A Short Story about the Experience of Time

For me, Body Time has so far been the reading experience of the year. Apparently, the author, who specializes in thicker books, wanted to conduct an experiment with this novella, and he succeeded. Although the book is not necessarily easier to read than the thicker tomes, those who expect something as dense as the baseball game at the beginning of Underworld will be disappointed. However, even though Body Time is only 144 thin pages, it requires more perseverance from the reader than the highly praised Ziegel that was once lauded to the skies in LQ and elsewhere.

Those who want to have the full aha experience and bring a certain measure of patience and willingness to endure should probably read this review after their own reading, because in its own way, the book is more exciting than a thriller. But if the temptation to give up on the dull parts on pages 50, 60, 80, or 100 becomes too great because seemingly nothing is happening, then this review is surely an encouragement to stick with a really great, but rather unusual book.

Body Time is for me the first book where the translation hits the central point of the work better than the original title. Although "The body artist" also fits, it misses the essential. Because the performance Body Time is the result of the mourning work of the body artist Lauren Hartke, who withdraws into the house where she lived her four-month-long marriage with her husband until the end of the lease. Readers who are more into suspense than action will better cope with the routine of daily life until its dissolution. From page 117, a review of the performance that emerged from the experiences and impressions provides the key to the reading experience. Only then does what has been read before and perhaps perceived as unimportant gain meaning. Because between page 30 (Rey's suicide with an obituary for the filmmaker) and the review of Lauren's performance plus vita and interview, Lauren's daily life rather trickles away, even though the little refugee Mister Tuttle and his strange behavior pose some riddles.

By page 26, the reader is thrown into Lauren and Rey's last breakfast, confronted with their hypersensitivity to smells and other body experiences and the couple's territorial behavior, who have little to say to each other but a lot to hide. A painful masterpiece that begins with the intrusion of a foreign hair that cannot belong to the married couple into Lauren's mouth. As nerve-wracking and actually unspectacular as this breakfast is, it gains additional meaning through Rey's suicide on the same day, which is provided as a newspaper article.

The cause of the hair that has entered the daily life of the two-person household and numerous unexplained noises reveals itself as Lauren returns alone. The communication with a human being who perhaps partly understands but can reproduce her and Rey's voices and certain turns of phrase but always eludes the widow's access determines the plot???? until page 108. Lauren's hypersensitivity and her dealing with her body is the other side of the mourning work. However, the narrative process consistently refuses the expectations of such a plot. Body Time is about 80 pages long simply boring or even unbearably low on action before the review provides the key. Hartke clearly wanted her viewers to feel the passing of time, right from the gut, painfully even. And so it happened, some of the less hardened left the theater.
They missed the best part.

The same goes for giving up too early. However, it could be quite exciting to first read the review of the performance Body Time and then go in search of clues in Lauren's daily life. However, in that case, the experience of time is lost. On the pages before the review, there is rather less text, but while the article flies by with the description and analysis, the pages before seem to drag on endlessly, even though one or two riddles about Mister Tuttle are solved.

In 1996, a physicist named Alan Sokal from New York University submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal focused on "poststructuralism." His essay, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," contended that Western science, with concepts like "gravity," is merely a social construct, a web of political and philosophical Enlightenment dogma.

Once the editors at Social Text published this display of poststructural erudition, Dr. Sokal disclosed that his article was a hoax, a parody of the kind of gibberish that often passes for intellectual analysis of language and culture.

It's tempting to hope that Don DeLillo will deliver a similar revelation soon after the publication of his latest "novel."

His previous works, such as "White Noise" and "Underworld," were highly successful both critically and popularly. He has won numerous awards, including the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Jerusalem Prize, and the American Book Award.

However, while those novels were filled with wit and insight, "The Body Artist" is claustrophobic and artificial. Only very smart professors of French literature and diehard fans of "Twin Peaks" will find "The Body Artist" fascinating. (I half expected a midget to dance through the wall and whisper, "My log had a dream about you last night.") But these niche readers may not be enough to recoup the $1 million that Simon & Schuster reportedly paid for this small book.

The story begins in a large rented house on a remote beach along the East Coast. Lauren Hartke has been married to Rey Robles for only a few months, but already their relationship is strained.

In the late 70s, Rey was a director of avant-garde films that briefly had a cult following in art houses in the US and abroad. He has spent the last 20 years in a state of alcoholism and depression.

Lauren, his third wife, calls herself a "body artist." She modifies her body in various ways, such as bleaching, sanding, cutting, and contorting it into strange shapes, while the robotic voice of a telephone answering machine repeats the standard greeting for 75 minutes. We're told that sophisticated theatergoers love this kind of thing.

DeLillo presents their last quiet breakfast in a stark, super-sensory narrative: "She crossed to the cabinet with the blueberries wet in her hand and reached up for the cereal and took the box to the counter, the mostly brown and white box, and then the toaster thing popped and she flipped it down again because it took two flips to get the bread to go brown and he absently nodded his acknowledgement because it was his toast and his butter and then he turned on the radio and got the weather."

The underlying dissatisfaction in this marriage is as palpable as burnt toast. Lauren attempts but fails to engage her melancholy husband in conversation, and then retreats into fantasies about herself in newspaper stories. "She took a bite of cereal and forgot to taste it. She lost the taste somewhere between the time she put the food in her mouth and the regretful second she swallowed it." This is like having breakfast with J. Alfred Prufrock.

Finally, Rey makes a bitter comment about having to endure "the terror of another ordinary day," drives off to his ex-wife's house, and shoots himself in the head.

A few days after his funeral, Lauren returns to the house in a state of shell-shocked grief. She feeds the birds and watches a Webcam of a quiet road in Finland. "The plan was to organize time until she could live again."

One day, she discovers a thin old man sitting in his underwear in one of the bedrooms of the house. "She thought he was inevitable." I did not. He speaks only in disjointed phrases from her conversation with her late husband: "I know how much. I know how much this house. Alone by the sea."

She suspects that he is mentally retarded, or a space alien, or a being from another time continuum, or her old science teacher, or her husband's ghost. She makes recordings of their strange sessions together until he leaves just as mysteriously as he arrived.

This has all the potential of Isaac Singer's magical realism, but DeLillo never develops these ideas enough to support the weighty themes he暗示的.

His narrator - noirrator? - presents this bizarre event with such pretentiousness that it's difficult to take these implications about the nature of grief, time, and language seriously.

The publicity material accompanying the novel claims that DeLillo "lets out the rope and allows readers to create whatever world he/she might want." That's like sending us a dictionary and saying, "The words are all here - arrange them into the great book he/she wants to read." The game is up.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0125/p1...

The Body Artist

Ghost meets Truly Madly Deeply in book form. However, this was a damp squib for me, a misfire. It is basically a treatise of the uncanny, born from a fictionalized encounter with another.

Spoilers: One day, you're at home with your husband, looking out the window at the birds, making toast, and chatting. Everything is cool. But then, breakfast over, he drives from your holiday place in New England to Manhattan where he used to live and shoots himself. Cue DeLillo's sentences on grief. Terse sentences that stretch conventionality, limn the expressible, and say simple things complexedly.
So, you're upset. And one day, you explore your big house and find a room you haven't been in before. Quelle surprise! You find someone living there, literally and metaphorically squatting. In real life, one's first reaction might be to go apeshit and at least call the cops. But the lead character lady in this book, who does a lot of Yoga or calisthenic action verging on pain, instead tries to talk to the guy. We quickly realize through his meaningless utterances that he is nutso. So far, so ordinary. But DeLillo ups the ante by having the guy creepily recite snatches of the husband/wife's conversations verbatim, in the guy's voice no less. Cue the wife getting all emotional that he is almost incarnating the husband. Cue lots of tape recorded interviews. She also takes the crazy man on a shopping trip and names him after an old teacher. Eventually, she gets over the shooting and the crazy guy escapes. She's thought about calling mental hospitals and such before this, but now does. And she calls one, and one says that a guy who might be the crazy guy has turned up. She leaves him there of course. I can't really recall how the book ends, but it has a viewpoint from one of the wife's friends which sums up some info.
DeLillo's sentences verge on simple aporia. His technique in dialogue is repetition of content and information, perhaps from an awareness of entropy in life as a whole. At worst, his style is obfuscationist and clumsy, and it rings wrong. Information loss (and its purposeful withholding by DDL) is his metier. DeLillo's characters have mimetic echoes, speech is bastardized or stilted, which adds to the uncanny atmosphere. DDL has always had an ear for the peculiarities of our verbal interactions, and this has found development and refinement in his latest decade of work. This refinement is what I reacted most strongly to. The conversation the wife has with the husband's ex-wife is painful, not because of content, but because DeLillo's rendering of her speech lapses almost into self-parody. I found the style slightly exasperating, though others may find it trembles on profundity and grace. I'm afraid I can only give it two stars.

3.8 ⭐
I always like Don, the friend, more and more.

There is a whole world, an unexplored cosmos within us.

The author tries to 'investigate' the universe of an artist who uses the body as a means of communication to express his path of awareness.

Perhaps it is just a way to deal with the grief of her husband, or perhaps it is something else entirely, who knows.

There is no single interpretation of the delusional mental trips.

But in the moment when you feel connected to his writing, it seems as if you are following him and truly understanding him.

It's like embarking on a journey through his inner world, experiencing the emotions and thoughts he conveys.

The way he describes things makes you imagine and feel as if you are right there with him.

It's a unique and captivating experience that keeps pulling you in, making you want to know more about his universe and the mysteries it holds.

It is said that the translation has already gone to print!

My review of the original is here.

In the translation, there will be a wonderful preface by Maksym Nesterenko, which places the story in context and extracts the maximum sense from it - the beginning of Maks' preface quotes here.

The first paragraphs of the short story as a sample:

Time, it seems, passes. The world is happening, unfolding into separate moments. You turn to look at a spider that is crawling towards its web. There is a vividness of light, a sense of the clarity of the outlines of all things, the bright pebbles in the cove. You most acutely understand who you are, on a large, bright day after a storm, when even the tiniest fluttering leaf is permeated with self-awareness. The wind rustles in the pines, the world irrevocably enters being, and the spider sways on the wind-tossed web.

This happened last morning when they were here, in the kitchen, at the same time: they were jostling each other to get something from the cupboard or the pantry, waiting for the other to move away from the sink or the fridge. Around them, the snow was still melting. She was holding a handful of blackberries under the faucet, closing her eyes and inhaling the scent that rose from the berries.

He was sitting with a newspaper and stirring his coffee. His coffee, in his cup. They read the newspaper together, but by unspoken agreement it belonged to her.

— I wanted to tell you something, but what.

She let the water from the faucet run and turned her attention. For the first time in her life, she turned her attention to this.

— About the house. That's what, — he said. — I wanted to tell you something.

I wasn't really a big fan of some of the other books written by DeLillo.

However, this particular work was an exquisitely beautiful and poetic exploration.

It delved deep into the themes of grief, art, and a marriage.

The author managed to paint a vivid and emotional picture of the complex emotions and relationships involved.

The prose was so beautifully crafted that it pulled the reader in and made them feel as if they were a part of the story.

The exploration of grief was especially poignant, showing how it can consume a person and change their life forever.

The role of art in the story was also fascinating, as it provided a means of expression and a way to come to terms with the past.

Overall, this was a truly remarkable book that I would highly recommend to anyone interested in a thought-provoking and beautifully written exploration of the human experience.

Don DeLillo is renowned for writing some of the most captivating and thought-provoking novels. His works are often considered the best, especially when it comes to psychological depth. In his novels, there is a palpable sense of presence and the presence of that sense is keenly felt. It's as if there is a ghost in the room, like a skeleton hidden in the closet, adding an air of mystery and unease.

One of the most astonishing elements in his stories is the strange transformation of a woman into a man. There are also characters like the mistress of the body and the body-artist, who bring a unique and complex dimension to the narrative. And then there is the mysterious Mr. Tattle, whose secrets and the mystery of self-destruction add yet another layer of intrigue to the already rich tapestry of DeLillo's fictional world. His novels are a literary exploration that delves deep into the human psyche and the strange and wonderful phenomena that exist within our lives.

