Randy Broman

the chaos of war

Revisado: 06-08-24

a challenge to read, but well worth the effort. jayne anne phillips is a wonderfully talented writer.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

Excellent

Revisado: 01-12-23

A t l e a s t f i f t e e n w o r d s

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña

esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Evocative

Revisado: 06-16-21

The Underworld, by Don De Lillo, is perhaps the best novel about modern America I’ve encountered. It’s long, and I listened to the Audible version (31 hours!), narrated by Richard Poe, who’s perfect for the task. It’s dark, conveying the angxt that many of us in America feel. It’s about the rich, the poor, and the very poor; and about American culture. It spans from the now nostalgic times of the 50’s to the early internet age, when it was written.

The style of the novel is akin to a random weave fabric, where the orthogonal warp and weft are time and the plot lines, wherein time moves back and forth in the narrative, and the plot threads shift, disappear and reappear later in the story, though not necessarily in time sequence. Some characters and themes are clear and heightened, while others are subtle and indistinct. The writing is vivid and evocative, using tropes and other literary devices, some of which are buried in our past, and the writer’s words and phrases are vivid and correct.

The author, DeLillo, and his main character in the novel, Nick Shay, both grew up in the Bronx, and much of the novel is set in the Bronx, conveying the gritty feel of New York life for the lower middle class and poor denizens there. The novel opens with the iconic baseball event of Bobby Thompson’s walk-off home run to win the NL championship over the Dodgers in 1951. The Giants Polo Grounds stadium was directly across the Harlem River from the Bronx, and Thompson’s home run ball appears, disappears and reappears at intervals throughout the novel. And in “real” time the setting of the novel passes from the Bronx to New Mexico and Arizona, and toward the end even to Kazakhstan, which Nick visits, in his a bit implausible later role as an executive for a waste management company. And yes, our culture of waste is one of the important themes in the book.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña