Libra", which gets inside of Lee Harvey Oswald, plausibly explaining how Oswald thought while also serving as a biography of his life. Libra joins the novel seamlessly to history.
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Summary: The Onion Effect
Review: Great read. However, I get the feeling that there are a few (many?) nuances that I didn't catch. Definite "re-read" material. Read a review putting G. Gordon Liddy as Mackey?? Guess I should also "re-read" Woodward and Bernstein.
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Summary: The whole is far less than the smattering of its parts
Review: In Libra, Delillo deals with one of the most well-known and well-documented events in recent history. The volumes of information, of images, of rumor, of intrigue dominate the story of JFK's assassination. Wisely, Delillo chooses to focus on a more peripheral and much less understood individual, Lee Harvey Oswald. There are so many contradictions in the case for and against Oswald. Was he alone? Was he innocent? Was he part of a team? These questions slide into obscurity as Delillo reconstructs Lee Harvey Oswald/O. H. Lee/A. J. Hidell/William Bobo. The inconsistent Oswald. The book unfolds with alternating chapters between two narratives of the past, and one in the present [1988]. One of the pasts is Oswald's life starting as an adolescent boy in the Bronx, which eventually collides with the other, beginning in April 1963 as a group of disenfranchised former CIA men decide to create a plot to make an attempt on the President. They do not intend to kill him. Shoot and miss is the plan. But as Delillo famously says, "Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death." So here we have a postmodern explanation for the mystique of conspiracy theory. There isn't an ordered lattice of events and characters, conducted by a deliberate intelligence. There is chaos, only ordered by a downward tendency toward death and destruction. It's Chaos Theory applied to human and political systemms. Libra is also Delillo's most accessible book, at least in the context of the others I have read, (all but Underworld, The Names, and Mao II). Unlike White Noise, the people in Libra seem somewhat real. They are not totally so for that would mean that we understand them, which we don't. Delillo always creates fractured, composite views of his characters. We get glimpses, often contradictory, into their past and their intentions. Maybe it's because I have read a lot of his work, but Delillo's philosophic statements, if you can even call them that, are much more connected to the narrative here than in his other work. For example, Nicholas Branch, in the present day narrative, is a contemporary CIA analyst poring over all the data on the assassination. At one point he begins examining the physical evidence. There are so many abstractions and difficulties in this investigation that the presence of real objects provides a glimpse of something like truth. "The Curator sends the results of ballistics tests carried out on human skulls and goat carcassess, on blocks of gelatin mixed with horsemeat...They are saying, 'Look, touch, this is the true nature of the event. Not your beautiful ambiguities.'" These sections contain some of the most poignant and valuable insight in any of Delillo's work I have seen. Libra is an interesting, if somewhat complicated work that both illuminates and obscures the character of Lee Harvey Oswald. This isn't as frustrating an experience as it might sound. By the novel's conclusion it would be cheap to wrap up such a sad and desolate story with niceties and tidy endings.
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Summary: Brilliant Example of What Historical Fiction Should Be
Review: In the very first chapter of this profoundly provocative novel, we take a ride in a speeding New York City subway with a truant Lee Harvey Oswald. As the young Oswald stares out the front window, little does he realize how much the rest of his life would be just like this: being carried away by a powerful machine and only catching flickering glances of the things and people along the way. Released very close to the 25th anniversary of JFK's assassination, LIBRA does not attempt to seriously propose a conspiracy theory. What he does do is take some of the facts, some of the tempting coincidences, and several of the possible scenarios, and create a labyrinth of intrigue and a world filled with shadows within shadows. This is a creepy book that haunts you, to use a tired cliche but I can't think of how else to put it. (Apparently the assassination is a favorite topic for DeLillo, as the Zapruder film and discussions about JFK conspiracies reappear in DeLillo's later book, UNDERWORLD.) Underneath it all is a dark struggle between what is planned and what occurs: strategy versus chance, conspiracy versus spontaneity, the best laid plans... etc. In LIBRA, the scales tip one way then the other and, yet, the result is the inevitable tragedy of November 22, 1963. This is what historical fiction should be.
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Summary: Fiction? Who said fiction?
Review: Interesting that a book such as this is categorised as "fiction" when in fact it comes awefully close to the actual account of things...
For anyone having read the actual historical account of the JFK case written by Jim Garrison (the D.A that officially investigated the case) "Libra" might seem -even- watered down, or, "mild".
