Libra

Rating:
Summary: Excellent and suspenseful novel
Review: Don Delillo is one of the best American writers out there. In Libra, his ninth novel, reflects on one of the most tragic and memorable events in US history: the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He turns his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, into the protagonist by reflecting upon his troubled life, and an antagonist for obvious reasons. Many conspiracies and coincidences are made evident by Delillo, like Oswald's life in the USSR and the FBI's involvement w/ Oswald, and JFK. It all leads to the focal point of the entire book, though it is predictable since we all know what happens. It leaves you in suspense throughout the entire book and it is very exciting and well-written.

Rating:
Summary: DeLillo's Great Novel
Review: Generally you tend to hear about _White Noise_ and sometimes _Underworld_ when DeLillo's best work is discussed. My own vote goes to this work, in which for the first time DeLillo abandons the burlesque dialogue and strings of witty aphorisms (make no mistake: these had served him well) for the flawed, damaged but always undegraded language of his later work. Think about it: DeLillo's early books veered from brilliant parody to sententious "profundity" (in the latter case I'm thinking particularly of the deadly and unreadable _The Names_). How much "parody" is in _Libra_, _Mao II_, or _Underworld_? There is one brief section of _The Body Artist_ in which DeLillo indulges himself in his older style (haven't read _Cosmopolis_ yet). The "profundity" of _Libra_ derives directly from DeLillo's observations, not from what he "has to say" about them. DeLillo's fabricated conspiracy puts some readers off, as well it might if DeLillo weren't so clear about the ways in which he uses history to serve the sort of truth fiction illuminates.

Rating:
Summary: Scales out of balance
Review: Prior to 9/11, the assasination of President John F. Kennedy was the most public of American tragedies. Regardless of an individual's personal feeling toward the President, that person was emotionally drawn into the assasination by television and the other mass media. It might be argued that this event shaped the face of televison journalism for decades to come. The story had everything: drama, tragedy, conspiracy theories and the live televised murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Few of us who were alive on that fateful day in Dallas cannot remember what he or she was doing at the exact moment the news was first heard.

That Don DeLillo decided to treat the event in a "fictionalized" manner gave him great latitude to combine well documented facts with the novelist's own creative talents. The result is absolutely brilliant. Although DeLillo centers his narrative around Oswald, he uses real and invented characters to give his book the feel of a novel while at the same time the immediacy of journalistic reporting. Although the reader is well aware of what is to come, DeLillo builds up the suspence by his masterful manipulation of time. He interweaves chapters that deal with Oswald's early life with chapters that are in "present" time as well as with chapters dealing with the period immediately preceeding the assasination. As the reader moves through the book, Oswald and the plotters all move inexorably toward that day on which their fortunes were to meet. By the time of this meeting DeLillo has so developed each of the characters to a point that their actions and the scenario that the author presents are completly believable. Particularly impressive is the way the author developed some of the subsidiary characters such as the disaffected Cuban, Raymo; Oswald's mother, Marguerite; and the G. Gordon Liddy clone, Mackey. The testimony of Marguerite before the Warren Commission is one of the most riveting pieces of monologue I have read, completely defining the speaker's character and all her misconceptions, tenderness, and cunningness.

Thankfully, DeLillo avoids falling into the conspiracy theory trap and he neither preaches a particular point of view nor uses the hindsight of history to draw conclusions from events which followed the assasination (as did Oliver Stone). That there are among us "men in small rooms" who deliriously inflate their own importance and who by a single act of violence can insure their place in history is all too real. DeLillo sees it as his task not to try to "furnish factual answers", but only to "fill some of the blank spaces in the know record" so that these misguided individuals might be better understood. He has succeeded in his task.

Rating:
Summary: better history than a work of fiction
Review: This is an impressive book in that it is able to string many different elements of Kennedy Conspiracy theories into a coherant plausible scenario. In terms of the historical grasp of the period the author succeeds. However the writing style is cumbersome by employing a non traditional narrative style of free association by some of the characters. The book is weak on suspense suprisingly so for a conspiracy book. The character development is fairly week outside of Oswald. Also the charcter of Nicholas Branch who was writing a secret history for the CIA should have been expanded.The book is poorly edited even accounting for the unorthodox narrative style. There are grammatical errors and punctuational errors in the manuscript that make it somewhat difficult to read. I give it 5 stars for being a historical novel and 1 star for the writing style.

Rating:
Summary: History, Conspiracy and Men in Small Rooms
Review: On the surface Libra is a novel about the history of the assassination of President John Kennedy and an insightful narrative about the man who is said to have pulled the trigger: Lee Harvey Oswald. But as with all such histories, the seemingly clear surfaces merely reflects the latest scriblings on what is really a deeply inscribed palimpist of human chronicle. Based on years of painstaking research and written from the perspective of a CIA historian assigned to produce a complete and secret history of the event, Don Delillo presents an intimate look at the man who has since become the symbol for America's shattered dreams and the subject of countless conspiracy theory scenarios. In so doing Delillo produces an image of Oswald that attempts to transcend the simplistic tropes to which he has been so often cast and, instead, represent Oswald as he really was: a lonely, impressionable, self-contradictory young man with a identity fractured by modernity.

In Libra, Oswald is not only the small meek looking man gunned down by Jack Ruby as a stunned nation was instantaneously transformed into subjects of the media panopticon, but also a dedicated Marxist, a US Marine, a husband, father and son. Thus, he gets what most assassins do not: a human face, if not a multitude of them. As the story progresses, Oswald's multiplicitous character is transformed and molded from "mere pocket litter", a "cardboard cutout" into a ready-made villain of a fading American ideal. How this transformation is accomplished, rather than the result of Oswald's actions, is really what Delillo is trying to fide an answer for. Whether or not he succeeds in discovering this depends upon the value that is given to history in modern society, and the implicit logic that this type of epistemological inquiry anticipates.

In Libra history is not simply an objective accounting of human accomplishment and action, but something constructed by men in small rooms. Libra is about understanding the influence of the apathetic forces of chance, randomness and cosmic disorder, which are then transformed into simplistic narratives that allow us all to sleep at night.

Libra is a book for anyone who wonders about the substance of American history and the ways in which this substance is created. It is a novel that throws into question many of our most cherished truths, one that requires the re-examination of the notions of human agency, identity, fate and ultimate nature of our postmodern reality. A great novel that offers many insightful answers as well as being a highly readable and engaging work of contemporary American fiction.

Rating:
Summary: Elegantly Written
Review: "Libra," is an elegantly written book that took me as deeply into the mind of Lee Harvey Oswald as I care to go, and by so doing allowed me to feel some compassion for a character (at least in this fictional version) I've likened more to a weasel than a human being. From boyhood to his young adult death Mr. Dellilo's Oswald is a character in search of self who never gets there. He's a shy, stupid, somehow charming boy who should be protected, but whose grandiose delusions would eventually put any protector off. You'd miss him in a crowd - until he pulled a gun. Oswald and Jack Ruby are the most defined characters in the book, with Oswald's mother weighing in with self-defining monologues that are a pleasure to read, but a pain to sympathize with. She's a whiner with an interesting whine.

The remaining characters are thin, never as low-down as you'd expect, and don't seem at all realistic as plotters in the assassination of the century.

"Libra," is not a mystery, not a thriller, not even much of a drama. If anything it's a meditation on character - or at least on Oswald's character. I'd recommend it for the beautiful writing, (phenomenal dialogue) but certainly not as a page-turner.

Rating:
Summary: A mixed success
Review: After reading the hefty Underworld and the sparse Body Artist, I wondered what DeLillo, a man who has a gifted use of language, would do with a more conventional narrative. With Libra, I began to get my answer and was not all that impressed.

Although not completely conventional, the story is more straightforward than the other books I have mentioned. Although a story dealing with conspiracy and assassination, it is basically lacking in suspense and action; for this reason, it must rely more on things like character, in particular that of Lee Harvey Oswald.

DeLillo portrays Oswald as a pathetic individual, a malfunctioning human whose failure is inevitable. You don't really empathize with Oswald; instead, you observe him with the same fascination you would give to a train wreck. The other characters in this story are more weakly depicted.

There are better novels dealing with the Kennedy assassination and possible conspiracies associated with it. I recommend American Tabloid by James Ellroy, which is much better (and Ellroy's sequel, The Cold Six Thousand, while weaker, is also very good). For DeLillo, while this is not a bad book, he is better off with his more unconventional stories.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent "Historical Fiction"
Review: I must recommend Libra as a work of fiction while suspending judgment as to the "truth" of the account. Also I will nitpick: DeLillo makes at least one mistake: he calls the newsman who was friendly with Jack Ruby "Joe Long," as per most versions. But it is known that the man in question was Gary De Laune, later a sportscaster for CBS in San Antonio. Of course it is possible that DeLillo left in this mistake on purpose. Writers are crafty that way.

Rating:
Summary: history and rage
Review: don delillo's libra is part character study (rendering the obscured figure of lee harvey oswald into focused clarity so that his sensibilities, his nuerosis, his passions become visible as well as his humanity), part historical analysis (we can see demonstrated in the narrative structure that axiom of history being at the will of eros and human emotion, that all plots, in this case the jfk assasination plot, no matter how fine tuned, are unconsciously driven towards death and must always unravel), part conspiracy theory (delillo's posits his own spin on the actors and aims of the assasination, ex-cia members seek to bolster public support for a reinvasion of post-bay of pigs cuba by a fake attempt on jfk's life, originally intended to occur in miami, with a fabricated trial of paper leading back to cuban intelligence to appear as retaliation for cia covert assasination attempts on castro, oswald is wound into the web by chance and circumstance). but most of all it is pure fiction.

the novel is rigorously researched and the story penetrates deep into the facts, as it is explicitly fiction, bringing what could be a banal historical tract into glowing and animate life, one can feel oswalds heavy breathing as he reads trotsky in a new orleans library or feel the cramped crowd sizzling as the motorcade crawls through the streets of dallas. in libra, we are given a glowing snapshot of american history and we see the national narrative not as a tale of benevolent heroics or moral crusading, but rather as pure passion, human blood-rush and alienation, desperate forces reacting in the only way they know how. this is human history, the rage of achilles.

libra is not only a strong counter narrative to dominant conceptions of contemp. american history, it also stands on its own as masterful literature. libra is smart and ruthless and funny. delillo's prose is tightly woven and reads elegantly, jewelled with beaming images that scald in your mind permanently. the author's ear for dialogue and natural cadence is uncanny, he can rave and he can orate and he can street-talk and he can love-whisper. managing to juggle almost eight to ten satellite characters in the story and allow oswald room to breath as a the central figure, delillo's catchs a panorama of personalities (agitated housewife, court marshalled marine, cia director, oswalds aged mother, private investigator, etc) and weaves them beautifully.

i say three cheers for libra.

Rating:
Summary: Freedom or Captivity
Review: This is the second Delillo book I have read (the other Underworld) and I was not disappointed. Upon finishing the book, I desired to read another by him. His style is incredible, and beyond my own words of explanation. To me, a recurrent theme in this book, and in Underworld, was the theme of freedom and captivity. Did Oswald finally find the freedom in his own life while in his Dallas Cell?

Example:
"Lee Harvey Oswald was awake in his cell. It was beginning to occur to him that he'd found his life's work..."

"This was the true beginning"

"His life had a single clear subject now, called Lee Harvey Oswald"

"The more time he spent in his cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now. This charged him with strength. There was clearly a better time beginning, a time of deep reading in the case, of self-analysis and reconstruction. He no longer saw confinement as a lifetime curse. He'd found the truth about a room. He could easily live in a cell half this size"

Is freedom in the eye of the beholder?

I highly recommmend this book to any reader interested in the assasination. Delillo is truly the artist of our time.