Libra

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful "idea" novel
Review: Libra is a fictional "biography" of Lee Harvey Oswald following his life and the plans that were underway during the seven months before the Kennedy assassination to make him the scapegoat. DeLillo, of course, takes liberties with the facts but he has produced a real page-turner and made Oswald into an entirely sympathetic character who may not have had the purest of motives but was not the one who fired the fatal shot.

Interestingly, DeLillo attributes an inordinate amount of luck to the fact that the motorcade appeared when and where it did. Several coincidences occurred to make the assassination possible, totally out of the control of those planning it. And yet it still worked.

The most fun part of reading it was noticing the ideas presented in the film JFK (filmed three years after Libra was published) appear in this book, making it a familiar territory. David Ferrie, in particular, is a major character and Guy Bannister appears often, also, as does Jack Ruby. De Lillo has obviously done his research.

Having just seen JFK again, I picked this up as sort of a "companion" novel and it worked well in that capacity. I felt that the movie did not really touch on so much of Oswald's life and that Libra filled in those gaps well.

DeLillo's sense of time and place are commendable and I think this was probably a good training ground for his epic Underworld, which has sat on my bookshelf, collecting dust for many years and which I will most likely now pick up and read.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Example of What Historical Fiction Should Be
Review: In the very first chapter of this profoundly provocative novel, we take a ride in a speeding New York City subway with a truant Lee Harvey Oswald. As the young Oswald stares out the front window, little does he realize how much the rest of his life would be just like this: being carried away by a powerful machine and only catching flickering glances of the things and people along the way. Released very close to the 25th anniversary of JFK's assassination, LIBRA does not attempt to seriously propose a conspiracy theory. What he does do is take some of the facts, some of the tempting coincidences, and several of the possible scenarios, and create a labyrinth of intrigue and a world filled with shadows within shadows. This is a creepy book that haunts you, to use a tired cliche but I can't think of how else to put it. (Apparently the assassination is a favorite topic for DeLillo, as the Zapruder film and discussions about JFK conspiracies reappear in DeLillo's later book, UNDERWORLD.) Underneath it all is a dark struggle between what is planned and what occurs: strategy versus chance, conspiracy versus spontaneity, the best laid plans... etc. In LIBRA, the scales tip one way then the other and, yet, the result is the inevitable tragedy of November 22, 1963. This is what historical fiction should be.

Rating:
Summary: Delillo's Fourth Best Novel
Review: A fun read, vintage Delillo, loaded with what we've come to expect from an American literary master.

A must read for any Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist.

Behind (in order) Underworld, Mao II, and White Noise, Libra is Delillo's fourth best novel.

Rating:
Summary: "Plots carry their own logic" ...
Review: First thing, the larger of the two reviews (I think Publisher's Weekly?) featured by Amazon for this book is very good. Don't expect an explanation of an event disguised as a novel. In Libra, DeLillo is not trying to explain an event in history; he wants to drop us into the lap of that event in all its complexity and nuance. "If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. .. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. Or perhaps not." This is the ambiguous world of the Kennedy assasination, the subject of this jewel of a novel. Particularly vivid in these pages is Jack Ruby: explosive and insecure, cruel in one moment, caring the next. And of course, Oswald. We watch Oswald's slow loss of identity. In Libra he disappears from history -- gradually losing touch, direction, hope, meaning. He does not appear to drive himself, nor is he driven by CIA or FBI or other operatives who, try what they will, essentially find him impregnable. Yet, history it what he makes, or finds. It is the Russian character so much involved in Oswald's ersatz defection, Kirilenko, who best seems to understand Oswald as "some kind of Chaplinesque figure, skating along the edges of vast and dangerous events. Unknowing, partly knowing, knowing but not saying, the boy who had a quality of trailing chaos behind him, causing disasters without seeing them happen, making riddles of his life and possibly fools of us all." He is encouraged by an operative not to find a place in history -- "wrong approach Leon" -- but "to get out. Jump out. Find your place and your name on another level." Reading Libra is participating in a waking dream, a graceful juxtaposition of conspiracy and coincidence, coverging at a point in time, at a place in Dallas. Libra is evocative of the whole tragedy, a novel that puts you on edge, not because the outcome is uncertain, but because, at a deep level, one fears to follow DeLillo's exploratory threads. Not a pleasant ride, but a powerful read.

