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marc129 's review for:
Underworld
by Don DeLillo
I can be fairly brief about this book: I just didn’t like it. Take the prologue: 60 pages of verbal acrobatics about a baseball game in 1951 that forty years later stills appeals to the imagination. I agree: DeLillo cleverly uses every literary trick in the book to achieve the same effect as a spectacular opening scene in a movie, that continues to vibrate on your retina for hours. But according to me, it's not appropriate to do that with prose, just let each medium/art retain its own strength. And then there is this cliché to zoom in on cult figures like Frank Sinatra or J. Edgar Hoover, who also happen to be in the stadium and have all kinds of reflections on the Cold War.
What follows is a meandering, kaleidoscopic novel in which both the baseball match as the Cold War are the connecting elements: it's so artificial that it seems like DeLillo wanted to show off: "look how ingenious I can make things..." and forgets that there also has to be some content. No, this book really was wasted on me (so I confess I didn't finish it).
What follows is a meandering, kaleidoscopic novel in which both the baseball match as the Cold War are the connecting elements: it's so artificial that it seems like DeLillo wanted to show off: "look how ingenious I can make things..." and forgets that there also has to be some content. No, this book really was wasted on me (so I confess I didn't finish it).