Libra

Rating:
Summary: A Nice Rebuttal of Two Shortsighted Theories
Review: Delillo cuts a nice middle ground between two strikingly opposing viewpoints about the Kennedy assasination, showing how both of them disintegrate in the whirling amorphous cloud of incomprehension surrounding the event. Those who think Oswald acted alone, without any support, can of course look at the evidence. It seems almost impossible that the assasination was carried out by one man, acting alone. Dellilo, however, does not stop there (like Oliver Stone does in JFK), rather he charts a conspiracy that has no author, one that feeds upon and acts for itself. There is no "shadowy man" operating behind the conspiracy, there are no hands operating the marrionettes--they exist for themselves. The effect is far less insidious as the portrait of the government painted by some conspiracy theorists. On the other hand, it is far more frightening. None of the characters in Dellilo's account really know why they are doing what they are doing. None of them speak to one another. In the end, the assasination of JFK just sort of happens--Oswald never has a moment of clarity where he says "Yes, I am going to assasinate the president." The orders from the CIA (and yes, the CIA is involved in Dellilo's account, though not in the way many people believe)get muddled, translated, until a seemingly innocent plot to ready the United States to face an oncoming Communist threat devolves into one of the most harrowing moments in U.S. history. The shots ARE fired, though it becomes quite difficult to tell exactly who is fully responsible for those shots.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in either the assasination of Kennedy or the ways in which conspiracy theories get propagated in our society. Dellilo asks us to think about how much agency we have in our own lives, about how terrorist acts get played out, about how conspiracies often have no cohesion, no single center of authority. The book refuses to offer any answers. And because of this, I think it one of the most compelling, interesting, and thought provoking portrayals of both the "making" of an event and its inscription into history. For Dellilo forces us to not only consider how an event gets "carried out," but also how it is remembered, how it is inscribed upon the consciousness of a country reeling from its very real effects.

Rating:
Summary: The whole is far less than the smattering of its parts
Review: In Libra, Delillo deals with one of the most well-known and well-documented events in recent history. The volumes of information, of images, of rumor, of intrigue dominate the story of JFK's assassination. Wisely, Delillo chooses to focus on a more peripheral and much less understood individual, Lee Harvey Oswald. There are so many contradictions in the case for and against Oswald. Was he alone? Was he innocent? Was he part of a team? These questions slide into obscurity as Delillo reconstructs Lee Harvey Oswald/O. H. Lee/A. J. Hidell/William Bobo. The inconsistent Oswald.

The book unfolds with alternating chapters between two narratives of the past, and one in the present [1988]. One of the pasts is Oswald's life starting as an adolescent boy in the Bronx, which eventually collides with the other, beginning in April 1963 as a group of disenfranchised former CIA men decide to create a plot to make an attempt on the President. They do not intend to kill him. Shoot and miss is the plan. But as Delillo famously says, "Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death." So here we have a postmodern explanation for the mystique of conspiracy theory. There isn't an ordered lattice of events and characters, conducted by a deliberate intelligence. There is chaos, only ordered by a downward tendency toward death and destruction. It's Chaos Theory applied to human and political systemms.

Libra is also Delillo's most accessible book, at least in the context of the others I have read, (all but Underworld, The Names, and Mao II). Unlike White Noise, the people in Libra seem somewhat real. They are not totally so for that would mean that we understand them, which we don't. Delillo always creates fractured, composite views of his characters. We get glimpses, often contradictory, into their past and their intentions. Maybe it's because I have read a lot of his work, but Delillo's philosophic, if you can even call it that, statements are much more connected to the narrative here than in his other work. For example, Nicholas Branch, the present day narrative [1988] follows a contemporary CIA analyst poring over all the data on the assassination begins examining the physical evidence. There are so many abstractions and difficulties the presence of real objects somehow provides a glimpse of something like truth. "The Curator sends the results of ballistics tests carried out on human skulls and goat carcassess, on blocks of gelatin mixed with horsemeat...They are saying, 'Look, touch, this is the true nature of the event. Not your beautiful ambiguities." These sections contain some of the most poignant and valuable insight in any of Delillo's work I have seen.

Libra is an interesting, if somewhat complicated, work that both illuminates and obscures the character of Lee Harvey Oswald. This isn't as frustrating an experience as it might sound. By the novel's conclusion it would be cheap to wrap up such a sad and desolate story with niceties and tidy endings.

Rating:
Summary: Contemporary masterpiece
Review: This book is a wonderful example of the way fiction is able to elucidate a level of truth that nonfiction is not able to get at. Written in a dreamlike quality, but more easily digestible than other DeLillo works. A stunning piece of work that will stand the test of time.

Rating:
Summary: A contemporary tragedy
Review: Libra was my first DeLillo read and I found it to be a very compelling one. The first few hundred pages of the book meander menacingly along like a slow movement in a Shostacovich symphony. There is no humour, no quickening of the pulse anywhere: instead we see bleakness, we feel the oppressing humidity of the South and witness the claustrophobic plotting of 'men in small rooms'. At first I was less taken by DeLillo's montage technique, but I honestly can't see how he otherwise would have been able to weave such a dense matrix from which fate leaps forth. This is what is absolutely impressive about this book: as the story unfolds, the assassination plot starts to develop its own logic, with those who conceived it in the first place standing helplessly along the lines. The great engine of Fate grinds its way through History, sweeping the lives of minute individuals and the consciousness of a nation along with it. DeLillo masterfully lets the story run its own course. As a result, this is a novel which really gets under your skin.

Rating:
Summary: Dark, but still very good writing...
Review: Don DeLillo's novel "Libra" is a novel that focuses on the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on the 22nd of November 1963. Rather than telling us completely why he was shot and the complete details of the assassination(which to his credit he does well without giving too many Clancy-esque details)it focuses on the man who's name and face is synonymous with the assassination, the man who allegedly shot the President with 3 bullets from a bolt-axle rifle with a defective aim in less than 6 seconds whilst being a poor shot: Lee Harvey Oswald. His life. the significance of the title being that Lee Harvey Oswald's star sign was Libra.
It starts from Oswald's childhood with the rantings of his bizarre mother and how his childhood was spent in poverty which led him to have left-wing ideals. This was one of the factors that led to his downfall, his ideals. It charts his career in the navy, his association with characters involved in the asassination(like David Ferrie) and his rather strange years in Russia and back to the USA again.
This book hoever does have a few technical inconcistencies(which I can't help but point out as I am quite an anorak on the details of the case). The main one being that the backyard photos were never taken by Oswald but were of a man with the assassination rifle and holding some left-wing literature and Oswald's face superimposed upon it. This has been proved by certain shadow inconsistencies in the photos.
DeLillo does have a gift for writing and his writing style is very poetic. This combined with the historic even of the assassination of a President imposed on some social satire (the satire being the nature and views of the American people in that era and the impact of the assassination in that it deprived the people of a sense of security and of an influencing figure, especially to the youths, to whom JFK was a godfather figure) combnie to make an ever-relevant book which shares the twin badges of being well-written as well as well-regarded.

Rating:
Summary: libra
Review: While the characters at plot in Libra are very intricate and well developed, the novel has one thing working against it: We all know the end. But if you like Delillo's writing style or are interested in Oswald's life (the most interesting parts of the book) then it is worth reading. Not up to White Noise, but still pretty good.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: A brilliant imagining of what may have happened behind the scenes of the 1963 Kennedy assassination. There are no diabolical masterminds here, just confused, pathetic men for whom the weaving of secrets is both a means of control and a natural expression of their own frustrations. There is no intricate conspiracy, rather an accumulation of events that ultimately explodes into a national tragedy. The book makes the point that cause and effect are very slippery concepts when it comes to history.

Rating:
Summary: What a waste -- I just don't get it
Review: OK, after many years of reading reviews touting DeLillo as one of the greats of modern American literature, I decided to read "Libra." If this qualifies as great literature, America's literary future is in serious peril. His characters are cardboard cutouts. His dialog is stilted and unrealistic. His descriptive passages are underdone with little evidence of imagination or enthusiasm.

Overall, this was a boring book that I would not recommend to anyone. Desperate to understand DeLillo's appeal, I forced myself to read all the way to the end...then wondered why.

I've been an avid reader for almost 50 years, reading books and short stories from every genre. I'm always willing to give an author the benefit of the doubt.

Maybe I'm just older than most of DeLillo's followers. Maybe it's just that I was old enough in 1963 to understand what was going on. Maybe I'm just expecting too much from DeLillo.

This was my first DeLillo novel. It will also be my last.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful pieces, but fragmented as a whole
Review: Each chapter of Libra could make a great "Atlantic" article. Written with nuance and a keen eye for the perfect little details, they are individually stunning. What DeLillo fails to do, however, is integrate the pieces in a compelling way. Besides some promising scenes that the reader will identify (for example, the notorious photo of Lee H. posing with a gun in his backyard) and recurring and painfully obvious expositions on the place of coincidence in history, this feels like a loosely related short story collection. Yet I suppose that the greatest failing of Libra is to make the reader feel any pang of sadness or sympathy when its characters so famously die. DeLillo's sober, detatched style backfires in this sense. The pieces of something great are here, but DeLillo doesn't bring them together.

Rating:
Summary: Absorbing Rendering of JFK¿s Assassination
Review: I picked up "Libra" as a great Don Delillo fan who wondered how he handled the familiar material of JFK's assassination. I was not disappointed. In "Libra", DeLillo successfully imagines the life of Oswald, building a believable emotional and historical portrait of the man who would commit this murder. He also creates a believable Ruby, drug addicted and not in control of his life, who would have twisted reasons for shooting Oswald. Finally, he presents a murder conspiracy that is plausible, a marginal operation on the political fringe that needs considerable luck to succeed. "Libra" is an imaginative tour de force that helps explain how this tragedy happened.