Роман классика современной американской литературы Дона Делилло (р. 1936) «Белый шум» – комедия о страхе, смерти и технологии. Смерть невозможно отрицать. Каждый день она проникает в сознание с телеэкранов и страниц бульварных газет. Каждый день она проникает в тело дозами медикаментов и кислотными дождями. Человеческое сознание распадается под натиском рекламы и прогнозов погоды. Мы боимся смерти – и продолжаем жить. Несмотря на белый шум смерти…В 1985 году «Белый шум» был удостоен Национальной книжной премии США.
Американец, работающий в Афинах и стремящийся удержать свою семью от окончательного распада, узнает о существовании странного культа, последователи которого совершили ряд необъяснимых убийств в странах Ближнего и Среднего Востока. Отчасти по воле обстоятельств он оказывается вовлеченным в неофициальное расследование этих преступлений, затеянное его друзьями, и начинает ощущать, что поиски истины необычайно важны и для него самого...
Дон Делилло (р. 1936) — знаковая фигура в литературном мире. В 1985 г. его роман «Белый шум» был удостоен Национальной книжной премии США. В 2006 г. «Нью-Йорк таймс» включила произведения Делилло «Изнанка мира», «Весы» и «Белый шум» в список лучших американских книг, написанных за последние 25 лет.Роман «Космополис» лег в основу сюжета одноименного фильма, главную роль в котором сыграл Роберт Паттинсон.
Трагедия 11 января 2001 года, увиденная глазами разных героев и в разных ракурсах. Клерк, выбирающийся из уже готовой обвалиться башни, террорист-угонщик, готовящийся к последнему полету, — и еще несколько персонажей, так или иначе вовлекаемых в трагические события. Впрочем, это, по сути, не столько рассказ о трагедии, сколько привычный американский «семейный» роман, в котором плавное течение жизни разбивается внешним вторжением, отчего линейное повествование рассыпается на структурно перемешивающиеся фрагменты.
A young television executive takes to the road in the 1960s with a movie camera to capture his own past in a "cinema verite" documentary. Within this framework, he delivers his observations on the influence of film, modern corporate life, young marriage, New York City and hipness.
From Publishers WeeklyDeLillo skates through a day in the life of a brilliant and precocious New Economy billionaire in this monotone 13th novel, a study in big money and affectlessness. As one character remarks, 28-year-old Eric Packer "wants to be one civilization ahead of this one." But on an April day in the year 2000, Eric's fortune and life fall apart. The story tracks him as he traverses Manhattan in his stretch limo. His goal: a haircut at Anthony's, his father's old barber. But on this day his driver has to navigate a presidential visit, an attack by ...
Amazon.com ReviewDon DeLillo's second novel, a sort of Dr. Strangelove meets North Dallas Forty, solidified his place in the American literary landscape in the early 1970s. The story of an angst-ridden, war-obsessed running back for Logos College in West Texas, End Zone is a heady and hilarious conflation of Cold War existentialism and the parodied parallelism of battlefield/sports rhetoric. When not arguing nuclear endgame strategy with his professor, Major Staley, narrator Gary Harkness joins a brilliant and unlikely bunch of overmuscled gladiators on the field and in the dormitory. In characteristic fashion, DeLillo deliberately undermines ...
Amazon.com ReviewThe defining moment of turn-of-the-21st-century America is perfectly portrayed in National Book Award winner Don DeLillo's Falling Man. The book takes its title from the electrifying photograph of the man who jumped or fell from the North Tower on 9/11. It also refers to a performance artist who recreates the picture. The artist straps himself into a harness and in high visibility areas jumps from an elevated structure, such as a railway overpass or a balcony, startling passersby as he hangs in the horrifying pose of the falling man.Keith Neudecker, a lawyer and ...
The narrator of this novel is Bucky Wunderlick, a Dylan-Jagger amalgam who finds he's gone as far as he knows how. Mid tour he leaves his rock band and holes up in a dingy East Village apartment, in Great Jones Street. The plot revolves around his retreat and a drug designed to silence dissidents.
For a few years, this book was everywhere-if by everywhere one means used bookstore shelves and remainder tables-a very visible reminder of what happens when the publishing industry misjudges a print run. I bought three or four copies of the book, not because I didn't remember buying it but because every six months the price would be even lower. The copy I read was a two dollar paperback, but I'm sure there's the dollar hardcover still on my shelves, probably right next to where the three dollar and four dollar hardcovers used to sit. Stupidly, I assumed that this ...
Don DeLillo's follow-up to Libra, his brilliant fictionalization of the Kennedy assassination, Mao II is a series of elusive set-pieces built around the themes of mass psychology, individualism vs. the mob, the power of imagery and the search for meaning in a blasted, post-modern world. Bill Gray, the world's most famous reclusive novelist, has been working for many years on a stalled masterpiece when he gets the chance to aid a hostage trapped in a basement in war-torn Beirut. Gray sets out on a doomed, quixotic journey, and his disappearance disrupts the cloistered lives of his obsessed assistant and the assistant's companion, a former Moonie who has also become Bill's lover. This haunting, masterful novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award.This tale of a reclusive novelist drawn back into the world by acts of terrorism reconfirms DeLillo's status as a modern master and literary provocateur.
In Players DeLillo explores the dark side of contemporary affluence and its discontents. Pammy and Lyle Wynant are an attractive, modern couple who seem to have it all. Yet behind their "ideal" life is a lingering boredom and quiet desperation: their talk is mostly chatter, their sex life more a matter of obligatory "satisfaction" than pleasure. Then Lyle sees a man killed on the floor of the Stock Exchange and becomes involved with the terrorists responsible; Pammy leaves for Maine with a homosexual couple… And still they remain untouched, "players" indifferent to the violence that surrounds them, and that ...
It's hardly a new experience to emerge from a Don DeLillo novel feeling faintly disturbed and disoriented. This is both a charm and a curse of much of his fiction, a reason he is so exciting to some readers and so irritating to others (notably George Will). And in the 117-page Point Omega, DeLillo's lean prose is so spare and concentrated that the aftereffects are more powerful than usual.Reading it is akin to a brisk hike up a desert mountain-a trifle arid, perhaps, but with occasional views of breathtaking grandeur. There is no room for false steps, and ...
DeLillo's Running Dog, originally published in 1978, follows Moll Robbins, a New York city journalist trailing the activities of an influential senator. In the process she is dragged into the black market world of erotica and shady, infatuated men, where a cat-and-mouse chase for an erotic film rumored to "star" Adolph Hitler leads to trickery, maneuvering, and bloodshed. With streamlined prose and a thriller's narrative pace, Running Dog is a bright star in the modern master's early career.
Amazon.com ReviewDon DeLillo's reputation rests on a series of large-canvas novels, in which he's proven to be the foremost diagnostician of our national psyche. In The Body Artist, however, he sacrifices breadth for depth, narrowing his focus to a single life, a single death. The protagonist is Lauren Hartke, who we see sharing breakfast with her husband, Rey, in the opening pages. This 18-page sequence is a tour de force (albeit a less showy one than the author's initial salvo in Underworld)-an intricate, funny notation of Lauren's consciousness as she pours cereal, peers out the ...
Set against the backdrop of a lush and exotic Greece, The Names is considered the book which began to drive "sharply upward the size of his readership" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Among the cast of DeLillo's bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator's estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses. A thriller, a mystery, and still a moving examination of family, loss, and the amorphous and magical potential of language itself, The Names stands with any of DeLillo's more recent and ...
Amazon.com ReviewWhile Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the cold war and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying. Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio ...
Amazon.com ReviewBetter than any book I can think of, White Noise captures the particular strangeness of life in a time where humankind has finally learned enough to kill itself. Naturally, it's a terribly funny book, and the prose is as beautiful as a sunset through a particulate-filled sky. Nice-guy narrator Jack Gladney teaches Hitler Studies at a small college. His wife may be taking a drug that removes fear, and one day a nearby chemical plant accidentally releases a cloud of gas that may be poisonous. Writing before Bhopal and Prozac entered the popular lexicon, DeLillo ...
