Libra

by Don DeLillo | Religion & Spirituality | This book has not been rated.
ISBN: 0670823171 Global Overview for this book
Registered by Vasha of Ithaca, New York USA on 10/24/2010
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2 journalers for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by Vasha from Ithaca, New York USA on Sunday, October 24, 2010
It is one of the many achievements of DeLillo’s brilliant historical novel that events and names so closely bound up with “the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century,” the Kennedy assassination, are so freshly and powerfully reimagined. At one level, Libra’s plot is a simple one: we follow the series of events that turned the disaffected Lee Oswald into the more historically resonant “Lee Harvey Oswald,” paralleled with the investigations of Nicholas Branch, an FBI deskman charged with cataloging it all afterward. But out of this material, DeLillo draws the finest demonstration of his characteristic skill — of shaking events so hard that the secret history of America suddenly falls out. Oswald’s story expands into a lyrical and ideological meditation on power, control, and how we see ourselves as belonging to history; the novel’s epigraph quotes a letter from Oswald on the point where “there is no borderline between one’s own personal world, and the world in general.”

In this postmodern thriller, Branch often operates as a reader-surrogate, keen to make connections, yet frequently frustrated by the sheer excess of data. As Oswald comes to realize that the plot runs much deeper than he thought, so a reader feels the layers of conspiracy and double-bluff spiralling beyond what can safely be contained. With the assassination, and Jack Ruby’s murder of Oswald, we return, inevitably, to the official history, but we return there disoriented and creatively suspicious.
— Bharat Tandon in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Journal Entry 2 by 1001-library at Helsinki, Uusimaa / Nyland Finland on Monday, November 8, 2010

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