Rating: 
Summary: Where the words take you...
Review: An extraordinary work of sustained and haunting beauty, from an American master known for his brilliantly inventive, erudite, precise, and dryly humorous novels about life in a world besieged by hidden conspiracies, media culture, terrorism, and technological dominance. But as profoundly relevant as these novels are to our times, they are often criticized for a lack of real warmth, a coldness brought on by intellectual distance. In The Body Artist, however, DeLillo continues the greater soulfulness he began exploring in his previous novel, Underworld, and burrows into the more humane -- bodily -- concerns of time, love, memory, and perception. In a kind of incantatory prose, DeLillo effortlessly submerges the reader into the life of Lauren Hartke, a performance artist living a solitary existence on a lonely coast in a rented house. One day a strange, ageless man, who possesses an uncanny knowledge of her life, as well as the life she shared with her departed husband, appears out of nowhere, and through their chance encounter, Lauren discovers a deeper, contextual sense of who she is. At 124 pages The Body Artist is more a novella than novel, but then not exactly. It could just as easily be a prose poem, a parable, or a prayer, because its power lies not so much in its printed words but where the words take you, begging the question of who the body artist really is -- Lauren Hartke, DeLillo, or you.
Rating: 
Summary: Hauntingly Odd
Review: Disclamer: I've never read any other DeLillo books. I typically enjoy novelists like Stephen King, Jim Butcher and Neil Gaiman. I picked this up because (1) I am a graphic artist and enjoy books on other artists, (2) it simply sounded interesting. I just finished reading it for the second time, which was necessary. Some people may call this book pretentious; I don't think it is at all, though some of the characters may rub people that way. It's experimental, sure, but this book is, itself, a work of art and either hits you dead on or misses you by a mile. This book hit me dead on. The discussions within about "high art," might leave people going "This is so wonky; how can they call this art?" That isn't the point. It isn't whether or not you like Lauren's art--it's not even so much that you like Lauren--it's that you really do need to look deeply into this book to like it and, if you do, you love it. A very intellectually stimulating read, definantly something to keep on the shelf and read over and over again.
Rating: 
Summary: DeLillo's Body Artist Is A Disapointment
Review: Don DeLillo followed his massive 800-plus page Underworld with this slim novel about Lauren Hartke, a woman who discovers a mysterious stranger in the remote summer home she is renting. It is easy to imagine that DeLillo was exhausted after his tour de force, and that The Body Artist was little more than an exercise for him, a pallet cleanser, something of a different tone and a different scope. Unfortunately for his readers, what might have been fun for him to write is not fun for us to read. The writing is spare. The words sit heavily on the page, resisting joining the other words in the sentence, and the sentences avoid the sentences that follow. Each thought seems so distinct, so definite, that it's hard to hold onto any of them, and I often found myself rereading the sentences in order to catch the meaning. The best way to describe the prose is in DeLillo's own words, as "an act of floating poetry....How strange the discontinuity. It seemed a quantum hop, one word to the next." The fact that DeLillo describes his own writing within the book suggests that the awkwardness was deliberate, but just because it was done consciously doesn't mean that it's good. I wanted more of the truths that I have come to expect from DeLillo, and not just ambiance. When Lauren finally seems to have an emotional breakthrough, the reader hasn't been given enough material to follow her there. We are left wondering, has anything actually happened? If you are interested in reading DeLillo, read White Noise and save The Body Artist for when you are such a fan that you want to have read everything he has ever published.
Rating:
Summary: A good book for some
Review: I can honestly say this is one of the worst books I've ever read. It is poorly written, excruciatingly boring and proof-positive that a big name can get anything published. The only redeeming feature of this book is that it is a mere 124 pages in length.The jacket description isn't even close to accurate unless by "spare and seductive" they meant spare on entertainment and that it seduces you to sleep. I'm going to give some of DeLillo's other work a chance because of the rave reviews I've read. This however, is not the place to start investigating his work.
Rating: 
Summary: Hated it.
Review: I really loved the premise. I was fascinated about it. I think it would make a wonderful movie or play. It was a quick read and held my attention. I really would like to see the whole premise even taken farther. I was a bit dissapointed that we didn't focus on "Mr. Tuttle" more - I could've read about him even more.
Rating: 
Summary: The word for bullcrap is bullcrap
Review: Shashank Tripathi said: "Who is this quaint stranger--unwilling time traveler?"
That's what Tuttle turns out to be. An unwilling time-traveler. Because I came across the following revelation in an interview that Don did with Michael Silverblatt:
"This character lives in time as it truly exists. Einstein said time is a fiction. And by that, I think what he meant is that our perception of time is not a genuine description of the way in which the structure of time exists in the universe around us. And this man, Mr. Tuttle, it seems to me, lives in time in an unprotected way. He's not able to protect himself as we do thru our misperception of the nature of time. It's the only way we can live. He can barely live. He can't speak clearly. He moves in a jerky sort of manner. He's totally lost in the world. Which could only mean that he is in the real world. Not in the world we have built with our self-protective mechanisms. We don't know what the universe is truly like. This is my reading of what certain scientists, certain cosmologists, seem to be saying. So my idea was simply to try to imagine a character in this terrible dilemma. One of the things he seems to be able to do is to move forward and backward in time. Although he certainly doesn't do this willingly. And I'm not quite sure if he does it physically or not."
