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3.88 AVERAGE
3.88 AVERAGE
Reading DeLillo always feels like a strange dream and Underworld is no different. It's a really long, strange dream; and you're either into it or you're not.
Right from the first chapter, which I have now read about ten times, I was hooked on DeLillo's choice to use a single baseball from one of the most famous games and most famous pitches in history as an allegory for American history. Beyond the masterful control DeLillo has over language in the first chapter, each character throughout the novel and each of their respective storylines are especially compelling, from Nick Shay to Sister Edgar. As disparate as these stories seem, DeLillo weaves them together with the smallest threads to give us something worthwhile.
To many readers, the randomness of this novel and its lack of a clear plot can be frustrating. From another perspective, DeLillo chooses to embrace the chaos and dig for a deeper meaning in our digital, consumerist world that often feels like a fever dream or a feeling of being "lost in the data stream." Reading Underworld is not easy; it isn't always enjoyable and his dialogue can sometimes be difficult to follow. Nevertheless, every sentence and word is beautifully and purposefully written. I think I'll find myself reading Underworld over and over again throughout my life and finding new meaning each time.
Right from the first chapter, which I have now read about ten times, I was hooked on DeLillo's choice to use a single baseball from one of the most famous games and most famous pitches in history as an allegory for American history. Beyond the masterful control DeLillo has over language in the first chapter, each character throughout the novel and each of their respective storylines are especially compelling, from Nick Shay to Sister Edgar. As disparate as these stories seem, DeLillo weaves them together with the smallest threads to give us something worthwhile.
To many readers, the randomness of this novel and its lack of a clear plot can be frustrating. From another perspective, DeLillo chooses to embrace the chaos and dig for a deeper meaning in our digital, consumerist world that often feels like a fever dream or a feeling of being "lost in the data stream." Reading Underworld is not easy; it isn't always enjoyable and his dialogue can sometimes be difficult to follow. Nevertheless, every sentence and word is beautifully and purposefully written. I think I'll find myself reading Underworld over and over again throughout my life and finding new meaning each time.
A nice book, although not worth the length. At the halfway point I could have stopped contented, and at the end I could have continued.
Mind duly blown. Nothing this big could ever be without its imperfections -- or absorbed fully, really completed, on a first reading (and, in this case, probably never; new discoveries would likely await on a 100th reading, should anyone get that far). It's a dense, supple nesting of Borgesian labyrinths, encompassing an outsized cosmology that should be far too big for one novel by one writer. But it fully earns its chutzpah and appears not only to warrant, but to demand, its (over)reach. I'm convinced it is worth every byway, every short-circuited connection enfolded within its multitudes. Not the most Perfect, but most likely the Greatest, novel I've read in a very long time.
warning:
there may be no coherent sentences in this review, as it's been less than twenty four hours since i've finished this book. it took me as long, probably, to read the last paragraph as it did to read the last few pages because i had to catch my breath and rub tears away after nearly every phrase.
that's the thing.
everything in the last couple of pages connects to something or someone somewhere in the eight hundred pages that came before. i'm sure there are some i missed - i've been reading on and off for almost two years - but the ones i caught, the longing, the yellow, your voice, the games children play, i can't even think of the depth of these intricacies without my jaw shaking and this fist of fervent nostalgia gripping my chest.
to say i love this book is an extreme understatement.
to maintain that this book has me for life is barely a beginning.
want standard? swerve.
want linear lines and a formulaic finish? swerve.
want undemanding, less than wholly engaging, same book different cover, only the cover's not really different either, repetitive, reductive, repulsive in its own restrictions storytelling?
want unfuckinglegendary?
swerve.
this book is legacy.
cocky everywhere it deserves to be and connected completely.
this book is an ouevre not only of composition, not only of free-form phraseology and raw history, not only of sensory secrets, headlines and slogans and paintings and warnings, not only of childhoods and adulthoods and neighbourhoods and how we lose and find ourselves in them and carry them under our skin like grudges or grace wherever we go - this book is a body not only of relationships and decades and every intertwined element and event, but of trust and pluck. this book is reliance that as you read, you're paying attention and assurance that if not, you're left behind thinking you left it behind.
this book is a covenant.
a frame by split-second frame emergency.
this book is a backbone unto itself.
a tour de new and overwhelming nakedness, rough slurs, cold sweats, bones to pick, painted planes and shared cigarettes and pencil lines on the wall your mother has drawn to mark your height.
we're all gonna die
and
fuck you, that's from where.
this book is both shots heard round the world and what it means for the man and the chair to go different ways, back-fronted Picasso lovers meeting again miles from home, a boy from another planet the streets aren't ready for and George the waiter and Moonman 157 and Lenny Bruce begging you to love him unconditionally and the Angel Esmeralda and both Edgars and Bronzini walking with that tangerine and Acey Greene as uncontainable as Jayne Mansfield herself and i can't even write Nick Shay's name without having to stop again, because i can't even think Nick Shay's name without collapsing into a dead-level, true-blue mess of severe sentimentality.
because this is a book i couldn't physically set down when it was over.
because this is a book that showed that me how to read it.
this book is confession, be patient.
don't swerve.
it's a gift and a lesson and a scar i want to cradle.
this book is an undividedness, acute close-ups within encyclopedic panoramas. a transcendence in modern American slang of suspicions and intimacies, bewilderment and affinities, dense with echos and references, nuns and artists and comedians and highway killers, dads that left for a pack of Lucky Strikes and never came back and Whistler's Mother and what we think is waste and where it goes and infinite tunneled underworlds and all their ancestral roots.
this book is whistle in the middle of the night i hope i always hear.
a treatise and an era and aesthetic itself.
an act of memory and epiphany.
this book is the whole ballgame.
jazz.
life and death.
om and bomb.
art.
which is still and will always be art, regardless of who's looking.
there may be no coherent sentences in this review, as it's been less than twenty four hours since i've finished this book. it took me as long, probably, to read the last paragraph as it did to read the last few pages because i had to catch my breath and rub tears away after nearly every phrase.
that's the thing.
everything in the last couple of pages connects to something or someone somewhere in the eight hundred pages that came before. i'm sure there are some i missed - i've been reading on and off for almost two years - but the ones i caught, the longing, the yellow, your voice, the games children play, i can't even think of the depth of these intricacies without my jaw shaking and this fist of fervent nostalgia gripping my chest.
to say i love this book is an extreme understatement.
to maintain that this book has me for life is barely a beginning.
want standard? swerve.
want linear lines and a formulaic finish? swerve.
want undemanding, less than wholly engaging, same book different cover, only the cover's not really different either, repetitive, reductive, repulsive in its own restrictions storytelling?
want unfuckinglegendary?
swerve.
this book is legacy.
cocky everywhere it deserves to be and connected completely.
this book is an ouevre not only of composition, not only of free-form phraseology and raw history, not only of sensory secrets, headlines and slogans and paintings and warnings, not only of childhoods and adulthoods and neighbourhoods and how we lose and find ourselves in them and carry them under our skin like grudges or grace wherever we go - this book is a body not only of relationships and decades and every intertwined element and event, but of trust and pluck. this book is reliance that as you read, you're paying attention and assurance that if not, you're left behind thinking you left it behind.
this book is a covenant.
a frame by split-second frame emergency.
this book is a backbone unto itself.
a tour de new and overwhelming nakedness, rough slurs, cold sweats, bones to pick, painted planes and shared cigarettes and pencil lines on the wall your mother has drawn to mark your height.
we're all gonna die
and
fuck you, that's from where.
this book is both shots heard round the world and what it means for the man and the chair to go different ways, back-fronted Picasso lovers meeting again miles from home, a boy from another planet the streets aren't ready for and George the waiter and Moonman 157 and Lenny Bruce begging you to love him unconditionally and the Angel Esmeralda and both Edgars and Bronzini walking with that tangerine and Acey Greene as uncontainable as Jayne Mansfield herself and i can't even write Nick Shay's name without having to stop again, because i can't even think Nick Shay's name without collapsing into a dead-level, true-blue mess of severe sentimentality.
because this is a book i couldn't physically set down when it was over.
because this is a book that showed that me how to read it.
this book is confession, be patient.
don't swerve.
it's a gift and a lesson and a scar i want to cradle.
this book is an undividedness, acute close-ups within encyclopedic panoramas. a transcendence in modern American slang of suspicions and intimacies, bewilderment and affinities, dense with echos and references, nuns and artists and comedians and highway killers, dads that left for a pack of Lucky Strikes and never came back and Whistler's Mother and what we think is waste and where it goes and infinite tunneled underworlds and all their ancestral roots.
this book is whistle in the middle of the night i hope i always hear.
a treatise and an era and aesthetic itself.
an act of memory and epiphany.
this book is the whole ballgame.
jazz.
life and death.
om and bomb.
art.
which is still and will always be art, regardless of who's looking.
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
i have a secret to tell...i know very little about baseball. but this book...it was one of my first exposures to the rambling post-narrative stuff of post-modern fiction & i loved every minute of it.
The scope of this novel was so fantastic that I find myself at a bit of a loss for how to talk about it in a way that accurately reflects it or does justice to its breadth. Weaving backwards through a half century of dozens of intertwined lives, 'Underworld' is more a study of history and culture than of any central character or theme. There are, of course, a number of identifiable themes that pop in and out of focus with the shifting narrative perspective: death, disease, the course-altering impact of nuclear weaponry, the endless accumulation of human waste, the dissolution of happiness as a viable foundation for an aging marriage, fiction's central role in both personal and public histories, the proliferation of media and connectedness and their complicated interactions with human psychology, the changing and unchanging shapes of religion and ritual and drug use and family and obligation, art and artlessness, the landscape of morality in an increasingly disconnected society, chance and circumstance as alarmingly powerful and impersonal agents with no concern for the structures we've build to hide from them, and I could go on for some time.
There really is a remarkable amount of meat packed into these 800 pages, which seem as a whole to sketch and outline America itself, as it transforms and mutates over decades though its citizens stay in many ways the same. I almost want to take the novel as an exploration of culture as an evolutionary force: people do not change any more or less than their environments require them to, the fascinating complication being that we shape our environments blindly and shortsightedly, one infinitesimal but quantifiable decision at a time. We are the unknowing progenitors of the fates of all generations to follow, mortal gods in ways we cannot even begin to trace or fathom.
Travelling backwards with a slow and careful unravelling of cause and effect over the long lifespan of the Cold War, characters' memories distorting back to reality the closer the pages come to the original events, DeLillo seems to unfold history itself. And he does so with masterful flourish, letting language do much of the heavy lifting for him: non-linear and interruptive dialogue, which feels as naturally uncomfortable and clumsy as real conversation often does, carries the apparently mundane into broader and deeper import; repeated themes and phrases expand in new ways with each iteration as if to show how time dulls the meaning of such phrases and ideas as we hold dear (since the narrative moves in reverse); a persistent and often meta- appreciation of words illustrates the wholly underestimated power they glean through their symbiotic relationship with knowledge.
Ultimately, 'Underworld' takes a well-earned place among a body of masterpiece modern literature that defies any synoptic description and hits all the harder for it, alongside such heavyweights as David Foster Wallace and Cormac McCarthy. It's a novel about time and people, and it becomes incredibly hard to compress it down beyond that with any measure of fidelity, the sort of fiction you really just have to experience yourself to get any true sense of what it is about. And I really recommend that you do that.
There really is a remarkable amount of meat packed into these 800 pages, which seem as a whole to sketch and outline America itself, as it transforms and mutates over decades though its citizens stay in many ways the same. I almost want to take the novel as an exploration of culture as an evolutionary force: people do not change any more or less than their environments require them to, the fascinating complication being that we shape our environments blindly and shortsightedly, one infinitesimal but quantifiable decision at a time. We are the unknowing progenitors of the fates of all generations to follow, mortal gods in ways we cannot even begin to trace or fathom.
Travelling backwards with a slow and careful unravelling of cause and effect over the long lifespan of the Cold War, characters' memories distorting back to reality the closer the pages come to the original events, DeLillo seems to unfold history itself. And he does so with masterful flourish, letting language do much of the heavy lifting for him: non-linear and interruptive dialogue, which feels as naturally uncomfortable and clumsy as real conversation often does, carries the apparently mundane into broader and deeper import; repeated themes and phrases expand in new ways with each iteration as if to show how time dulls the meaning of such phrases and ideas as we hold dear (since the narrative moves in reverse); a persistent and often meta- appreciation of words illustrates the wholly underestimated power they glean through their symbiotic relationship with knowledge.