Rating:
Summary: Constructing History
Review: DeLillo's Libra is a fascinating read, not only because its topic is one of America's most traumatizing events in recent history--not the assassination of president Kennedy is the point of interest in the book--but the question: What made this event so terrifying, why had it such an impact?

In answering this question DeLillo leaves out the obvious reasons: JFK's popularity and people's hopes connected with his politics. Instead, he puts the focus on a more profound problem: With the assassination of JFK the American people were woken up from their dream of security and regularity. A conclusive explanation of the how and why of the event could have put them back to sleep. Such an explanation is not available though. It is just not the way history works, and DeLillo skillfully shows exactly that in his book. He depicts a conspiracy that gets out of hand and Oswald as a manipulated and constructed individual.

Presenting his version of the events, DeLillo at the same time questions its validity. Reading his novel we become aware of the impossibility of drawing the right conclusions of the mass of hard facts and vague hints--the infinite possibilities of what can be held for the truth. Therefore, any historical account can only be a possible version of the real. In so far, DeLillo's Libra places itself somewhere between fiction and history.

Libra is a novel that deserves every attention.

Rating:
Summary: Seamless
Review: For me, the great novel explaining a political event in the 1960's remains DeLillo's "Libra", which gets inside of Lee Harvey Oswald, plausibly explaining how Oswald thought while also serving as a biography of his life. Libra joins the novel seamlessly to history.

Rating:
Summary: A Conspiracy of Coincidences
Review: Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman lashing out at his solitude and failure. Oswald was the patsy in a vast conspiracy to advance shadowy aims.

Sailors of the ocean of literature published about November 22, 1963 can expect either one or the other of the above takes on what happened that fateful afternoon in Dallas. It's become almost a window into what you really are as a person, what you believe to be the true facts of the crime.

The first great thing about Don DeLillo's terrific novel "Libra" is the fact it posits a third view of the assassination, which can be simplistically described as a blending of the two main versions. In "Libra," Oswald is both a lone gunman, following his own idiosyncratic path through an absurd existence of his own design; and the dupe of a small coterie of disaffected ex-CIA operatives and anti-Castro Cubans who think killing Kennedy will shift negative attention on Uncle Fidel and punish the man who disowned their cause after the Bay of Pigs.

Ultimately, what killed Kennedy wasn't one man or even a bunch of them, as DeLillo sees it, but a vast pattern of circumstances that gel with the advantage of hindsight into something so intricate and interwoven as to seem preordained. Oswald got a job at a school book warehouse, and the next month the president's motorcade is rerouted right by it. A newspaper ad denouncing the President is published with a funeral-like black border the day he arrives. A rifle and a pistol ordered weeks apart arrive on the same day. And so on.

As David Ferrie, one of the conspirators, tells Oswald: "Coincidence is a science waiting to be discovered. How patterns emerge outside the bounds of cause and effect."

Every assassination conspiracy should have its own philosopher. One failing of "Libra" is DeLillo's continual use of dialogue like this, apt as it is, to flush out key points. The narrative, disjoined and non-linear to begin with, often verges on the Faulknerian within individual chapters and sections. Fortunately, the overall story is well known enough that this is navigable.

Even the best authors can get too pretentious for their own good, but "Libra" is a great read worth sticking around for to the end. You get vivid characterization, particularly with Oswald and his hyperdramatically self-pitying mother. There's a strong sense of the period, the early '60s before the decade went ker-pow (i.e. before this happened). DeLillo really conveys a sense of what went wrong and what could have been behind it, without offering easy answers or unsubstantiatable blame. It's clear the guy did his homework, covering all the bases as he overlays his fictional vision to the facts we are so familiar with, the story of 11/22 that DeLillo likens to "the Joycean Book of America...the novel in which nothing is left out." There are interesting detours, red herrings that tease out various subtleties and, while not essential to the plot, reward repeat readings. Finally, there are some real shafts of humor, as when Oswald, self-exiled in the Soviet Union, is looked over for possible employment by the KGB, and found wanting: "The test results were in and only his urine got a passing grade."

Does "Libra" offer the definitive account of the assassination? It's certainly one worth considering. I'm not sure the Jack Ruby angle is explained convincingly (though Ruby is one of the most interesting characters sketched by DeLillo). Most everything else is, though. For the record, I believe Oswald acted alone, but DeLillo does raise some strong points to suggest the contrary. At the same time, there's a lot here to peeve the Oliver Stone crowd.

"Libra" makes for an illuminating introduction to one of our greatest living novelists and to one of the signature events of living memory, which four decades later affects us still. While you and I may not understand everything in the book, it's helpful to bear in mind that comprehensibility is not the object here, and what we get instead is a sense of the things that can happen beyond our ken, and that the belief we control our own destiny is a lie, sometimes fatal.

Rating:
Summary: The JFK Assassination Is Not Really The Issue For Me
Review: What puts this book in the foremost rank of contemporary American novels (not that I'm especially qualified to proclaim any such thing) is not the light it may or may not shed on history. It is simply Mr. DeLillo's virtuosic prose and the singularly mesmerizing narrative voice produced by that prose.

For me, DeLillo first achieved this degree of clarity and force with 'The Names,' his sixth (seventh?) novel, and he's continued to refine and improve it ever since. Reading alone to oneself is a special and private act; DeLillo engages and penetrates that privacy the way few novelists known to me have approached. He expresses a fearless grasp of human nature with language so wondrously charged with poetic energy that the act of reading it is like somehow experiencing fine music through print. This quality pervades his later novels and at least surfaces in all of them, and is the main reason I like DeLillo (not the JFK conspiracy junk that is 'Libra's' narrative pretext).

It has pointed out, with some justification, that DeLillo's characters are too often like one another. Those objectors should be delighted with 'Libra'; the characters are distinct and superbly actualized: Boy Oswald, Win Everett, Jack Ruby, and Mother Oswald are really amazing.

Rating:
Summary: Fiction? Who said fiction?
Review: Interesting that a book such as this is categorised as "fiction" when in fact it comes awefully close to the actual account of things...
For anyone having read the actual historical account of the JFK case written by Jim Garrison (the D.A that officially investigated the case) "Libra" might seem -even- watered down, or, "mild".
De Lillo overwhelms as he revives (literally, as mostly anyone associated with this case is long dead...) the characters that set the stage for Kennedy's association and takes a brave approach simoultaneously as he doesnt opt for the easy way out.

It's an interesting concept the one that De Lillo undertakes: take a historical event and retell the story by letting the real characters do the talking, the living, the plotting, show them in every day life, bring biographical scenes from their lives forth and ultimately , under the guise of fiction, unfold the story again.

There would be objections, of course. Anyone would would try the same thing that De Lillo does here would probably come up with a different variation. Some even with a radically different one. The author of this book comes close, very close.
As a work of literature it is sometimes repetitive but it mostly wins its bet as De Lillo proves over 350 pages that he's got the charisma of reconstructing characters , but moreover, of understanding human nature and politics. Afterall, one with no understanding of human nature has no understanding of politics, thus, this had to be a given.
Allthough i would personally reccomend Garrison's book, "Libra" is not a bad place to start if you feel somewhat "confused"...

Rating:
Summary: The Onion Effect
Review: Great read. However, I get the feeling that there are a few (many?) nuances that I didn't catch. Definite "re-read" material. Read a review putting G. Gordon Liddy as Mackey?? Guess I should also "re-read" Woodward and Bernstein.