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3.99 AVERAGE
3.99 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Kind of tough going towards the end. Entertaining and page turning at times. Much more enjoyable than White Noise in my opinion.
challenging
dark
sad
medium-paced
Libra is Don DeLillo's 1988 historical fiction of Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a result of painstaking research that prefigured the new wave of interest in JFK conspiracy theories that would erupt in the early 1990s. In DeLillo's imagination, the assassination of JFK was the work of three bitter CIA operatives -- the fictional Win Everett, Larry Parmenter and T.J. Mackey -- veterans of the fight against Castro who cannot forgive Kennedy for denying air support to the Bay of Pigs invasion and thus causing the operation to fail. They feel that an attempt on Kennedy's life, with a tangled thread that leads toward Cuba, will reenergize action to take back the island. Everett painstakingly fakes IDs, all manner of paperwork and elaborate back stories, but when the cabal learns of Lee Harvey Oswald, they find their man is already there waiting for them.
Lee Harvey Oswald is the Libra of the title, born in October and like scales wildly out of balance, he constantly teeters between extremes: a juvenile delinquent who joins the Marines and then becomes Communist and defector to the USSR, only to be disillusioned by the Soviet Union's political system. DeLillo's treatment of the assassin is remarkable: Oswald's innermost thoughts and motivations are on display, everything that makes him tick, and yet we can never crack him like we can the other characters. As David Foster Wallace wrote in the introduction to one edition of the novel, "Libra is proof that the best authors can do anything they want. A book about Lee Harvey Oswald, Libra manages to get into Oswald's head and yet leave him a mystery because DeLillo knows the degree to which some men are enigmas even to themselves."
Another strong point of Libra is DeLillo's ability to maintain tension even though we all know how this will end, that Kennedy will be assassinated and Oswald killed in turn. The reader cannot wait to find how DeLillo's vision of the assassination will fall into place. The author manages to reconcile both the conspiracy/grassy knoll and lone gunmen versions of the event. Oswald proves to be both a despicable thug and a pitiful patsy.
Libra was the follow-up to DeLillo's breakthrough novel White Noise, which depicted America in the 1980s as exhausted by media overload and consumer choice. This concern appears in Libra as well. The sheer amount of data available to DeLillo's CIA librarian writing a secret history of the assassination -- ballistics reports, a computer-enhanced Zapruder film, photographs of the myriad figures implicated -- serves only to obfuscate what really happened on November 22, 1963, not to clarify it. The assassination of JFK and Oswald's murder by Jack Ruby two days earlier was mediated to millions of Americans by television and film, and the endlessly occuring rebroadcast of the events has served to mythologize it like no political assassination before.
Libra is an enjoyable novel and many aspects of it have stuck with me. What holds me back from giving it a full five stars is that too much of the domestic dialogue between the CIA men and their spouses is the kind of unrealistic, oddball conversations DeLillo already indulged in with White Noise: dry listings of factoids, vapid, inane commentary and characters who seem to be talking to themselves in a trance. Nonetheless, don't let that critique hold you back, Libra is fun.
Lee Harvey Oswald is the Libra of the title, born in October and like scales wildly out of balance, he constantly teeters between extremes: a juvenile delinquent who joins the Marines and then becomes Communist and defector to the USSR, only to be disillusioned by the Soviet Union's political system. DeLillo's treatment of the assassin is remarkable: Oswald's innermost thoughts and motivations are on display, everything that makes him tick, and yet we can never crack him like we can the other characters. As David Foster Wallace wrote in the introduction to one edition of the novel, "Libra is proof that the best authors can do anything they want. A book about Lee Harvey Oswald, Libra manages to get into Oswald's head and yet leave him a mystery because DeLillo knows the degree to which some men are enigmas even to themselves."
Another strong point of Libra is DeLillo's ability to maintain tension even though we all know how this will end, that Kennedy will be assassinated and Oswald killed in turn. The reader cannot wait to find how DeLillo's vision of the assassination will fall into place. The author manages to reconcile both the conspiracy/grassy knoll and lone gunmen versions of the event. Oswald proves to be both a despicable thug and a pitiful patsy.
