For most people in the world, there are only two places in the world, the place where they live and their television.

It is a thought-provoking and content-rich book that makes anyone think. There are very beautiful sentences, excellent dialogues of outstanding characters. Thanks to the reliable translator with experience and good taste who translated the text from such difficulty to such goodness.

If you are afraid of death or worried, you must read this book. Even if you are not, you must also read this book. It is a book that can bring different feelings and inspirations to different people. It can make us reflect on our lives, values, and relationships. It is not just a book, but also a mirror that reflects our inner world. So, don't hesitate, pick up this book and start reading.

Reading White Noise by Don DeLillo is an experience that can only be described as the literary equivalent of 18 paranoid hours of non-stop channel surfing. Picture yourself chain-smoking and nursing a migraine in a smoggy, overcrowded city, all while under the influence of meth.

You might wonder why this is considered one of the most important books of the 20th century. Well, it serves as a prime example of the postmodern simulacra and absurdist philosophy that haunted the latter half of that century and continues to plague us today. After reading this book, I felt a profound sense of bleakness and emptiness that lasted for several days, and I'm still in the process of recovering.

The book had great potential. It could have been a powerful commentary on life in a media-saturated society that idolizes safety and bright colors within the temples of grocery stores. A society that risks suffocating in the toxic by-products of its own vain materialistic pleasures, conveniences, and distractions.

However, a truly great commentary would have been too meaningful. After all, this is the age of negation and disorder, where everything is turned inside out. To live fully without fear is to kill freely without hesitation. This is an age of futility, where the best artists are often indifferent or even hostile to supreme coherence, and only depictions of anti-heroism are praised and awarded the National Book Awards.

DeLillo is undoubtedly a talented writer, but in this work, he seems to have wasted his talent and missed a crucial opportunity to call for change. Don't misunderstand me; I'm not criticizing his portrayal of a dystopic American setting. The Toxic Airborne Event was brilliant, timely, and necessary. However, he fails to encourage his readers to even briefly examine the causes and consequences of our toxin-producing lifestyle. It was right there in front of us! I also take issue with his demonic proposal that liberation can be found in murder, that there is no immortality, and that important "psychic data" can be gleaned from commercials and television programs.

Yes, I'm aware that it's only fiction, and I know that he might have meant something entirely different. But when you turn it inside out and upside down, this is what it seems to imply. Have a Coke and a Dylar and put a bullet in my head. It's the opposite era!

Throughout the entire time, I was convinced that I would give 5 stars.

However, the slightly weaker ending compelled me to make it 4.

Nevertheless, DeLillo is one of my discoveries for this year. I love it.

The story or work by DeLillo has had a significant impact on me.

It has certain elements that are truly captivating and engaging.

Although the ending didn't quite reach the level I expected for a 5-star rating, it still managed to leave a lasting impression.

I appreciate the unique style and perspective that DeLillo brings to the table.

It's like opening a new door to a world of different ideas and emotions.

I'm looking forward to exploring more of DeLillo's works in the future and seeing what other surprises and revelations they have in store for me.

Overall, despite the small setback with the ending, I still highly recommend DeLillo's work to others.

"We seem to believe that it is possible to keep death at bay by following rules of good behavior."

A strange family. He is a university professor who doesn't know German but holds a chair on Hitler. She (the nth wife where n is not clearly quantified) teaches the elderly to maintain the correct posture, an instruction that comes after a life spent assuming incorrect positions.

They. The children. Who seem much more aware and adult than their parents. Who are annihilated, nullified, devastated by a single enormous fear. The fear of death.

What is the "cure" for the fear of death, which, like white noise, annihilates all other sounds?

"And what if death were nothing but sound? - Electrical noise. - It is heard forever. Sound everywhere. How terrible! - Uniform, white."

A life spent searching for a cure for something that has no cure: death is not an illness, it is a fact and as such incurable.

Searching to cure it with religion.

"If you are afraid of death, you convince yourself that it doesn't exist by inventing religion. Is religion a method to overcome the fear of death?"

With death itself.

"The more people kill, the more credit they accumulate. It is the explanation for any massacre, war, execution. - Are you saying that throughout history, man has always tried to cure himself of death by killing others? - Obviously."

With chemistry (psychotropic drugs).
With prevention.
With the maintenance of correct behaviors.
With technology.

All in vain. Death is there waiting for everyone. Inexorable.

"It always ends like this," he said. "You spend your life saying goodbye to others. How do you say it to yourself?"

A sarcastic, ironic, surreal De Lillo. Who once again made me think. This time laughing (bitterly) under my breath.

De Lillo's work presents a thought-provoking exploration of the human condition and our relationship with death. His use of strange and often absurd characters and situations forces us to question our own beliefs and attitudes towards this inevitable reality. The idea that we try so hard to find a cure for the fear of death, through various means such as religion, violence, and technology, yet it remains an incurable fact of life, is both disturbing and enlightening. It makes us realize that perhaps instead of constantly trying to avoid or deny death, we should focus on living our lives to the fullest and coming to terms with our mortality. De Lillo's writing style, with its use of short, punchy sentences and thought-provoking dialogue, adds to the impact of his message and makes his work a must-read for anyone interested in exploring the deeper questions of human existence.

Reading this book was an interesting experience for me. Contrary to the author's own opinion, the book was postmodern. The translation was also good and reading it went very well. It was not tiring at all. The theme of the novel revolves around death, mourning, the media, and consumerism.

This book offers a unique perspective on these topics, delving deep into the human psyche and the complex relationships that exist within society. The author's writing style is engaging and thought-provoking, making it a pleasure to read.

The translation plays a crucial role in bringing the story to life for non-native speakers. In this case, the translator has done an excellent job of capturing the essence of the original text and presenting it in a way that is both understandable and enjoyable.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in exploring postmodern literature or those who are simply looking for a good read. It offers a fresh take on familiar themes and is sure to leave a lasting impression.

What a truly clever novel it is. It is brilliant yet restrained, meaningful while understated. Delillo is indeed one of the few genius writers who never gets carried away by his own genius. He is patient, not giving up the game too soon. He allows the reader to guess, sometimes even to squirm. He is neither overly cryptic nor too obvious.

This novel encompasses numerous themes, and I don't believe it would be fruitful to attempt to go through all of them. However, let's commence with the title. What could he possibly mean by that?

For me, the key lies in something that occurs near the beginning, within one of the many supermarket scenes. Somebody stumbles and knocks over a rack of paperback books, which spill out all over the floor. There are so many books that it becomes difficult to walk.

This incident encapsulates one of the fundamental messages of this book: an excess of information. Delillo was aware that modernity would bring with it ever-increasing amounts of data (and this was even before the advent of the internet). Life would gradually be submerged beneath a tidal wave of media - information, tabloids, factoids, television, advertisements, mass-market paperbacks. How is an author supposed to compete with such an onslaught? How can real art - art that demands prolonged concentration to appreciate - how can real art survive in such an environment?

Delillo approaches this problem in a humorous manner. Every other line of dialogue appears to be a half-hearted attempt at profundity. But they almost always miss their intended mark, seemingly on purpose. People are striving to make sense of their world, yet all dialogue is so saturated with information that nothing profound can truly exist. People are left pondering the greatest questions of life with factoids gleaned from trashy newspapers. The main character engages in a discussion about his inevitable death with a man who practically worships television ads.

In some respects, this novel is even more timely now than when it was first published. Many of the trends of modernity that Delillo identified have intensified. But at least this book manages to cut through the white noise.

Noise of Background is a disturbing, strange, enigmatic, complex and risky novel:

1. Disturbing: It constantly generates in the reader a sense of déjà vu, of dislocation, of loss, of not knowing where you are located or where the characters are located, whether in a supermarket or on the university campus, whether in a real emergency or in a fake simulacrum, whether in a complex laboratory or in a modern convent.

2. Strange: Because it effectively produces a sense of strangeness, that we are alienated (or of the alienating nature of capitalist society), that we are alien subjects, that we do not belong, strangers, aliens to our true nature, foreigners to our authentic condition, to our meaning, to our finitude.

3. Complex: Due to the way the situations, dialogues and characters are presented. It presents itself as a farce, as the scenery of a hostile territory. Because it is not suitable for just any reader, it requires a specialized one, a literary specialist with a backpack and a walking stick, an intelligent reader who strives to understand the meaning, to go further, to applaud the risk and value the staging, the detailed description of a deteriorated inner world: that of Jack Gladney.

4. Risky: Because it is not easy, there are hostile passages, absurd landscapes and a sense of life that is not very hopeful, although with a nostalgic and melancholy ending. But it is beautiful, ambitious, with several layers of interpretation and literary value, very literary, that is, it is or presents itself as a narrative artifact ready to explode in the reader's face. BOOM! Reader.

Noise of Background stays, leaves a residue, messes with your soul (if you believe in it, I do), and will remain on the shelf for a long time observing your movements, watching you, waiting for a new dawn.

I'm truly overjoyed that I've finally arrived at a stage in this book where I can come to terms with the fact that I won't be finishing it. I persevered with it for an extended period because I had heard such wonderful things about it and, truth be told, I actually relished it a great deal in the beginning. However, subsequent to the toxic event, it has simply become really asinine.

Few authors would have the ability to render a colossal, lethally toxic gas leak dull. But, for some reason, I sense that Don DeLillo has managed to do precisely that here. It was such an intriguing subject matter to read about - brimming with the potential for some truly intense action and a palpable sense of dread! Yet, there was no action to speak of. It was even less thrilling than that time when my family and I attempted to flee from Hurricane Rita for three hours only to be unable to leave the county and had to turn around and watch TV at home. So, what occurred during the event? Oh dear, Jack Gladney discovers that he's going to kick the bucket in a few decades... join the club! Is this a revelation that can only be grasped subsequent to an airborne toxic event?

The dialogue is abysmal, disengaging, and completely unconvincing.

I feel rather remorseful about abandoning a book when I'm less than 100 pages away from the conclusion. But if nothing of interest transpires within 225 pages, then I can't realistically anticipate that it ever will.

POP CULTURE UPDATE: Hey, it's a movie now! I was actually quite satisfied with it. However, if I had to nitpick, I'd say it stayed perhaps too faithful to the book. I have a feeling that the style might be off-putting for those who are new to it and don't have the background knowledge from the book. In a way, it might not stand on its own as a movie based solely on its cinematic merit.

Anyhow, for the curious, here are my first impressions.
~|~|~
The car crash speech was out of order.
There was no barn!
The books on the occult seemed to be played up more.
The face in the sheet really gave me a good jump scare.
There was a lot of actual dialogue, but it was shortened.
The shell logo was really cool.
What was up with the gas station power?
Were those screen shadow puppets in the evac shelter?
The gun came from Murray, not Baba's dad. (Although Murray still said the gun speech.)
What happened to the lost bunny?
Wilder said "again"? The car in the river, the launch/jump?
~|~|~
There was no plane near-crash survivor speech.
The "Isn't fear news?" rant - was it the same?
~|~|~
There was no snake pit kid.
Was Babette shot? Was she at the hospital too?
There was no tricycle ride!
There were no kids training as simulation survivors.
~|~|~
Act 3 got funny. The sentimental treatment of the surfer and the sing-song cadence of the doctor were quite entertaining.
Babette's confession and his reaction felt a bit too much like Driver's other work and out of character for Gladney, but it was still a striking performance.
~|~|~
The movie draws a clearer parallel between Mr Gray's disconnected TV dialogue and the kids' constant trivia. He seems more pitiable in the movie, but the "he was there the whole time" detail wasn't in the book and felt a bit unnecessary.
~|~|~
*Danny Elfman did the music! That was a nice touch.
The lady doctor's role was shortened, losing a lot of depth and just being expository for Dylar.
There were only generic brands in the end credits.
~|~|~
Overall, I had a mixed bag of feelings about the movie adaptation. It had its strengths and weaknesses, but it definitely made me think about the book and its themes in a new light.

What is the opposite of déjà vu?

Reading "White Noise" these days when the world seems to be completely upside down has a bitter prophetic taste and the words of Don DeLillo only add unease to the unease…

(…) why is there respectable people, full of good intentions and responsible, who get involved in disasters when they see them on TV?
So I told him about the recent evening based on lava, mud and fury of water, which the kids and I had found so exciting?
- We wanted more, always more.
- It's natural, it's normal, - he replied, with a reassuring nod. - It happens to everyone.
- Why?
- Because we suffer from cerebral fade. From time to time we need a disaster to break the incessant bombardment of information.
(…) Words, images, numbers, facts, graphs, statistics, little machines, waves, particles, grains of dust. Only disasters attract our attention. We want them, we need them, we are dependent on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. (…))

And then

(…) Malcolm and I once had tea with Colonel Gheddafi. A fascinating and ruthless man, one of the few terrorists we know who lives according to his public image.)

And again

(- It doesn't cause nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath, as they had said before.
- What does it cause?
- Heart palpitations and a sense of déjà vu.
- Déjà vu?
- It hits the false part of human memory, or something like that. But it's not all. They don't even define it as a fat and black cloud anymore.
- And how?
He looked at me carefully.
- Toxic aerial event.
Words he pronounced with a dry tone and full of omens, syllabicating them, as if he felt the threat contained in the terminology created by the government.
(…)
- He was saying something like: «Evacuate all residences. Cloud of lethal chemicals, cloud of lethal chemicals»)

Let's meditate, people, let's meditate.

I copy and paste my long intervention (more of a long quote) into the Reading Group with which I read "White Noise" in 2011.

http://www.anobii.com/forum_thread?to...

As I said a few days ago, reading the third chapter something curious happened to me, a sort of déjà vu… Reading the story of the most famous barn in America I said to myself: - "But I've read this thing before, I know it!"

The problem was, but where had I read it?

Thinking and rethinking, racking my brains I remembered!

I had read it on TV Trigonometry and Tornado by David Foster Wallace, and here it is.

It's a bit long, there are some unclear references - extrapolating from an essay is not an easy thing! - but I think the essence of the discourse is quite understandable; if then someone is interested they can always read it in full, and in addition to this on television there are also other very interesting ones and of a more enjoyable tone.

And Unis Pluram: The American Writers and Television (1997)

(Pages 61/62/63/64/65)

(«It was in the America of the post-atomic era that the influences of pop culture on literature became something more than technical artifices. At the moment when television emitted its first cries, the mass culture of the United States seemed to be able to be successfully used by High Art as a great reservoir of myths and symbols. The great priests of this movement of pop worshippers were the post-Nabokovian "black humorists", the exponents of metafiction, and all that range of Francophiles and Latinophiles who were only later grouped under the label of "postmoderns". The erudite and caustic novels of the black humorists introduced onto the scene a generation of new narrators who considered themselves as a kind of avant-garde of the avant-garde, not only cosmopolitan and polyglot, but also technologically prepared, children of more than one single region, tradition and theory, and citizens of a culture that told the most important things about itself through the mass media.
(…)
Remember that the phenomenon of looking and the awareness of looking tend by nature to grow exponentially. What characterizes another, successive current of postmodernist literature is a further shift, from considering television images as possible objects of literary allusion to thinking of television itself and meta-vision as valid subjects in themselves. I am referring to a certain literature that begins and finds its raison d'être in commenting/responding to an American culture increasingly made by and for what is vision, illusion, television image.
(…)
But the true prophet of this transformation in American narrative has been the already mentioned De Lillo, a conceptual novelist long undervalued, who has chosen the signal and the image as his unifying topoi, just as ten years earlier Barth and Pynchon had used paralysis and paranoia as raw material. "White Noise" (1985) by Don De Lillo seemed to many budding writers a kind of blaring television call. And scenes like the following seemed particularly important:

A few days after Murray asked me if I knew anything about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove for twenty-two miles in the countryside around Farmington. There were meadows and apple trees. White fences stretched along the fields. Soon the first signs appeared. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five before arriving at the place… We walked along a path to the hill that served to get a better view. Everyone had cameras; there was someone with a tripod, special lenses, filters. A man in a booth was selling postcards and slides of the barn, photographed right from there. We stood near a grove and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, from time to time scribbling something on a notebook. Finally he said: "No one sees the barn". There followed a long silence. "Once you have seen the signs for the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn". He fell silent again. People with cameras were coming down the hill, immediately replaced by others. "We are not here to capture an image. We are here to maintain one. Do you understand, Jack? It is an accumulation of nameless energies". There was another long silence. The man in the booth was selling postcards and slides. "Being here is a kind of spiritual offering. We only see what others see. The thousands who have been here in the past, those who will come in the future. We have accepted to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. In a sense it is a religious experience, like every tourism". Another silence followed. "They take pictures of taking pictures", he said.*

I have included such a long quote not only because it is too perfect to be cut but to draw your attention to two relevant points. One is the presence of the Dobynsian message on the metastases of looking. Because there are not only people who look at a barn that is famous only for the reason of being an object that is looked at, but Murray, the pop culture scholar, is looking at the people who look at a barn, and his friend Jack is looking at Murray who is looking at all this looking, and of course we readers are looking at Jack the narrator who is looking at Murray who is looking, etc. If the reader is excluded, there is a regressive series similar to that of Dobyns' poetry, in the barn looking at the barn, etc.

But even more interesting are the complex ironies inherent in the scene. The scene itself is obviously absurd and thought of as absurd. But most of the parodic force of the text is directed at Murray, the one who would like to transcend the act of being a spectator. Murray, looking and analyzing, wants to try to understand the reason the form of the abandonment to these collective visions of mass images that have in turn become mass images only because they have been made the object of a collective vision. The "prolonged silence" of the narrator in response to Murray's blathering is worth more than any speech. But it should not be understood as an implicit sympathy with the crowd of hungry sheep for photos. If even their "scientific" critic is ridiculed, this does not mean that these poor Joe Six-Packs are any less ridiculous. The tone of the narration throughout the piece is a kind of impassive sarcasm, the perfectly composed face typical of irony - Jack remains silent in the dialogue with Murray, because speaking out loud in a scene of this kind would make the narrator part of the farce (instead of being a detached "observer" capable of transcending), and therefore also vulnerable to ridicule. With his silence, De Lillo's alter ego, Jack, makes an eloquent diagnosis of a true disease that we all suffer from: him, Murray, those who look at the barn.»

*Translation for Micromega by Edoardo Nesi.)

Contemplaos a vosotros mismos, aquí encerrados.

We have been placed under quarantine. We are like the lepers of the Middle Ages. They don't allow us to leave here. They leave food at the foot of the stairs and tiptoe away to save themselves. We are living the most terrifying moment of our lives. Everything we love and have worked for is seriously threatened.

This year has been decisive in terms of my readings because I have been gradually getting out of my comfort zone and I have been daring (and I plan to continue doing so) with writers who I had a lot of respect for and who I always postponed out of fear of being too much for me. The fact is that this has been the year in which I have immersed myself with authors considered postmodernists: Erickson, David Foster Wallace, Robert Coover and almost without planning it, I plunged into Don DeLillo and his White Noise.

"She also believes that nothing can happen to us as long as there are creatures in the house that depend on us. The children represent a guarantee of our relative longevity. We are safe as long as we have them with us. When they grow up and scatter, however, she wants to be the first to leave. She fears that I will die unexpectedly, treacherously, fleeing in the middle of the night. It is being alone that she fears."

White Noise is a novel from 1985 but it could perfectly be a novel of now because of the way DeLillo explores and analyzes environmental degradation, hyper-accelerated consumerism, the existential angst of having to face day to day and above all the eternal terror of death, that concept still not accepted/overcome by humans, for all this and more, it makes it an almost timeless novel.

The story is told by Jack Gladney, a university professor in his fifties, who lives with his wife and several of his children from different marriages in the town of Blacksmith, a small academic town that is peaceful and quiet, but the idyllic domestic life is threatened when the town of Blacksmith is evacuated due to an industrial accident and as a result of this incident, a toxic leak threatens the "nothing ever happens" of Blacksmith. The Gladneys must leave their home for a few days and seek safety almost as they are, so for once in their lives they feel that terror of being homeless and without the comforts of the welfare society, with all that that entails.

"Those things happen to poor people who live in unprotected areas. Society is organized in such a way that it is the poor and the illiterate who suffer the main impact of natural and artificial disasters. It is the inhabitants of depressed areas who suffer from floods; it is those who live in shacks who endure hurricanes and tornadoes. I am a professor..."

"Have you ever seen a professor rowing in a boat along his own street when there are floods on television? We live in a clean and pleasant town located near a university with a picturesque name. Those things don't happen in places like Blacksmith."

"I'm not only a university professor. I'm the head of the department. I don't see myself fleeing from a toxic leak into the atmosphere. That's something reserved for people who live in trailers in the most degraded areas of the county, surrounded by fish farms."

It is a novel that begins masterfully, and from the first moment, DeLillo's prose hooked me. DeLillo approaches his story with a transparent style, which flows almost without the reader noticing and passes through several levels. It is a novel that could be a satire of the welfare society, a comedy about domestic and family life, and there are even moments when it can seem like a thriller because of the way the story is chained together as a result of a mystery. It is perhaps one of the details that has most amazed me about this novel because what seems at first glance a satire on the upper-middle-class American society as a result of the industrial accident, DeLillo gradually converts it into a kind of dystopia that converges in the protagonist facing himself, in a whole metaphysical experience. Another wonder is how DeLillo approaches family dialogues, a mix between the absurd and absolute lucidity, a lucidity that almost always comes from the still-young children, while the parents, both Jack and Babette, appear lost and full of questions.

Many of the scenes in the novel take place in supermarkets and shopping malls, which is exactly the center of "culture" today, it was in 1985 when DeLillo published the novel and it is even more so now in 2021. The characters in White Noise walk both outside the university and the housing development where they live, but they also walk through those supermarkets with the shelves full of brands where they talk and dialogue as if they were at home; DeLillo emphasizes again and again how much we feel enslaved by this consumer society, how we hoard junk and how we accumulate garbage and he does it from the most hidden humor.

"...the phenomenal plenitude suggested by those overstuffed bags, by their weight, their size, their number, among the familiar designs of the packaging and the eye-catching signs, the giant sizes and the offer packages, between the feeling of satiety that we experienced and the feeling of well-being and the security and satisfaction that those products provided to the comfortable home of our souls..."

For a book that talks about the angst of life, about death and how we face environmental terrors, it is not a dense or heavy read, because DeLillo approaches his characters with humor, with moments in which the reader cannot help but smile and I confess that in even pathetic and anguished moments, I had to burst out laughing, and I am extremely grateful to this author, who has already charmed me.

In 2022, a film adaptation directed by Noah Baumbach and starring Adam Driver premiered. It looks promising.

"Run, beat the snow, cover the cracks in the bathtub and the sink, play word games with Wilder and at night, in bed, read aloud classics of erotica. What do I do? I twist the garbage bags and tie them, swim some lengths in the school pool. When I go out for a walk, the street runners catch up with me inaudibly, appear beside me and make me jump stupidly in fright."

Two waves of strangeness collide in this ultra-wacky, Edward Albeeesque yarn of radiation via ultraconsumerism.

There's the Gladney clan: a bunch of misfits straight out of Wes Anderson. They are a family like no other, each member with their own idiosyncrasies. The father is a professor of the very popular Hitler studies at a college in a college town. His obsession with Hitler adds an element of the macabre to the story. The children are all idiot savants, with unique talents and quirks that make them both fascinating and a bit off-putting. The mother is a weirdo, lost in her own world of strange ideas and behaviors.

Then there is the undertow of dread carried like a fog through wires and the air itself. Something that interests the likes of filmmaker Cronenberg. This sense of unease pervades the entire story, adding a layer of mystery and suspense.

I think that while this work is original, plenty of other stories (about alien invasions, paranoia born of technology, etc.) resemble it. However, what sets this one apart is the atmosphere that DeLillo has so masterfully created. It is a world that is both familiar and yet completely alien, a place where the ordinary becomes extraordinary and the extraordinary becomes terrifying.

Unlike "Bug," the characters here are too strange to be endearing. They are not the kind of people you would want to be friends with, but they are the kind of people you can't help but watch. And while this may not be required reading, it is definitely a book that will stay with you long after you've finished it.