The Names, by Don DeLillo
The Names, by Don DeLillo
Places, always places. Her memory was part of theconsciousness of lost places, a darkness that ran deep in Athens. There were Cypriots here, Lebanese, Armenians, Alexandrians, the island Greeks, the northern Greeks, the old men and women of the epic separation, their children, grandchildren, the Greeks of Smyrna and Constantinople. Their true home was to the spacious east, the dream, the great idea. Everywhere the pressure of remembrance. The black memory of civil war, children starving. Through the mountains we see it in the lean faces of men in flyspeck villages, stubble on their jaws. They sit beneath the meter on the cafe wall. There’s a bleakness in their gazing, an unrest. How many dead in your village? Sisters, brothers. The women walk past with donkeys carrying bricks. There were times when I thought Athens was a denial of Greece, literally a paving over of this blood memory, the faces gazing out of stony landscapes. As the city grew it would consume the bitter history around it until nothing was left but gray streets, the six-story buildings with laundry flying from the rooftops. Then I realized the city itself was an invention of people from lost places, people forcibly resettled, fleeing war and massacre and each other, hungry, needing jobs. They were exiled home, to Athens, which spread toward the sea and over the lesser hills out into the Attic plain, direction-seeking. A compass rose of memory.
My reading of The Names was unfortunately colored by two other books I read recently: Underworld (Bookpost, January 2012), which is considered DeLillo’s masterpiece and which I found to be 800 pages of annoying baby boomer wanking; and The Name of the Rose (Bookpost, April 2012), in which Umberto Eco does so excellently what DeLillo attempts to do with The Names that the comparison suffers. In fact, the literary and skullduggery aspects of Eco and DeLillo are so similar that I would have wondered if DeLillo had ripped off Eco’s idea, except that DeLillo was published first.
The Names was written in 1982, about the year 1979 (It’s exact, as the hostage crisis in Iran and other Middle Eastern terrorist crises of the day are referenced as a key thematic element), and has not aged well. The wealthy Americans gallivanting around the Mediterranean having nihilistic marital difficulties and talking about themselves may accurately reflect the culture of the 1970s, but today their behavior seems more alien than that of the swarthy Mediterranean “others” in whose countries they act as boorish tourists.
The protagonist, James, is a risk assessor for a large corporation, which helps to let you know that “risk assessment” is part of the theme of the book. The parallels with Umberto Eco are twofold: the obsession with language and symbols (DeLillo or his protagonist at one point asserts that language and meaning are the great gifts that Americans bring to the Greeks, an assertion that had me drop my jaw), and the existence of a secret cult. The cult in The Names apparently indulges in ritual killings, the victims and locations of which are determined by wordplay involving their names (get it?), and James spends much of the second half of the book feverishly working to discover the cult’s secret, heedless of the risk (get it?) to his own safety.
DeLillo’s 1979 is a world full of political and emotional upheavals, the importance of which are measured by the effects they have on the central characters’ mid life crises. I look back and see the tail end of my country’s Golden Age; a time when we had the only President in my lifetime who never lied to the American people, not once; a time when the destruction of America’s economy and culture under Reagan and the Bushes had not yet begun; a time when people were free to do their own thing, excessively at times, without having to line up and piss in a bottle under the threat of mandatory minimums. And yet, a lot of people were still deeply unhappy at the time. We never knew how good we had it.
Places, always places. Her memory was part of theconsciousness of lost places, a darkness that ran deep in Athens. There were Cypriots here, Lebanese, Armenians, Alexandrians, the island Greeks, the northern Greeks, the old men and women of the epic separation, their children, grandchildren, the Greeks of Smyrna and Constantinople. Their true home was to the spacious east, the dream, the great idea. Everywhere the pressure of remembrance. The black memory of civil war, children starving. Through the mountains we see it in the lean faces of men in flyspeck villages, stubble on their jaws. They sit beneath the meter on the cafe wall. There’s a bleakness in their gazing, an unrest. How many dead in your village? Sisters, brothers. The women walk past with donkeys carrying bricks. There were times when I thought Athens was a denial of Greece, literally a paving over of this blood memory, the faces gazing out of stony landscapes. As the city grew it would consume the bitter history around it until nothing was left but gray streets, the six-story buildings with laundry flying from the rooftops. Then I realized the city itself was an invention of people from lost places, people forcibly resettled, fleeing war and massacre and each other, hungry, needing jobs. They were exiled home, to Athens, which spread toward the sea and over the lesser hills out into the Attic plain, direction-seeking. A compass rose of memory.
My reading of The Names was unfortunately colored by two other books I read recently: Underworld (Bookpost, January 2012), which is considered DeLillo’s masterpiece and which I found to be 800 pages of annoying baby boomer wanking; and The Name of the Rose (Bookpost, April 2012), in which Umberto Eco does so excellently what DeLillo attempts to do with The Names that the comparison suffers. In fact, the literary and skullduggery aspects of Eco and DeLillo are so similar that I would have wondered if DeLillo had ripped off Eco’s idea, except that DeLillo was published first.
The Names was written in 1982, about the year 1979 (It’s exact, as the hostage crisis in Iran and other Middle Eastern terrorist crises of the day are referenced as a key thematic element), and has not aged well. The wealthy Americans gallivanting around the Mediterranean having nihilistic marital difficulties and talking about themselves may accurately reflect the culture of the 1970s, but today their behavior seems more alien than that of the swarthy Mediterranean “others” in whose countries they act as boorish tourists.
The protagonist, James, is a risk assessor for a large corporation, which helps to let you know that “risk assessment” is part of the theme of the book. The parallels with Umberto Eco are twofold: the obsession with language and symbols (DeLillo or his protagonist at one point asserts that language and meaning are the great gifts that Americans bring to the Greeks, an assertion that had me drop my jaw), and the existence of a secret cult. The cult in The Names apparently indulges in ritual killings, the victims and locations of which are determined by wordplay involving their names (get it?), and James spends much of the second half of the book feverishly working to discover the cult’s secret, heedless of the risk (get it?) to his own safety.
DeLillo’s 1979 is a world full of political and emotional upheavals, the importance of which are measured by the effects they have on the central characters’ mid life crises. I look back and see the tail end of my country’s Golden Age; a time when we had the only President in my lifetime who never lied to the American people, not once; a time when the destruction of America’s economy and culture under Reagan and the Bushes had not yet begun; a time when people were free to do their own thing, excessively at times, without having to line up and piss in a bottle under the threat of mandatory minimums. And yet, a lot of people were still deeply unhappy at the time. We never knew how good we had it.