Underworld - Don DeLillo
Underworld - Don DeLillo
Publication date: 1997
Edition: Picador paperback
Publisher: Picador
Pages: 832
Source: bookdepository.co.uk
Summary/Back of the book:
While Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the Cold War and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying. Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter--the "shot heard around the world"--and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand.
"It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria.
Through fragments and interlaced stories--including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others--DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled. --Amazon.com
My review:
When I first saw the blurb of the book I thought it was mainly about baseball, which I know very little about (what I do know is from Summerland by Michael Chabon).While baseball is one of the unifying threads of the novel it's not at its heart a book about baseball, or sport, but about relationships, and the passage of time.
It's a very big book, and it took several sessions to get through it, but it didn't feel like a slog. It jumps around from story to story, which keeps it from getting too bogged down, as each mini story adds to your knowledge and understanding of one of the threads of the overaching story. The main threads are the history of the baseball from "the shot heard around the world" in the opening section as it passes through various hands, the history of Nick Shay and his family from growing up to the early '90s, the background threat of the cold war, and then there are the stories of numberous characters who interact in some way with either Nick or the baseball or both. It's very cleverly done to gradually paint up layer on layer the cancas of the novel, though it took a little time to get used to the changes in perspective generally the characterisation was clear enough that you could tell whose perspective a chapter was from without anything as clumsy as naming the character as the chapter heading as in some novels with multiple points of view.
He also uses real people and events from the period to create context and atmosphere. I'll admit my knowledge of the US during the Cold War is sketchy, but the historical events seemed to be written into the novel well, and weren't jarring, and seemed to be realistically portrayed, likewise the characters were well fleshed without becoming stereotypes. It would have been easy to fall into stereotypes, especially given that a large portion of the novel takes place among an Italian community in New York. The dialogue is unforced and fairly natural. Motivations are believable.
This is not an adventure novel or a thriller, there's not a set plot you can follow from page 1 to page 832, there's not a climax or a big THE END moment. Some people on Amazon have given this novel bad reviews because of that. This is a novel that is about, amongst other things, the passage of time, and continuity, and the fact that while some things end, people die etc. time and events keep moving onwards, and history is constantly being written and re-written. While the novel begins with "The shot heard around the world" and the Soviet Union's testing of a nuclear bomb and ends after the USSR is opening up to foreigners there are hints at ongoing issues both in the protagonist's life (he's on a business trip with his colleague who is also his wife's love), and global events (the consequences of the nuclear testing in the local area).
I very much enjoyed this book and have already bought another novel by Don DeLillo.
My rating: 9.5/10
Publication date: 1997
Edition: Picador paperback
Publisher: Picador
Pages: 832
Source: bookdepository.co.uk
Summary/Back of the book:
While Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the Cold War and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying. Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter--the "shot heard around the world"--and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand.
"It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria.
Through fragments and interlaced stories--including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others--DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled. --Amazon.com
My review:
When I first saw the blurb of the book I thought it was mainly about baseball, which I know very little about (what I do know is from Summerland by Michael Chabon).While baseball is one of the unifying threads of the novel it's not at its heart a book about baseball, or sport, but about relationships, and the passage of time.
It's a very big book, and it took several sessions to get through it, but it didn't feel like a slog. It jumps around from story to story, which keeps it from getting too bogged down, as each mini story adds to your knowledge and understanding of one of the threads of the overaching story. The main threads are the history of the baseball from "the shot heard around the world" in the opening section as it passes through various hands, the history of Nick Shay and his family from growing up to the early '90s, the background threat of the cold war, and then there are the stories of numberous characters who interact in some way with either Nick or the baseball or both. It's very cleverly done to gradually paint up layer on layer the cancas of the novel, though it took a little time to get used to the changes in perspective generally the characterisation was clear enough that you could tell whose perspective a chapter was from without anything as clumsy as naming the character as the chapter heading as in some novels with multiple points of view.
He also uses real people and events from the period to create context and atmosphere. I'll admit my knowledge of the US during the Cold War is sketchy, but the historical events seemed to be written into the novel well, and weren't jarring, and seemed to be realistically portrayed, likewise the characters were well fleshed without becoming stereotypes. It would have been easy to fall into stereotypes, especially given that a large portion of the novel takes place among an Italian community in New York. The dialogue is unforced and fairly natural. Motivations are believable.
This is not an adventure novel or a thriller, there's not a set plot you can follow from page 1 to page 832, there's not a climax or a big THE END moment. Some people on Amazon have given this novel bad reviews because of that. This is a novel that is about, amongst other things, the passage of time, and continuity, and the fact that while some things end, people die etc. time and events keep moving onwards, and history is constantly being written and re-written. While the novel begins with "The shot heard around the world" and the Soviet Union's testing of a nuclear bomb and ends after the USSR is opening up to foreigners there are hints at ongoing issues both in the protagonist's life (he's on a business trip with his colleague who is also his wife's love), and global events (the consequences of the nuclear testing in the local area).
I very much enjoyed this book and have already bought another novel by Don DeLillo.
My rating: 9.5/10