Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.88 AVERAGE
3.88 AVERAGE
I give it 4 1/2 stars. I loved reading this book, even though it took months and I would sometimes go for a week without getting very far and there were so many characters and plots that I would forget what had happened and get confused. This book does not follow a linear narrative, it can be hard to follow. But the characters are real, the stories are amazing, and the writing is excellent. I feel like a better person for having read this book. The Bronx, Lenny Bruce, the shot heard round the world, it reads like a lesson in american culture with a little politics thrown in.
to be honest, this layered epic of the 20th century took me a couple hundred pages to get into, but as the novel runs to 827 pages it was a relatively short time before I surrendered to the spell of Delillo's prose. touching on everything from baseball to the Bomb, everybody from Lenny Bruce to J. Edgar Hoover, and everywhere from the Arizona desert to Kazakhstan with stops in the Bronx throughout, the book is about connections really: emotional, chemical, electronic; random, momentous, never noticed. Delillo has crafted something beautiful out of a seemingly anonymous sampling of the world's garbage. oh yeah, and it's about garbage as well.
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
A genialidade narrativa de DeLillo poderá ser comprovada logo no primeiro capítulo, que é um portento narrativo que até a alguém que não quer saber nadinha de basebol faz abanar a alma (é essencialmente sobre um certo jogo ocorrido na década de 50 do século passado). O restante não acompanha qualitativamente, mas só porque a «personagem principal», face às secundárias, é tão interessante de ler como calcular juros de mora. Prova de que o sonho americano - que é isso que a personagem pretende incorporar - é uma balela e um aborrecimento.
Realmente notáveis e extraordinárias são várias dessas personagens secundárias, numa riqueza criativa e narrativa como poucas vezes se tem a sorte de encontrar, com aqueles passos da hábil dança que estes mestres da verborreia da americanidade da segunda metade do século XX tão bem executam, entregando ao leitor o ovo de Páscoa plantado um par de centenas de páginas antes, tudo fazendo convergir. Ora expressamente, ora na vontade leitora, que é convocada com efectivo esforço e não através de vacuidades armadas aos cucos.
Há muito que tinha o DeLillo como desonrosa lacuna nas minhas leituras e em boa hora colmatei tal lacuna. Espero durar para ler mais deste autor.
Realmente notáveis e extraordinárias são várias dessas personagens secundárias, numa riqueza criativa e narrativa como poucas vezes se tem a sorte de encontrar, com aqueles passos da hábil dança que estes mestres da verborreia da americanidade da segunda metade do século XX tão bem executam, entregando ao leitor o ovo de Páscoa plantado um par de centenas de páginas antes, tudo fazendo convergir. Ora expressamente, ora na vontade leitora, que é convocada com efectivo esforço e não através de vacuidades armadas aos cucos.
Há muito que tinha o DeLillo como desonrosa lacuna nas minhas leituras e em boa hora colmatei tal lacuna. Espero durar para ler mais deste autor.
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
For me, this book was really too much, just overwhelming. It felt like a loose collection of unrelated scenes and episodes. There's no real plot, except American post-WWII and cold war history. Maybe I'll read some other DeLillo, hoping for it to be better.
Splendid writing! Some brilliant bits & scenes
BUT:
-way too long
-more characters than Delillo (&/or the plot) can handle
-no coherence, seems like a random set of episodes which are, at best, losely connected
-story arches that are underdeveloped/unfinished/barely started
-overly complex (not in a good way)
in short: more editing would have done this novel some good...
BUT:
-way too long
-more characters than Delillo (&/or the plot) can handle
-no coherence, seems like a random set of episodes which are, at best, losely connected
-story arches that are underdeveloped/unfinished/barely started
-overly complex (not in a good way)
in short: more editing would have done this novel some good...
I went back and forth a few times with this book. It starts off with a prologue about a 1951 baseball game that coincides with the Russians testing “the bomb”. We jump forward to the 90s and gradually make our way back. The cast is rather large, with no particular character being of too much interest or importance. America in the post war years serves as the focal point.
What DeLillo writes about doesn’t really interest me but then for a few pages he does something I find quite interesting, whether it’s the few moments where two character’s are having three strands of a conversation at once, or the best moments in the book for me, the couple times we have pre coital interlocution between characters I can’t even remember. My interest in the book started out moderate and went down, came back for a hundred pages or so, went way, and then by the end it wasn’t really too enjoyable and I had to settle for ⭐️⭐️
What DeLillo writes about doesn’t really interest me but then for a few pages he does something I find quite interesting, whether it’s the few moments where two character’s are having three strands of a conversation at once, or the best moments in the book for me, the couple times we have pre coital interlocution between characters I can’t even remember. My interest in the book started out moderate and went down, came back for a hundred pages or so, went way, and then by the end it wasn’t really too enjoyable and I had to settle for ⭐️⭐️
This is one of my favourite books ever. Don't let the title mislead you. The Underworld DeLillo is writing about has nothing to do with the mafia or organized crime, but rather the worlds that exist beneath our very souls, born from our very pasts that stay with us and are always a part of us no matter who we are in the present or who we become in the future. Underworld is a masterpiece of modern story-telling and a fantastic examination at what lies beneath the faces that we show the world.
adventurous
challenging
dark
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes