I have completed the second book of Delillo, and I can say that I liked it much more than "Point Omega".

The story begins with a horribly vivid scene of a morning involving a couple, a 60+-year-old man and a 35-year-old body artist. In this scene, all the reader's senses are magically engaged. How? Suffice it to say that this scene is spread over nearly 25 pages (!). Continuing, the man leaves and commits suicide. Here then begins the whole theme of the book. How this woman is left alone to face the loss. In the remaining 125 pages, this feeling of loss, loneliness, and inability to accept that the mathematically precise routine described in the first scene will never exist again is described in detail. The protagonist, unable to accept such a thing, creates with her imagination a boy-man whom she supposes she finds in the attic and talks to with phrases of her husband.

This book was very, very powerful. It forces you to experience exactly all the emotions that the protagonist goes through, to experience the pain of loss that she embodies literally (as a body artist) and that threatens to erase her. Horrifically raw and mysterious. It created a feeling of unease in me. There is no doubt that Delillo is excellent at creating palpable emotions with the handling of the words he chooses. 3.5 stars!!

"...Then she sees herself creeping towards him. She has the image in front of her eyes. She creeps on all fours and it seems so real to her, as if it is happening. She feels that she has been torn apart and she sees that she is trying to pull him down to the floor with her, to stop him, to hold him here, or that she is trampling on him, that she is dissolving and melting into him or simply that she remains crouched on the floor and bursts into uncontrollable sobs while her self looks at her from above."

Прекрасний початок нового року, але все одно залишається старе питання - «хто така людина?». Це питання може бути стосовно різних осіб. Можливо, це людина, яку ми тільки знайомилися, і хочемо дізнатися більше про неї. Можливо, це людина, яка завжди була поруч, але ми ніколи не звертали уваги на її особливості.

Щоб відповісти на це питання, потрібно спробувати подивитися на людину з різних сторін. Звернути увагу на її поведінку, мовлення, інтереси. Спробувати зрозуміти її цінності та принципи. Можливо, тоді ми зможемо відповісти на питання «хто така людина?» і побачити її справжній обличчя.

У новому році давайте будемо звертати більше уваги на людей навколо себе і спробувати їх краще знати. Можливо, тоді ми зможемо побудувати глибші та цінніші відносини.

I have absolutely zero opinions on this book.

It just ebbs along, and things happen, but they don't really impact the reader in any way. The characters are basically just there, without really being anything or anyone.

It's not even that nothing happens. It's just that I was feeling/thinking/enjoying/hating/(dis)liking/etc. exactly nothing while reading this.

I couldn't decide how many stars to give something I have absolutely no opinion on. But most 2 stars books have at least something redeeming or, in any case, an attempt at something. And this just didn't do any of those things for me. So, one star it is.

The story seemed to lack a clear direction or purpose. The events felt random and disjointed, failing to create a cohesive and engaging narrative.

The characters were one-dimensional and lacked depth, making it difficult for me to form any connection or interest in them.

Overall, this book left me completely unimpressed and dissatisfied. I would not recommend it to others.

There's something truly captivating about the wind. It has a way of stripping you of all your assurances, seeping into you continuously, making you acutely aware of the hidden thinness of everything that surrounds you. All the solid stuff that makes up a hundred undertakings suddenly seems like the barest, flimsy makeshift.

Grief, too, has a similar effect. "The Body Artist" commences with a domestic breakfast scene. Husband and wife are engaged in a conversation that is going nowhere. The wife has no inkling that this is the very last time she will ever lay eyes on her husband, that in just a few hours, he will be gone forever. In this novel, which is a sort of ghost story, DeLillo strips everything down to its bare essentials, pares everything back, and scrubs everything clean. Just as Lauren, the grieving wife, has to learn how to take a breath again, it's as if DeLillo is learning how to write anew. The remote house where Laura lives does not belong to her. After some time, she discovers that she is not alone.

"The Body Artist" is a bit of a mixed bag for me, and I can't give it a full fanfare of praise. However, there is no denying that no living writer can pen sentences as beautifully as DeLillo. Here's the opening paragraph:

Time seems to pass. The world unfolds, moment by moment, and you pause to gaze at a spider firmly attached to its web. There is a rapidity of light and a sense of things being precisely outlined, with streaks of running lustre on the bay. You know with greater certainty who you are on a strong, bright day following a storm, when even the tiniest falling leaf is imbued with self-awareness. The wind rustles through the pines, and the world comes into existence, irrevocably, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.

The Body Art is the second book that I have read by Don DeLillo and I can say that I liked it a little more than Omega Point or, at least, that I managed to better understand the artistic direction of this author. I'm inclined to say that Don DeLillo is what I would have liked Murakami to be.

