A review by matt_som
Libra by Don DeLillo

3.0

I like the idea of _Libra_ as well as the insights Delillo has to offer more than I liked the experience of reading the book itself. It's not that it wasn't a good read - his prose in this one has a nice snappy quality. But to me the problem was what Delillo himself says about the JFK assassination through this book: it was and is one of the most over-determined events of the past century. Perhaps Delillo was fighting a losing battle as soon as he decided to write an "imagined" account of Lee Harvey Oswald's life leading up to the assassination - even in 1988, I would think Delillo had been up against too much history, too many other fictional portrayals, too much everything. So _Libra_ comes off as a bit of a lame duck. And maybe there's a kind of beauty in that: Delillo gives us his take on a large, dense and unwieldy cultural/historical text which - big surprise - remains fundamentally unreadable and unknowable.