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3.88 AVERAGE
3.88 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
emotional
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Didn't finish, again, but I also made considerable progress through this postmodern beast of a novel. The prologue itself was worthy of barely one star. Once you struggle through that, the novel transforms into a dense 800+ page monster of philosophy and snapshots of America throughout the 20th century. Very experimental and intriguing in terms of structure, but in terms of language and syntax, it is inherently readable. I'll finish it eventually, but for now, I just have to give it three stars.
For some reason, I set this down several years back after reading the first hundred pages or so. Why I did that, I have no idea. Underworld is an expansive, Baudrillardian excursion through post-WWII America.
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
God I would fing kill to have been a part of the late twentieth century honestly it makes me so woeful thinking about it.
Don Delillo and other post modernist writers, but especially Delillo, do a frighteningly excellent job of connecting history—from unseemingly consequential countercultural threads to shifts of a paradigmatic proportion—to the real everyday fear of individuals. Fear of obsolescence, media, death and aging, irrelevance, undesirability, unhappiness. Delillo does this in an unmistakably American lens which is both rarely done to my liking and what makes it so captivating to me.
Underworld takes the reader backwards in time, starting with baseball and ending with a couple keystrokes and a single word. The epic talks about nuclear destruction, ever presence of adultery, crises of faith, mundanity of murder, morality of filial expectations, reimaginations of Eisenstein, the fastidiousness of the ritual of recycling, debatable quality and substance of modernist art, the meditation of beading a sweater, and literally so much more. Although it got slow and random in the second half, the prose remained top notch and it’s the type of book that would prompt many enjoyable rereads.
Don Delillo and other post modernist writers, but especially Delillo, do a frighteningly excellent job of connecting history—from unseemingly consequential countercultural threads to shifts of a paradigmatic proportion—to the real everyday fear of individuals. Fear of obsolescence, media, death and aging, irrelevance, undesirability, unhappiness. Delillo does this in an unmistakably American lens which is both rarely done to my liking and what makes it so captivating to me.
Underworld takes the reader backwards in time, starting with baseball and ending with a couple keystrokes and a single word. The epic talks about nuclear destruction, ever presence of adultery, crises of faith, mundanity of murder, morality of filial expectations, reimaginations of Eisenstein, the fastidiousness of the ritual of recycling, debatable quality and substance of modernist art, the meditation of beading a sweater, and literally so much more. Although it got slow and random in the second half, the prose remained top notch and it’s the type of book that would prompt many enjoyable rereads.
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
It took me six years to get through this book. While this time stuck, it was a long time coming. That prologue is a nexus. At novella length, and all at once an omniscient look at a baseball game and a snapshot of mid-century America, it's both hubristic and miscalculated. DeLillo's language and knack for perfect syntax are always welcome, but boy did he commit to writing a Long Book and only slightly nail the landing. The novel is at its best in its most human and quiet moments, and his scenes of dialogue here are some of the most naturalistic of his career. His most recent novellas have become essentially dadaist works of non sequitur dialogue, sometimes veering into the nightmarish, but this novel appears to be the final vestige of early-period DeLillo, where his characters usually replicated the actions and voices of real people. But what is the book ultimately saying about America? Or people? Or society? Honestly, not that much.
challenging
dark
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Warning - Underworld has no recognizable plot. Or really any plot at all for that matter. But it is an amazing journey through four decades of history (1950s-1990s), through the eyes of well crafted fictional characters and J. Edgar Hoover (trust me, it makes sense eventually).
It opens with a fictional world series, which is fine, but somehow the away team won everything with a walk off home run. THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE.
I'm not sure I ever got over it, especially since that game loosely set up the entire plot.
The characters... I didn't connect with any of them. The only one I was remotely interested in, Klara Sax, does not get very much time to shine. In my opinion. Most of the characters work to get rid of/hide nuclear waste. These are not shining pinnacles of what human beings should be.
I don't know about this book. The word choices were very harsh and blunt, carefully chosen, but very long winded. Paragraphs went on forever and didn't really say anything new. I felt like I wasn't going anywhere.
Plus, baseball.
I'm not sure I ever got over it, especially since that game loosely set up the entire plot.
The characters... I didn't connect with any of them. The only one I was remotely interested in, Klara Sax, does not get very much time to shine. In my opinion. Most of the characters work to get rid of/hide nuclear waste. These are not shining pinnacles of what human beings should be.
I don't know about this book. The word choices were very harsh and blunt, carefully chosen, but very long winded. Paragraphs went on forever and didn't really say anything new. I felt like I wasn't going anywhere.
Plus, baseball.