Libra

Rating:
Summary: Good Book
Review: Libra deals with the Kennedy assassination from Lee Harvey Oswald's perspective. Oswald is presented as one of a number of trigger men, but as only a small player in a much larger conspiracy involving former CIA operatives. At first it appears that the conspiracy's goals are to use a failed attempt on the president's life as a ruse for re-invading Cuba, however somewhere along the line that plan is forgotten and the president becomes the real target of the operation.

Oswald is presented as a confused and misguided individual, with big ambitions but little direction and with no clear goals. The story takes the reader through Oswald's service in the military, a defection to Russia, a failed marriage and a number of other misadventures. Libra presents Oswald as a not entirely willing participant in the plot to assassinate Kennedy. This fictional Oswald is a pathetic, but disturbingly sympathetic character.

The book is a good one. One of its themes which I greatly appreciated is the banality of evil - while conspiring to assassinate the president, the plotters also deal with their day to day problems, such as taking care of their families, worrying about their careers etc. From this perspective the book is fascinating and unique. However, I never found myself fully gripped by the plot nor did I feel any suspense. Libra is a good book, it may even be great from a literary perspective, however I read novels for entertainment and not for literary genius. From this perspective I feel that the book came a bit short.

Rating:
Summary: DeLillo's Best Work
Review: The manner in which the author links up the life of Lee Harvey Oswald (the Libra of the title) with the multiple and convoluted conspiracies to stage an assassination attempt is completely engrossing. Oswald's imagined life on its own is fascinating, and if the depiction of the workings of the CIA is anything like the reality, we should all have a long deep look at how our world works.

Unusually for DeLillo, the minor characters, mainly invented, are all brilliantly portrayed and the reader cares about how each and every one of them ends up. DeLillo's notorious way (or lack of it) with dialogue actually works in this novel (whereas for me it fails utterly in a novel like Underworld).

The assassination scene finally arrives after 400 pages of intrigue and is well worth the wait. It's so well written that the events seem to flash in slow motion across your eyes as you read.

The only bum note for me was the depiction of Jack Ruby, who is written as a kind of afterthought. The author is obviously constrained by the factual basis, but Ruby's own story could have been more thoughtfully interweaved.

Rating:
Summary: The JFK Assassination Is Not Really The Issue For Me
Review: For me, what makes this book so great is not the light it may or may not shed on history; it is Mr. DeLillo's virtuosic prose and the singularly mesmerizing narrative voice produced by that prose.

As far as I can judge, 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 to oneself is a special and private act; DeLillo engages and penetrates this 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).

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

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: 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.