DeLillo's writing in this book is complex and thought-provoking. He delves deep into the themes of identity, the human body, and the role of art in society. The story follows a group of characters whose lives intersect in unexpected ways, and through their experiences, we are forced to question our own assumptions and beliefs.

One of the things that I found most interesting about The Body Art is the way in which DeLillo explores the relationship between the physical and the spiritual. He shows how our bodies are not just vessels for our souls, but are also an integral part of our identity and our connection to the world around us.

Overall, I would highly recommend The Body Art to anyone who is interested in literature that challenges and inspires. It is a book that will make you think and will stay with you long after you have finished reading it.

For the continuation of this review, please visit https://cristinaboncea.com/2023/06/18...

DeLillo is truly a wordsmith.

I'm among those individuals who have absolutely no issue with plotless books. Provide me with a collection of fascinating characters and astound me with beautiful, lyrical writing. I'm completely up for such things.

The book contains some outstanding writing. The repetitions, which I've come to believe is a necessity for writers like DeLillo, who have a penchant for writing satire, shape the tonality of the novel.

The opening breakfast scene is brilliant, and the book maintained my attention for the majority of the part. However, the final few pages. I still confess that I can't truthfully say I understand the novel. Immediately after finishing it, I perused a few summary notes online, and indeed, they do conform to my interpretation of the novel. But I'm certain there is greater depth to it than what my small brain can handle or fathom.

I'm glad to learn that this isn't this man's finest work. Since I already possess Underworld, White Noise, and Americana. I would be disappointed if someone informed me that this is his masterpiece.

Great writing, but I can't really claim that I loved it.

“When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.” This thought-provoking statement sets the stage for an interesting exploration. The writing in this piece was truly perfect, with a seamless flow and engaging language. The story itself had the potential to be captivating, filled with unique ideas and vivid descriptions. However, despite all these优点, I found myself unable to fully connect with it. Instead, I kept getting distracted, my mind wandering to other things.

Maybe I was just not in the right mood for this particular story. It's possible that my state of mind at the time was not conducive to fully immersing myself in the narrative. Or perhaps there was something about the story that didn't quite resonate with me on a personal level. Whatever the reason, it's a reminder that our ability to engage with a piece of writing can be influenced by a variety of factors.

“When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.”

True Story: The low rating of the book on Goodreads is due to the fact that the probability of getting satisfaction from it is low. Although...

Seething (the performer who understands a man's death on an emotional level) is very tempting to imagine something impressive and unrealistic in the style of Kotovsky. However, this story takes a postmodern author to (in the words of the author in the afterword) convey a modernist idea.

I failed to get pleasure from the text. The translator wrote about the "compactness" of the language. Let's add to this some light "philosophical" inserts (a few sentences) and the author's light "play" with the text (or not light, but a well-thought-out one, based on bipolar oppositions, as the preface says).

I have a comparison that can more or less well explain the format of the book. It reminds me of the first part of "The Sound and the Fury", where the voice of a sick boy speaks; where readers are tortured without the promise of anything better.

Similarly, DeLillo tortures a bit with a rather austere, hidden unreality that has no purpose, but only encrypted signs.

The thing is only that this lasts throughout the entire story, with breaks for a few "grounded" inserts that are supposed to explain the common "bardo" of the heroine and the author, who is fascinated by creating a world, encrypting and inserting things into the text.

The author of the preface and Hanna Yulia gave the book 5☆ each. This means that the book is very challenging and "don't try to read it if you don't want to play in decoding". Subjectively, the second hardest text in the series after "The Bomb". And the least favorite.

...And the wonderful (really) afterword by Max is like a curatorial text in a gallery. Without it, it is difficult to gather the text and give the joy of reading. Therefore, if you take it on, try to accept it as a test of reading and interpretive care. And if you don't like such games, then the book is "out of the question".

The Body Artist: A Novel by Don DeLillo

The Body Artist is a captivating novella penned by Don DeLillo in 2001. It delves deep into the grieving journey of a young performance artist, Lauren Hartke, after the tragic suicide of her much older husband. What makes this novella even more intriguing is the presence of an enigmatic figure that Lauren discovers lurking in an upstairs room of the house following her husband's demise. This element has led some to describe it as a ghost story.

The structure of The Body Artist is quite unique. It is not like a traditional narrative. The chapters are like short, two-phrased sentences that don't quite pair up, and there is always a thin and imaginative border felt between them. For example, the description "The day is a white dusty haze, and the highway rises dry into the sky. It has four northbound lanes, and you are driving in the third lane and the cars are speeding, and behind and on both sides, but not too many and not too close." creates a vivid and almost dreamlike atmosphere.

The translation of this novella by Mansoureh Vafaei was published by Nashr-e No in 2007 (1386 in the Iranian calendar) in 108 pages with the ISBN 978-964-312-885-7. It falls under the category of 20th-century American literature. Critics have compared reading the initial chapters of this book to searching for something in the darkness of a dawn-lit room, even before having a cup of coffee. It truly is a work that challenges the reader's perception and takes them on a thought-provoking journey.