DNF didn't vibe.

It seems that the game just didn't have that certain something that would make it really engaging and exciting for me. Maybe it was the gameplay mechanics that felt a bit off, or perhaps the overall atmosphere didn't quite click.

I was really looking forward to getting into DNF and having a great time, but unfortunately, it didn't live up to my expectations.

The graphics were decent enough, but they didn't really wow me. The controls could have been more intuitive as well.

Overall, I was left feeling a bit disappointed with DNF. It just didn't have the vibe that I was hoping for. Maybe I'll give it another try in the future, but for now, I'll be looking for other games to satisfy my gaming cravings.

My first encounter with DeLillo is completely unsuccessful.

The only merit of the book is its brevity, which, however, does not alleviate its heaviness. It is a continuous self-talk, with exhausting details and descriptions.

My impression is that DeLillo, fortunately, does not know the subject he has dealt with except by hearsay. I highly doubt that he has ever had to deal with suicide.

Certainly, everyone reacts to grief and pain in a rather personal way, but suicide has an additional burden of pain that is completely absent here.

It is an event that violently tears away a piece of the soul that dries up, and whose place is taken by a deep and devastating sense of guilt that time cannot erase but only, partially, dull.

In "Body art," there is nothing. It is just an irritating, miserable, and sterile writing exercise for its own sake.

A recently widowed performance artist finds herself in an unexpected encounter. She meets a mentally-splintered psychic time traveler. In reality, he is a retarded homeless guy who has broken into her summer home. However, instead of being outraged, she shows hospitality. In return, he shits in her car. But before one judges harshly, she is in no state of mind to accept such grim realities. Besides, there is a certain romanticism in how time itself, space itself, and chance itself have brought them together at this exact moment.

She then embarks on a project. At the kitchen table, she tapes his painful progress as he fumbles around with the building blocks of basic vocabulary and the cybernetics of simple syntax. It could be learning, relearning, or in some strange way, teaching her or even gifting her the Martian's mangling of the Earthling's tongue. This project is not unlike programming a colossal supercomputer that appears to be reel-to-reel tape, blooping lights, and flashing buttons on the outside, but is actually a mess of disconnected wires and a general fire hazard on the inside.

Echoes of this short novel can be found in "Falling Man" (performance art and death), "Point Omega" (art and death), and "Zero K" (death). It seems that death and art are recurring themes that tie these works together in some mysterious way.

I firmly believe that I need to enhance my English proficiency. To achieve this goal, I have decided to engage in a couple of years of intensive learning. During this period, I will focus on improving all aspects of my English, including grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and listening skills.

One of the ways I plan to do this is by rereading this book. I am confident that with my improved English, I will be able to understand the text more deeply and appreciate the author's writing style and ideas even more. This will not only help me to improve my language skills but also expand my knowledge and understanding of the subject matter.

I am looking forward to the challenge of intensive learning and the opportunity to reread this book with a new perspective. I believe that this will be a rewarding experience that will help me to achieve my goals and become a more confident and proficient English speaker.

This was my first encounter with Mr. Dan Delillo. And how much I enjoyed it. This book was so enjoyable that despite its small volume, I have been reading it from the end of the holidays until now and I don't want it to end.

It was full of famous descriptions and charming acquaintances! The translation was good, except for a few places where it couldn't convey the meaning, and it was faithful to the text and the author's style.

Just this first paragraph of the book is enough to attract a person to read the rest of it:

Time seems to pass. The world becomes with each passing moment, it happens, and you are there to take a look at the spider stuck to its thread. The speed of light is and the perception of things is with a specific flutter and the rainbow-like rays are running on the gulf. You become more certain of who you are, on a hot sunny day, after the storm, when awareness falls into the tiniest leaf that falls. The wind makes a sound in the nooks and crannies and the world comes into existence, without return, and the spider is riding on the thread that sways in the wind.