De Lillo overwhelms as he revives (literally, as mostly anyone associated with this case is long dead...) the characters that set the stage for Kennedy's association and takes a brave approach simoultaneously as he doesnt opt for the easy way out. It's an interesting concept the one that De Lillo undertakes: take a historical event and retell the story by letting the real characters do the talking, the living, the plotting, show them in every day life, bring biographical scenes from their lives forth and ultimately , under the guise of fiction, unfold the story again. There would be objections, of course. Anyone would would try the same thing that De Lillo does here would probably come up with a different variation. Some even with a radically different one. The author of this book comes close, very close.
As a work of literature it is sometimes repetitive but it mostly wins its bet as De Lillo proves over 350 pages that he's got the charisma of reconstructing characters , but moreover, of understanding human nature and politics. Afterall, one with no understanding of human nature has no understanding of politics, thus, this had to be a given.
Allthough i would personally reccomend Garrison's book, "Libra" is not a bad place to start if you feel somewhat "confused"...
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Summary: A Conspiracy of Coincidences
Review: Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman lashing out at his solitude and failure. Oswald was the patsy in a vast conspiracy to advance shadowy aims. Sailors of the ocean of literature published about November 22, 1963 can expect either one or the other of the above takes on what happened that fateful afternoon in Dallas. It's become almost a window into what you really are as a person, what you believe to be the true facts of the crime. The first great thing about Don DeLillo's terrific novel "Libra" is the fact it posits a third view of the assassination, which can be simplistically described as a blending of the two main versions. In "Libra," Oswald is both a lone gunman, following his own idiosyncratic path through an absurd existence of his own design; and the dupe of a small coterie of disaffected ex-CIA operatives and anti-Castro Cubans who think killing Kennedy will shift negative attention on Uncle Fidel and punish the man who disowned their cause after the Bay of Pigs. Ultimately, what killed Kennedy wasn't one man or even a bunch of them, as DeLillo sees it, but a vast pattern of circumstances that gel with the advantage of hindsight into something so intricate and interwoven as to seem preordained. Oswald got a job at a school book warehouse, and the next month the president's motorcade is rerouted right by it. A newspaper ad denouncing the President is published with a funeral-like black border the day he arrives. A rifle and a pistol ordered weeks apart arrive on the same day. And so on. As David Ferrie, one of the conspirators, tells Oswald: "Coincidence is a science waiting to be discovered. How patterns emerge outside the bounds of cause and effect." Every assassination conspiracy should have its own philosopher. One failing of "Libra" is DeLillo's continual use of dialogue like this, apt as it is, to flush out key points. The narrative, disjoined and non-linear to begin with, often verges on the Faulknerian within individual chapters and sections. Fortunately, the overall story is well known enough that this is navigable. Even the best authors can get too pretentious for their own good, but "Libra" is a great read worth sticking around for to the end. You get vivid characterization, particularly with Oswald and his hyperdramatically self-pitying mother. There's a strong sense of the period, the early '60s before the decade went ker-pow (i.e. before this happened). DeLillo really conveys a sense of what went wrong and what could have been behind it, without offering easy answers or unsubstantiatable blame. It's clear the guy did his homework, covering all the bases as he overlays his fictional vision to the facts we are so familiar with, the story of 11/22 that DeLillo likens to "the Joycean Book of America...the novel in which nothing is left out." There are interesting detours, red herrings that tease out various subtleties and, while not essential to the plot, reward repeat readings. Finally, there are some real shafts of humor, as when Oswald, self-exiled in the Soviet Union, is looked over for possible employment by the KGB, and found wanting: "The test results were in and only his urine got a passing grade." Does "Libra" offer the definitive account of the assassination? It's certainly one worth considering. I'm not sure the Jack Ruby angle is explained convincingly (though Ruby is one of the most interesting characters sketched by DeLillo). Most everything else is, though. For the record, I believe Oswald acted alone, but DeLillo does raise some strong points to suggest the contrary. At the same time, there's a lot here to peeve the Oliver Stone crowd. "Libra" makes for an illuminating introduction to one of our greatest living novelists and to one of the signature events of living memory, which four decades later affects us still. While you and I may not understand everything in the book, it's helpful to bear in mind that comprehensibility is not the object here, and what we get instead is a sense of the things that can happen beyond our ken, and that the belief we control our own destiny is a lie, sometimes fatal.
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