Ultimately, 'Underworld' takes a well-earned place among a body of masterpiece modern literature that defies any synoptic description and hits all the harder for it, alongside such heavyweights as David Foster Wallace and Cormac McCarthy. It's a novel about time and people, and it becomes incredibly hard to compress it down beyond that with any measure of fidelity, the sort of fiction you really just have to experience yourself to get any true sense of what it is about. And I really recommend that you do that.
When my wife and I moved in together some 23 years ago, she had a copy of this book. It remained on our shelves for maybe 5 years more or so until I donated it because she had tried it once and gave up and I had this silly notion in my mind that DeLillo was not a writer for me (I quite obviously had him confused with some other author or group of authors). It was not until 2016 that I read any DeLillo thanks to the first group I joined her on Goodreads. I read and loved, [b:White Noise|6719051|White Noise|Don DeLillo|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1331319621l/6719051._SX50_.jpg|327422]. I then vowed to reclaim another copy of Underworld, but it still took me another 8 years to acquire and actually read it.
Some things are so large, it's hard to get your mind around them. What is this book about? The paranoia of an era as technology, nuclear weapons/waste, and capitalism converge to disassociate us from our bodies and splinter our narratives. And what DeLillo gives us is a novel befitting this new world, a "story" of connections, tangents, historical moments experienced at the individual level as tectonic forces shift irrevocably beneath the surface. He is a prophet of doom and a poet of urban decay:
He hopscotches through time and characters, maintaining distinctions while blurring boundaries. At least a couple times, I lost track of who I was reading about or where, but I was still captivated by the energy, the rhythm, and the voicing he skillfully employs. It feels held together more by theme and symbol than plot or character, as if uncovering the zeitgeist were its purpose.
A postmodern alarum attempting to reveal the system that has already co-opted us. Resistance is futile---a present sliding into a future more Borgian than Borgesian.
------------------------------------------------
BUNCHES OF WORDS I SHOULD LOOK UP/INTERNALIZE/ASSAULT OTHERS WITH
megillah | dominus vobiscum | argot | halide | transept | postulant | wimple | cincture | guimpe | dietrologia | weltanschauung | psychomimetic | kriegspielish | maunder | velleity | tizzoons | scucciament | claire-obscure | porca miseria | cloacal | brooch | bourns
Some things are so large, it's hard to get your mind around them. What is this book about? The paranoia of an era as technology, nuclear weapons/waste, and capitalism converge to disassociate us from our bodies and splinter our narratives. And what DeLillo gives us is a novel befitting this new world, a "story" of connections, tangents, historical moments experienced at the individual level as tectonic forces shift irrevocably beneath the surface. He is a prophet of doom and a poet of urban decay:
"They were a society of indigents subsisting without heat, lights or water. They were nuclear families with toys and pets, junkies who roamed at night in dead men’s Reeboks. She knew who they were through assimilation, through the ingestion of messages that riddled the streets They were foragers and gatherers, can redeemers, the people who yawned through subway cars with paper cups. And doxies sunning on the roof in clement weather and men with warrants outstanding for reckless endangerment and depraved indifference. And there were shouters of the Spirit, she knew this for fact–a band of charismatics who leapt and wept on the top floor, uttering words and nonwords, treating knife wounds with prayer."
He hopscotches through time and characters, maintaining distinctions while blurring boundaries. At least a couple times, I lost track of who I was reading about or where, but I was still captivated by the energy, the rhythm, and the voicing he skillfully employs. It feels held together more by theme and symbol than plot or character, as if uncovering the zeitgeist were its purpose.
"It’s all a question of mind over matter. They don’t mind and we don’t matter."
A postmodern alarum attempting to reveal the system that has already co-opted us. Resistance is futile---a present sliding into a future more Borgian than Borgesian.
------------------------------------------------
BUNCHES OF WORDS I SHOULD LOOK UP/INTERNALIZE/ASSAULT OTHERS WITH
megillah | dominus vobiscum | argot | halide | transept | postulant | wimple | cincture | guimpe | dietrologia | weltanschauung | psychomimetic | kriegspielish | maunder | velleity | tizzoons | scucciament | claire-obscure | porca miseria | cloacal | brooch | bourns
A disconnected collection of tales characterizing life in the 50-70’s. If the stories had been kept separate, there may have been more potential for the book. Jumbled together as they are with no evidence of a common theme tying them together, it was an unsatisfying read. The reader has a good voice but does not vary his voice enough with different characters (especially women) making this even more difficult to follow.