Libra was the follow-up to DeLillo's breakthrough novel White Noise, which depicted America in the 1980s as exhausted by media overload and consumer choice. This concern appears in Libra as well. The sheer amount of data available to DeLillo's CIA librarian writing a secret history of the assassination -- ballistics reports, a computer-enhanced Zapruder film, photographs of the myriad figures implicated -- serves only to obfuscate what really happened on November 22, 1963, not to clarify it. The assassination of JFK and Oswald's murder by Jack Ruby two days earlier was mediated to millions of Americans by television and film, and the endlessly occuring rebroadcast of the events has served to mythologize it like no political assassination before.
Libra is an enjoyable novel and many aspects of it have stuck with me. What holds me back from giving it a full five stars is that too much of the domestic dialogue between the CIA men and their spouses is the kind of unrealistic, oddball conversations DeLillo already indulged in with White Noise: dry listings of factoids, vapid, inane commentary and characters who seem to be talking to themselves in a trance. Nonetheless, don't let that critique hold you back, Libra is fun.
challenging
dark
informative
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
The best Delillo work I have read to date (White Noise, Zero K). Conspiracy theories are fun, but the JFK assasination is in a league of its own and Delillo brings it to life beautifully.
In his other novels I have noticed that Delillo spends an unusual amount of time inside his characters’ minds, and this is again the case in Libra. This approach might not work for most writers, but it is Dellilo’s calling card and I love it. Nobody can pry open the mind of his characters quite like Delillo. I found myself nodding in appreciation once Delillo reveals the source of the novels title as well: just another example of his brilliance in character study. The writing is not at all elegant but smooth and effective nonetheless. Guess I loved a lot of things about this one, so I reserve the right to upgrade this to five stars once I have chewed on it a little longer.
In his other novels I have noticed that Delillo spends an unusual amount of time inside his characters’ minds, and this is again the case in Libra. This approach might not work for most writers, but it is Dellilo’s calling card and I love it. Nobody can pry open the mind of his characters quite like Delillo. I found myself nodding in appreciation once Delillo reveals the source of the novels title as well: just another example of his brilliance in character study. The writing is not at all elegant but smooth and effective nonetheless. Guess I loved a lot of things about this one, so I reserve the right to upgrade this to five stars once I have chewed on it a little longer.
adventurous
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
reflective
relaxing
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
challenging
informative
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This is an odd thing to review. It feels like an excellent book wrapped in a disappointing book wrapped in a good book. It tells the life of Lee Harvey Oswald in a sort of temporally-squished parallel narrative concerning various conspirators in and around the intelligence community in the time preceding and following the assassination.
There is a lot that works, but what I come away from this book feeling is frustration. I can tell there is a lot I am meant to impart from the book given both its topic and scope that I feel I can only grasp at by the necessary sense amidst the narrative shotgunning of events that “well they must have talked about this, and I didn’t get it.” One part of this is that while this book masterfully sets up its vignettes with a lot of time spent in the ordinary lives of characters, it does little with them, skipping past numerous dramatic moments and describing them only in hindsight after building up the anticipation to them. In one part, there is an assassination attempt on a General that gets several chapters of buildup and is then skipped past with a simple “I missed.”
The second big issue that hurts the narrative is its chronology. If it played with time in the fashion of something like Nolan’s Dunkirk, where the timelines all moved in the same direction and towards the same point, that may have been one thing, but the presence of the hindsight chronologer and the tendency of the narrative to peek ahead caused me to lose the thread many times.
While there are sections particularly at the end that hammer on the themes about how an external viewer to a conspiracy might assume a unity of interests or that it went exactly as planned despite it being a mess of fleeting coincidences and misunderstandings, I feel like I am inferring a lot of this in hindsight, as while I felt the outline of this theme while reading the scope was simply so big and the many characters ultimately so difficult to keep straight that I feel I missed the more substantive exploration of this idea I feel like the book was attempting. There are no less than three factions with an angle on the core events of this book, with many occasions where they intersect or directly conflict, and yet at a certain point, no amount of lavish character description can get me past the “another character into the big bin of ex-CIA hacks or Miama Cubans” problem. If I had a notebook and a Venn diagram, I feel like I’d have enjoyed this much more.
The best parts of this book focus on the one character who I think (appropriately) was given all the care and focus he needed, that of Lee himself. While there were occasions (such as his trip to Mexico) that are hard to piece together, I do feel like I got an excellent sense of who he was and the conflicts he found himself at the centre of; not very bright, ambition exceeded ability, but fundamentally a person who did care about the right thing, even if he was (as a consequence of the things he does and situations he puts himself in) ultimately very easy for various different people to string along.
As well, if I were to judge it as a series of vignettes, it paints an incredibly vivid and enrapturing image of America at this point in time with a sense of smoke filled back rooms and midcentury paranoia that is very evocative of something like Pynchon. That will do a lot for you. However, it doesn’t get past the bigger issues of plot that I feel like was more suggested to me than told. The currency of this book is supposition and innuendo, but I’m afraid the conversion rate isn’t great. Thankfully, the writing quality saves it.
There is a lot that works, but what I come away from this book feeling is frustration. I can tell there is a lot I am meant to impart from the book given both its topic and scope that I feel I can only grasp at by the necessary sense amidst the narrative shotgunning of events that “well they must have talked about this, and I didn’t get it.” One part of this is that while this book masterfully sets up its vignettes with a lot of time spent in the ordinary lives of characters, it does little with them, skipping past numerous dramatic moments and describing them only in hindsight after building up the anticipation to them. In one part, there is an assassination attempt on a General that gets several chapters of buildup and is then skipped past with a simple “I missed.”
The second big issue that hurts the narrative is its chronology. If it played with time in the fashion of something like Nolan’s Dunkirk, where the timelines all moved in the same direction and towards the same point, that may have been one thing, but the presence of the hindsight chronologer and the tendency of the narrative to peek ahead caused me to lose the thread many times.
While there are sections particularly at the end that hammer on the themes about how an external viewer to a conspiracy might assume a unity of interests or that it went exactly as planned despite it being a mess of fleeting coincidences and misunderstandings, I feel like I am inferring a lot of this in hindsight, as while I felt the outline of this theme while reading the scope was simply so big and the many characters ultimately so difficult to keep straight that I feel I missed the more substantive exploration of this idea I feel like the book was attempting. There are no less than three factions with an angle on the core events of this book, with many occasions where they intersect or directly conflict, and yet at a certain point, no amount of lavish character description can get me past the “another character into the big bin of ex-CIA hacks or Miama Cubans” problem. If I had a notebook and a Venn diagram, I feel like I’d have enjoyed this much more.
The best parts of this book focus on the one character who I think (appropriately) was given all the care and focus he needed, that of Lee himself. While there were occasions (such as his trip to Mexico) that are hard to piece together, I do feel like I got an excellent sense of who he was and the conflicts he found himself at the centre of; not very bright, ambition exceeded ability, but fundamentally a person who did care about the right thing, even if he was (as a consequence of the things he does and situations he puts himself in) ultimately very easy for various different people to string along.
As well, if I were to judge it as a series of vignettes, it paints an incredibly vivid and enrapturing image of America at this point in time with a sense of smoke filled back rooms and midcentury paranoia that is very evocative of something like Pynchon. That will do a lot for you. However, it doesn’t get past the bigger issues of plot that I feel like was more suggested to me than told. The currency of this book is supposition and innuendo, but I’m afraid the conversion rate isn’t great. Thankfully, the writing quality saves it.
A really fascinating novel. The structure, point of view, dialogue, chronology, and theme were all perfectly tailored to the plot which, even if some it is made up, is essentially immutable.
The theory put forward about JFK's assassination is totally plausible. It's unsettling though to realize how likely it is that chaos drives events more often than planning and plotting.
My only real complaint is that most of the characterizations aren't very deep. The CIA guys are all sort of a blank as well as Marina. In the case of Ruby and Oswald, there's more but not enough (I'd actually put Marguerite in this category too). What did Oswald particularly think of himself? His inner thoughts were often expressed but not his motivations or emotions.
The theory put forward about JFK's assassination is totally plausible. It's unsettling though to realize how likely it is that chaos drives events more often than planning and plotting.
My only real complaint is that most of the characterizations aren't very deep. The CIA guys are all sort of a blank as well as Marina. In the case of Ruby and Oswald, there's more but not enough (I'd actually put Marguerite in this category too). What did Oswald particularly think of himself? His inner thoughts were often expressed but not his motivations or emotions.
For someone like Delillo who throws tangents in a same paragraph, resisting to do that in here where subject matter is tangential than possible, is very much, fruitful? Perhaps it took him utmost commitment and restraint to not move around the whole way. There are dull spots, but everything gets tied together at the end unlike the real assasination, making it all worth. Without context I would've called the book boring despite being birthed by Delillo, but thanks to YouTube. 5/5