And I'm not quite sure if the above-mentioned subject-matter is something that DeLillo should even have written about. Maybe it should've been left to Philip Dick and company. Nevertheless, I was impressed by a lot of the prose. Including the following passage that takes Nabokov's "squashed squirrel" alliteration non-joke and improves upon it: "The dead squirrel you see in the driveway, dead and decapitated, turns out to be a strip of curled burlap, but you look at it, you walk past it, even so, with a mixed tinge of terror and pity. Because it was lonely."
Rating:
Summary: Interesting, thought-provoking parable...
Review: The Body Artist is an interesting, engaging rumination. I do, however, have one piece of advice: be sure you are in the mood to read this book. It's not your typical novel, because it appears to be flat and uneventful -- in other words, no plot to speak of. But it will make you think about the nature of identity and what makes us who we are. The Body Artist is really more of a parable than a novel. The two main characters -- Lauren, a "body artist" who turns her own body into nothingness and a strange man who had until recently lived secretly in her home and who has the gift of mimicking other people's voices, but with no voice of his own -- are interesting in their bizarre similarities. But nothing really happens to them. Even so, DeLillo writes with marvelous, beautiful prose. Read this if you are in the mood for something experimental, literary and thought provoking.
Rating:
Summary: Strangeness of grief
Review: The Body Artist is the strangest--most haunted--most terse portrayal of grief I've ever read. Both its beauty and its strangeness bloom from the melding of an inexact and painstakingly precise language. A language that is both lush--with a deep desire to come to terms with its own sweet grief--and stripped bare--all the way down to the white bone of honesty, to the complete despair of having lost the unnamable which feeds the spiritual and physical urges within us. DeLillo revels in memory here--clings to it-- as well as the ability to convey more through imprecision of language ("What's it called. She'd pressed down the lever to get his bread to go brown.") than through linguistic clarity. I gorged on DeLillo's stark novel(la) all night until there was nothing left of it to eat. The actual narrative is imbedded so deeply in the spareness of the language, the cutting short of the sentence, the acknowledged but forgotten sentence, that it was a second read before I cared whose grief I felt (and then, only vaguely), or what caused it. Even then, I found myself more invested in the metallic taste of the spoon carrying the load of fig traveling the distance from the page to my dry mouth. The Body Artist is weirdly both internal and external; what feels like an intimate place of entry into one woman's tumultuous and complex emotional terrain becomes a place of entry into the grief of its own readers, forcing us to examine (or simply enter into) the landscape of our longing and sadness through the doorway of our day-to-day, mechanical lives.
Rating:
Summary: To review or not to review or perhaps
Review: The book is simultaneously a masterpiece and unfulfilling. DeLillo is a master in his use of language - the sentence can be jarring, incomplete, ambiguous, meandering as the plot line requires. An example: "She moved past the landing and turned into the hall, feeling whatever she felt, exposed, open, something you could call unlayered mayer, it that means anything, and she was aware of the world in every step." While I frequent enjoy movels specifically because of their use of language, I found DeLillo's writing jarring - there were sentences I had to reread in order to get the sense of them. I prefer to reread a sentence for the sensual pleasure of the words. Similarly, I was both impressed and uneasy about his building of character. He does a splendid job of rooting the body artist in the physical, with an awareness of the physical that had, for me, an almost Zen-like quantity. This was used to advantage as her experiences after her husband's suicide lead to fluid boundaries of time, space, personhood, reality ... However, in the first chapter which sets up the story I found the discrepancy between her semi-awareness of thought and her physical rootedness created a character out of focus. Nonetheless, while I've not been made a fan of DeLillo, anyone interested in the use of language in contemporary novels should read something by him - and this volume is an excellent choice.
Rating:
Summary: A HAUNTING NOVELLA ABOUT THE SHATTERING EFFECTS OF DEATH
Review: This is not an easy novel, and don't let its length (a mere 124 pages) let you think otherwise. The plot is anything but usual. After a young artist's husband commits suicide, she resumes her life only to one day discover a strange person sitting on a bed in an unused room, an otherworldly man-child who speaks in cryptic utterances that lack context and syntax. She assumes that he suffers from autism and plans to notify authorities; but changes her mind after hearing him repeat, word for word, a conversation she had with her husband on the day of his death. Wow. Who is this quaint stranger -- unwilling time traveler? Is our protagonist no more than a desperate woman whose grief and isolation have made her delusional? At first I was somewhat frustrated by these questions, but found myself haunted by the layered meanings. When it was not the prose that had me thinking, I was smitten with DeLillo's fascinatingly poetic writing style. He weaves such a riveting tapestry of words to delve into the emotional minutiae of his characters that he not only captivates our sympathetic attention he has us thinking like we were the ones he was talking about. I highly recommend this effortlessly engrossing tale if you have a taste for offbeat but thought-provoking literature.
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