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A review by babybearreads
Libra by Don DeLillo
adventurous
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
4.0
"If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent and nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not."
Oh DeLillo, my favorite of the 20th century straight white male American writers. He never fails to investigate his ideas in an interesting way, and of course his impeccable snappy dialogue goes without saying. This time, the stage is his fictionalized version of the Kennedy assassination, just one fleshed-out theory of many (believe me, when I told friends and family I was reading this book, all the different theories poured out). It circles around the "making" of the infamous Lee Harvey Oswald, and also the three ex-CIA men who in this story organize an intentionally near-miss attempted assassination in order to lead the president to take back Cuba after the embarrassing Bay of Pigs. Obviously we know how the story ends... but how we get there is no less thrilling. I stayed up late to finish the last 50 pages in one sitting!
What gets me every time is how incredibly prescient DeLillo's ideas are. What this book is REALLY about is: witnessing the making of an extremist; why we are attracted to conspiracy (see quote above); the desire for certain people to be "bigger than themselves" and "part of history" and maybe that's a dangerous viewpoint because they think what they're doing is above criticism?; how huge changing events are just possibly mistakes made by normal people; how we can't escape the chaos that is human life and why try to control it. OK maybe that final point is mine own...
While it's my least favorite of the three DeLillo works I've now read and lags in the middle, it still felt entirely worth my time. And perhaps it will be yours!
Oh DeLillo, my favorite of the 20th century straight white male American writers. He never fails to investigate his ideas in an interesting way, and of course his impeccable snappy dialogue goes without saying. This time, the stage is his fictionalized version of the Kennedy assassination, just one fleshed-out theory of many (believe me, when I told friends and family I was reading this book, all the different theories poured out). It circles around the "making" of the infamous Lee Harvey Oswald, and also the three ex-CIA men who in this story organize an intentionally near-miss attempted assassination in order to lead the president to take back Cuba after the embarrassing Bay of Pigs. Obviously we know how the story ends... but how we get there is no less thrilling. I stayed up late to finish the last 50 pages in one sitting!
What gets me every time is how incredibly prescient DeLillo's ideas are. What this book is REALLY about is: witnessing the making of an extremist; why we are attracted to conspiracy (see quote above); the desire for certain people to be "bigger than themselves" and "part of history" and maybe that's a dangerous viewpoint because they think what they're doing is above criticism?; how huge changing events are just possibly mistakes made by normal people; how we can't escape the chaos that is human life and why try to control it. OK maybe that final point is mine own...
While it's my least favorite of the three DeLillo works I've now read and lags in the middle, it still felt entirely worth my time. And perhaps it will be yours!