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brettglass 's review for:
The Body Artist
by Don DeLillo
a surprisingly wonderful and surreal novel. a performance artist's husband commits suicide, and her house is haunted? visited? by a man who cannot conceptualize time. he speaks always in the wrong verb tense and ostensibly remembers the future. what follows is her attempts to record and make sense of his anachronistic language, vignettes of birds feeding and her stretching her body in preparation for her performances, and meditations on time's relationship to loss. this book felt very cinematic with its juxtaposition of seemingly disparate scenes and strange visuals. it's the type of novel that would work really well as an art house film because it's all sensation and time and conversation and no real plot to speak of, but in a good way. the length is really helpful here. it's short enough that this repetition and lack of real narrative arc is novel and never becomes redundant or boring. i bought this on a whim after finding it at a bookstore, and the cashier all but tried to talk me out of buying it. i dont really get why maybe im missing something but i quite liked this book!