The Body Artist is a must-read for those who appreciate unique storytelling and a deep exploration of the human psyche. It offers a different perspective on grief and the afterlife, and leaves the reader with much to ponder long after they have finished the last page.

Once upon a time, there was a widow who was a performer. She wandered around the house where she had lived with her late husband. The house might be haunted or not. If it was haunted, then its phantom visitor either existed simultaneously in all times, without being divided into the past and the present - so it existed particularly in the time when the husband of the mistress of the house was still alive - or it was all just imagination. As far as I remember, Freud interpreted stories about ghosts as stories about the return of repressed traumatic memories: that which cannot be integrated into experience returns in the form of visions. So here too: the grief is too fresh and too great. It is easier to explore its perimeter than its essence - and what if time does not exist (the experience of living time is always a very physical experience, so it is no coincidence that the main heroine is an artist of the body and undergoes various physical transformations); and what if time, like a one-sided movement, is only perhaps our perception.

Translating this is another hell, because, firstly, the story is completely built on tautologies and a vocabulary of approximately 50 words, that is, from everything that is usually considered the virtues of good writing - avoid repetitions! demonstrate the richness of the synonymous series! and so on, and so forth - here we have to give up, unfortunately beating ourselves on the hands. Secondly, in de Lillo there is a kind of syntax that gives the effect of a slightly delayed reaction, as if the signal is breaking through the thick water - the definitions refer a little further into the depth of the sentence than you expect (for example, "he was tired and went to the table, this man"), and this is a balancing act between preserving the originality and at the same time not slipping into incomprehensible gibberish. But the adventure was interesting.

Don DeLillo's "The Body Artist"

My first acquaintance with the author, and I can definitely say that his language is enchanting and I'm curious to read more from him.

I knew that DeLillo often explores the question of death and its perception. And "The Body Artist" is exactly about this. About living through loss.

The story itself is written very poetically and is built on moments when the heroine "falls through". You know those moments when suddenly you become aware of yourself and everything around and understand how illusory everything really is. And what a tiny speck you are in this huge world. And all of this is described in such a way that you catch yourself thinking that this feeling is familiar to you.

Overall, in this story, the plot is almost absent. It is completely about emotions and internal changes. About the pain of loss and the way to live through it. About feelings that don't always find an outlet in emotions or words.

This is a stream of thoughts, feelings, and sensations.

At the same time, "The Body Artist" is very domestic. DeLillo describes some obvious details with such scrupulousness and cinematography that it gives a wow-effect of immersion and it seems that you are inside the scene.

I don't know how else to describe this book. You just find yourself in it and feel the heroine. Think her thoughts. Hold a cup in her hands. Look through her eyes at the night broadcast from a half-empty road. This is not like anything I've read before.

Arta corpului de Don DeLillo (2001)

This short novel, described as an anatomy of pain and grief, seemed to me very surprising in form, as a narrative, and as a literary experience. The writer changes the styles of telling the story. The opening scene, with the last breakfast of the couple Rey-Lauren, appears to represent the choreographic notations of a director who describes as objectively as possible only the observable behaviors. Then, there are two short journalistic reports. The first describes Rey's suicide, a famous director for "the poetry of abandoned places, where extreme situations become inevitable". The second, later, is the body art show in which Lauren participates, a scenic experiment through which the artist explores the slowing down of time, titled "The Time of the Body". And between these intervals, Lauren's experience of grief unfolds: left alone in a house outside New York where she had lived with Rey for a period, Lauren passes through time without Rey, yet feeling him everywhere.

Mysteriously, a strange character appears in the house, a being that is neither quite a child nor quite an adult, capable of reproducing Rey's voice and the dialogues held by the couple. For a while, Lauren plays the detective, trying to find out who this being could be and feeding on the unpredictable snippets from the past dialogues with Rey, reproduced with the fidelity of a recording. Whether this being is real or just a creation of Lauren's shocked mind remains to be debated. I perceived it as a transitional angel for Lauren, through a space that although materially is the same, emotionally is strange; others have considered it as a ghost of Rey.

"Why doesn't the death of the man you love bring you darkness and emptiness? [...] Why doesn't his death carry you in a huge scandal, tear your clothes of grief? Why do you accept his death? Or why do you surrender to a buttoned-up grief, with your lips tight? [... Dive deeper, she said to herself. Let it defeat you. Go where it takes you [... ] I am Lauren. But less and less."

I thought that the book could be best accompanied by this clip in which the artist Marina Abramovic sees her lover again for the first time after 30 years. It seemed to me that it was as if he had returned from the dead:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEcqo...