A review by monkeelino
Libra by Don DeLillo

4.0

Somewhere along the line I got this notion in my head that DeLillo wasn't for me. I have no idea how that got lodged in my head, but it could not be more wrong. This is only my second of his works (after being quite delighted with White Noise), but between his subject matter (the American zeitgeist) and his writing style (dark, funny, smart, biting, while somehow being lyrical), I think I might be hooked. Some of his passages are simply enjoyable on their own:

The faintly musty smell, the coolness of the small room, the familiar labels on jars and cans made him feel like an ancient and tired child, someone allowed to relive the simplest, the deepest times, moments that left a scar on the heart---not an evidence of some detailed pain but only of time itself, systemic, heavy with loss.

In Libra he tells the tale of how Lee Harvey Oswald came to shoot JFK in 1963. It's told in the type of "jump cut" style more common to film. Within chapters, DeLillo shifts to different characters/locations or moves forward/backward in time, adding to what is an overwhelming, disorienting feeling of being caught up in forces that even those supposedly pulling the international strings don't fully comprehend nor control. His is not so much a theory of what actually happened as a tale with closure served up as a kind of dressing to cover this historical wound.
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WORDS I LEARNED WHILE READING THIS BOOK
prelapsarian | panatela | shvartzer