“Underworld” was published when I was in college, a part time bookseller who touched so many books in the course of a day, shelving new fiction, shelving classics, shelving How-To manuals and graphic novels and dictionaries. “Underworld” was something else, much buzzed about, a grey image of the World Trade Center buildings bisected with a church steeple. I directed many-a customer to its spot in the store and set it into hands. That’s one of the rules of bookselling: Make the customer hold the book.

By the time it came out in Trade Paper, I was a frothy mess of curiosity. I had to read it. I dug in. The prologue is about 60 pages of the Giants v. the Dodgers, Branca v. Thompson. The shot heard around the world. A young kid skips school to jump a turnstile and watch the game. It is expertly drawn from different perspectives: This kid, Cotter, who loves baseball. The response of the crowd, littering the outfield with strips of paper, receipts, pieces of magazines, debris. J. Edgar Hoover as part of a foursome that includes Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra and Toots Shor. The buildup to the key moment in New York City baseball history and the way Cotter eventually oozes through the crowd for the game-winning baseball, giving a man a snake bite to relinquish his grip, Jackie Gleason barfing up hot dogs and drinks and the splatters landing in the cuffs of Sinatra’s pants.

This scene is famous, well, as famous as a scene from a book can be. It has been republished in Best Sports Writing of the Century, among a handful of other places where I have stumbled upon it. It’s great. It is detailed. It is exciting and funny and super visual. But it is the reason I’ve spent the past decade and a half failing to read this book.

Step One: Begin reading “Underworld,” including it’s massive prologue. Step Two: Continue reading into the introduction of garbage administrator Nick Shay, his suspicions about his wife’s infidelity, his handful of big-drinking work friends, a reconnection with the artist Klara Sax he banged when he was a teenager. Step Three: Feel the weight of this book, all 800 plus pages and these vignettes that are getting introductory treatment. Feel mind wander. Step Four: Set down “Underworld” just a few too many days in a row. Until the book opens automatically to the place where it has been left sprawled face down. Step Five: Retain curiosity about the book, read others by Don Delillo. Step Six: Resolve to read “Underworld,” but come to resent the prologue, THE PROLOGUE, so long, so baseball, read so many times you could one-act play it at an after bar probably. But know that you cannot read “Underworld” without revisiting that prologue. It’s part of the book and it’s necessary. Step Seven: Think about how much you want to read “Underworld,” but just don’t.

At exactly 1 p.m. Central Time on January 14, 2012, I finished “Underworld.” It took two weeks. It took re-reading the prologue (again) but reading it in a new way. It was interesting again. Mind blowing in its attention to detail. Delillo painting mini figurines that require a magnifying glass to shade the laugh lines with his Lilliputian brush.

It spans about four decades in America, starting with the famous baseball game, then jumping between periods. At its center is Nick Shay, who now believes he owns the game-winning ball, though who can know for sure. He keeps it as a memento of failure, since his team lost that day and forever erased his interest in baseball. Shay has a muddied past. He grew up in an Italian neighborhood in NYC and his life took a seedy lean where people steal and connive and cruise around in a stolen car. There are hints that despite his relatively normal life as a middle aged man, he once killed a man. He also once got hot and heavy with the wife of his brother’s chess coach. These bits of bio are dropped, little nuggets, and the stories are brought back into play in a measured way as the story progresses.

There are whole chunks on Shay’s brother, a former chess whiz, who struggles socially. The artist Klara Sax, who spends a summer struggling to find a reason to paint, a mysterious young girl who forages through garbage cans and lives on the street, an expert graffiti artist who stains the subways with his wildstyle creations. J Edgar Hoover attends Truman Capote’s party, but first spends time with his assistant and chaste romantic interest, a nun, Cotter’s wheelin’ and dealin’ for a dime father.

This book is insanely imagined. Who the heck is Don Delillo and can I get a copy of his brain scan? How did he do this? He weaves fact and fiction, binds it so tightly, that the seams aren’t even visible. Consider a section in which Klara Sax goes to see lost film footage by the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. Delillo actually describes this footage in pretty great detail, staying true to the filmmaker and what kind of lost footage he might have collected at this period in his life. In the same book, Delillo successfully gets into the head of a graffiti artist, the best around, walking the walk, talking the talk and embracing the lingo and the fears and the moment of pride when a train he has painted emerges from a tunnel.

I’ve said before that this or that book is about “everything” and now I fear that I’ve wasted that descriptor on things that weren’t about “everything” compared to the way “Underworld” is about everything. So, fresh slate. “Underworld” is now the official about everything book. And, nearly 15 years after I first tried to read it, I’m going to make my grand claim that this is the best book I’ve ever read.

I tried so hard. But I just can't. Fucking. Do it.

I submit this final plea to the goodreads universe. Give me a reason to keep going, or on page 381 shall I forever lie.

Come si fa a commentare l'opera di un genio senza essere ripetitivi o banali? Credo sia impossibile e non so se sarò in grado, ma per DeLillo cercherò di trovare le parole migliori.
DeLillo è un genio e lo conferma con questo ennesimo libro. Un libro che mi ha tenuto compagnia per quasi un mese. Un mese intenso, un mese ricco di poesia, di meraviglia, di cose che si tendono a rimuovere, di cose che si preferisce dimenticare.
Partendo da una partita di baseball e percorrendo la storia a ritroso, grazie a una pallina, che non è solo un cimelio, ma il leit motif di tutte le storie che qui si narrano, ripercorriamo l'America, la sua storia, i suoi confini, dalla bomba atomica a tutto ciò che la caratterizza con l'occhio attento di DeLillo.
I personaggi sono descritti in un modo talmente perfetto e sublime che ti sembra quasi di vivere con loro, in simbiosi con loro,.
E voi cosa aspettate? Immergetevi in questo libro dedicandogli il tempo e le attenzioni che merita, perché vi assicuro che sarà un viaggio entusiasmante, un viaggio che non vorrete terminare.

Ci ho messo un “gastigo”, ho tribolato per 786 pagine prima di avere un’illuminazione! Ho faticato, stentato, ripetendomi più volte: “Ma perché ho incominciato questo libro?”. Andavo avanti però perché c’era qualcosa che mi attirava, che esercitava un fascino strano… Sì, è un grande libro. Forse non è un bel libro, se per bello s’intende “piacevole a leggersi”. È un po’ leggersi dentro, oltre che leggere dell’America, la sua storia, la sua cultura, la sua identità. E quindi dà fastidio, tremendamente fastidio ritrovarsi a pezzi, avere e scoprire di avere un’identità andata in mille pezzi, la propria storia, la propria peculiarità culturale esplosa e andata in pezzi. Ho visto questo in Underworld.
Nel raccattare e riattaccare i pezzi che DeLillo ha disseminato nelle 880 pagine emerge la storia recente dell’America, dall’inizio della “Guerra fredda” e dell’Era Atomica”, fino agli anni ’90 del secolo passato. Passando per sue le tappe più cruciali e significative. A partire dalla vittoria dei New York Giants sui Brooklyn Dodgers del 3 ottobre 1951 (ovvero quando i russi fanno detonare una bomba atomica in una località segreta), Kennedy e la crisi di Cuba del ’62 (i “missili in giardino”) sull’orlo della catastrofe nucleare, l’assassinio di Kennedy nel ’64, le marce dei neri contro l’apartheid, la guerra del Vietnam. Filo conduttore che collega tutto: la minaccia della guerra atomica e della distruzione di massa evocata nella foto del quadro “Il trionfo della Morte” di Bruegel il Vecchio che ossessiona ed affascina niente di meno che il gran capo dell’FBI John Edgar Hoover. La morte e la distruzione sempre evocate, ma esorcizzate e rese quasi inoffensive dall’equilibrio del terrore istauratosi tra le due superpotenze, Usa e Urss, che si confrontano per cinquanta anni quasi, si dividono il mondo e, a modo loro, garantiscono un certo ordine. Un ordine e un nemico rimpianti una volta finiti, perché la disgregazione dell’identità è resa evidente e inoppugnabile con la fine dell’Urss. La società capitalistica, quella feroce dei consumi, vittoriosa e trionfante come la Morte, è una società nichilista e autodistruttiva. Divora tutto: beni, ambiente, memoria, senso, valori, identità, futuro. Produce rifiuti, scarti, scorie tossiche, scorie nucleari, da nascondere underworld. Rifiuti sono i pezzi di società e le classi sociali andate in pezzi per la new economy e la finanza senza più regole, per la globalizzazione. Quartieri e città degradati, abbandonati, inquinati, resi tossici nel disinteresse e nell’assenza di ogni responsabilità civile e politica. Rifiuti sono gli uomini fuori dal meccanismo produci- consuma; rifiuti sono le minoranze etniche emarginate; rifiuti sono i giovani, i giovanissimi senza lavoro e senza futuro, tossici e non, nuovi nomadi in una nuova civitas di rifiuti e scarti, quartieri in degrado, case fatiscenti, senza alcuna assicurazione sanitaria e tutela sociale, senza sanità pubblica essenziale garantita. Scarti umani senza alcun valore, scarti abbandonati tra le immondizie e l’erba avvelenata. È anche questa l’America, l’altra faccia della superpotenza e dei B52 in volo sulla terra carichi di morte. Wall Street si specchia nel Bronx degradato e nel New Mexico radioattivo dei poligoni nucleari, ma soprattutto nella discarica universale che travalica i confini per scaricare liquami tossici non trattati in mare o in Africa.
Ma questa è anche l’Italia e l’Occidente, l’Oriente della Pechino di trenta milioni di persone immersi in uno smog mortifero. O del negazionismo ambientale di un Trump qualsiasi assunto alla presidenza.
È forse adesso il vero Trionfo della Morte e dell’Underworld: L’Ade. "Perché, pensai, i cattivi odori sembrano dirci qualcosa su noi stessi?... Ogni cattivo odore ci riguarda. Ci facciamo strada nel mondo per poi capitare nel mezzo di una scena medieval-moderna, una città di grattacieli di spazzatura con la puzza infernale di ogni oggetto deperibile mai fabbricato, e accorgerci che assomiglia a qualcosa che ci portiamo dietro da tutta una vita. ... Costruivamo piramidi di rifiuti sopra e sotto terra. Quanto più pericolosi, tanto più a fondo cercavamo di seppellirli. La parola plutonio viene da Plutone, dio dei morti e signore degli inferi".
Di contro, la memoria e la storia (altro che “Fine della storia” di Fukuyama) per resistere e conservare l’identità. L’affetto sincero e la gratuità di ogni gesto disinteressato e amico, l’aiuto all’altro, in ogni caso, al di là di ogni scopo di lucro e profitto. E la bellezza cercata nell’arte e nella vita come salvezza dal precipitare nell’underworld, per riemergere dall’Ade. I graffiti e i graffitari che dipingono un angelo rosa o azzurro sui palazzi in rovina ogni volta che muore una bimba o un bimbo… La ragazzina dodicenne che correva tra le macerie del Bronx agile e libera come una gazzella. Esmeralda. “Corre sempre. Correre è la sua bellezza e la sua salvezza, la sua melodiosa speranza, un merito speciale, una purificazione, il movimento altalenante e leggero di qualcosa di divino che soffia sul mondo”.

Underworld is a panoramic and bleak portrayal of society and it is cosmic in its vision of the human nature.

Yes, the dead fall upon the living. But he begins to see that the living are sinners. The cardplayers, the lovers who dally, he sees the king in an ermine cloak with his fortune stashed in hogshead drums. The dead have come to empty out the wine gourds, to serve a skull on a platter to gentlefolk at their meal. He sees gluttony, lust and greed.

Cityscapes and vacant lots… Crowds and recluses… Politicians and bureaucrats… Rebels and secret agents… Men and women… Husbands and wives… Adulterers and lovers… Gameplayers and aficionados… Believers and priests… Collectors and thieves… Outsiders and conformists… Outlaws and idols… Villains and victims…

The whole beat landscape was bomb-shadowed. It always had been. The beats didn’t need a missile crisis to make them think about the bomb. The bomb was their handiest reference to the moral squalor of America, the guilty place of smokestacks and robot corporations, Time-magazined and J. Edgar Hoovered, where people sat hunched over cups of coffee in a thousand rainswept truck stops on the jazz prairie, secret Trotskyites and sad nymphomaniacs with Buddhist pussies…

The authoritarian state is hell and silly petty devils abide there unhappily enjoying total hypocrisy.

Despite the award nominations and the praise from great contemporary authors like David Mitchell and David Foster Wallace, I didn’t go into this book knowing much about it. Pomo, writerly, and long: those were my only preconceptions. Now I can at least pretend to see what the fuss is about. The book starts with a resounding shot, as in the one “Heard Round the World” – a phenomenal account of the 1951 playoff game where the Giants took the pennant from the Dodgers thanks to Bobby Thompson’s dramatic bottom-of-the-ninth home run. Baseball lends itself well to good writing, it seems. For example, you might appreciate an author who describes warm-up pitches that “crack into the catcher’s mitt, a series of reports that carry a comet’s tail of secondary sound.” I started out afraid that DeLillo’s style would venture into some sort of overwrought, near rococo extreme, but the language actually kinda grew on me (which, for an 800+ page book is a good thing).

After the game, the story moves ahead 40 years where we learn about Nick Shay, a boyhood Dodgers fan who at that point owned the famous home run ball. It had taken a circuitous route from its ricochet off a bleacher seat into the quick hands of a hooky-playing, gate-hopping kid named Cotter and then to various collectors along the way, each with a story to tell. But the ball was just a narrative device. The real focus was on threats posed by the Cold War and the detritus of our nuclear age.

There were quite a few characters featured; Lenny Bruce and J. Edgar Hoover among them. The primary fictional ones included Nick (mentioned above), a man with a secret who worked for a huge waste removal company; his little brother, a former chess prodigy, who did research in nuclear physics for the Defense Department; and Nick’s former lover who today would be labeled a cougar. She was an artist who led a huge project to paint B-52’s retired to the desert. The various stories were then told in reverse chronological order dating back to the early 50’s. An epilogue set years later then wrapped things up and settled a few of the conflicts. DeLillo structured it all very cleverly. Connections beneath the surface were consistent with the whole “underworld” motif, as were the possibilities that things buried long ago could resurface again (like nuclear waste, for instance). The strands that tied together reminded me of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, especially the parts in New York with the graffiti art, the haves and have-nots, and the multicultural crosscurrents. I then saw that a couple of the blurbs for this later work mentioned a debt of gratitude to Underworld for paving the way.

While this book provided a decent return on my investment in time, I can’t go to the extreme that certain professional reviewers have with their “Great American Novel” talk. The shortcoming for me was the hollowness of the characters. Even Nick, who got first person narrative privileges, just wasn’t all that human at the core. Maybe other DeLillo works aren’t so fixated on big themes or the writers’ craft, and he concentrates more of his effort on vivifying the people within them. For all the praise he gets, I hope that’s the case.

Seems like to most people, Delillo is a love-or-hate proposition. His pace is either relaxed, or his books are boring as hell. His prose is gorgeous, or it's stilted and awkward (or just plain bad?). His dialogue is pitch perfect, or it's unrealistic and/or wooden. His philosophical musings are either profound or so pretentious as to be laughable. His plots are either nonexistent in such a way that you don't even notice, or they're nonexistent in such a way that you want to throw the book at the wall (which, with a book like Underworld, could do some significant damage to the wall).

I've felt both ways. The Body Artist was torture, and Cosmopolis was mostly torture. But they were short and I made it through them and appreciated parts of them. Libra was the first one I read that had some semblance of a traditional plot, and it was mostly stolen from history. Underworld's definitely got a plot, but it's not the plot on the book jacket, which in fact makes Underworld sound pretty unappealing. The book follows the life of a baseball? Most people don't give a shit about baseball, let alone one specific baseball.

What the book really is is a coming-of-age-during-the-Cold-War story, told backwards. Does that not sound more interesting? Yes, it follows tons of characters, from real ones Jackie Gleason and J. Edgar Hoover and Lenny Bruce to fictional ones like Nick Shay and Klara Sax. But I'd argue that most of the stuff that doesn't involve Nick directly is in there for tone. I don't necessarily think that a book has to be long for it to be great, but it helps. You need some time -- a few hundred pages, quite often -- to feel like you've lived through a period, or in a place, that you really haven't. No doubt Delillo could have cut some stuff and I wouldn't have thought, "Hmm, I still don't quite get cold-war America," but I have no complaints about the length as it is.

The structure of the book is really cool, and saying it's "shaped like a mushroom cloud" is clever but doesn't explain why anyone might want to actually try reading this. But it starts in 1951 with the climactic Giants-Dodgers baseball game, which sets the tone for the rest of the book. I'm not talking about the jubilant Giants celebrating their victory. I'm talking about Jackie Gleason vomiting on Frank Sinatra's shoes, Hoover's foreboding at the falling Life magazine pages and The Triumph of Death, Cotter Martin's duel over the baseball-in-question with the spectacularly and insidiously evil Bill Waterson, the unexpectedly low attendance of the game.

Then it jumps to the 1990's, with Nick Shay as a middle aged and nearly-complete human being. From there, it goes backwards in increments, describing events (global and local) pivotal to Nick's life, ending with the crime hinted at much earlier that changed Nick's whole character. Then for the epilogue, it jumps back to the present, and Nick's completion, or self-actualization, or whatever. That sounds lame, but I'm trying not to give anything away. I'm not always crazy about fragmented or jumbly timelines, but this one just makes sense. And to be perfectly honest, I feel like most of the more vehement negative criticism on this site has to come from people who didn't make it far enough to see that it does make sense.

I wouldn't normally try to defend Delillo's characters; they're often postmodernly flat in the most annoying way. Jack Gladney? Bill whatever from Mao II? Jesus, Eric Packer? Who could possibly care about these guys? They're just vehicles for Delillo's "systems" philosophy, which is also not always that appealing. One of his few successes with character was Lee Harvey Oswald, for whom, again, he could draw on a certain amount of real information. The Warren Report or whatever that enormous project was. But Nick Shay is unexpectedly real. Maybe that's because we get his whole life, and most of the lives of those close to him. And it's so great to finally* see Delillo write a long book with a real plot and a real protagonist.

Last thing: the prose style. Some people think what he writes is stupid, or makes no sense, or whatever. And I'd agree as far as to say that yes, he does have some clunkers. Some absolutely horrible sentences. Counterintuitive metaphors that never get explained. Unnecessary floridity. Dialogue between certain characters seeming way too intelligent. These are all present in Underworld, but I'd say much less so than his other novels. You never quite forget it's Delillo writing, but the clunkers come off like the tics and mannerisms of a brilliant but slightly irritating uncle extemporizing at dinner, and are easily ignored and benefit-of-the-doubted. Whereas The Body Artist consists almost exclusively of these tics, and is consequently intolerable.

My favorite scene from the book is one that may be a throwaway for most people, including maybe Delillo himself, but I really like it and I think it does what good books have to do: teach you how to be a (better) human. Nick is meeting with this Jesuit priest who's been enlisted by a friend of the family as a mentor/role model. (I think there should have been more of these scenes, actually, even if it had made the book 50 pages longer) Nick at this point is a cocky Italian-Bronx teenager who's full of piss and vinegar, as they say. But the priest asks him to name the parts of a shoe. Nick says the laces, the sole, the heel. Not much else to it. Smug. The priest insults him and prompts him to name the tongue. The priest points at parts of the shoe and names the cuff, the quarter, the welt, the vamp, the eyelets, the aglets, the grommets. The point being not the arcaneness of shoe nomenclature, but instead how little you know when you're young -- or how little you know, period. From that last list, I personally only knew eyelets, aglets and grommets. Father Paulus to Nick: have some goddamn mindfulness. Try to know something about the things you do every day.

So it's worth sticking out, I think. One caveat: Delillo's meditation at the very end of the epilogue, on the Internet as a metaphor for the interconnectedness of everything, is laughable, and should be disregarded at all costs. He's established his systems over the course of 800 pages, and this last bit is beating the proverbial dead horse. Sorry, Mr. Delillo.

Now onto 2666, the next installment in the Winter of Longass Books.

*I realize that the chronology's a little weird here if you're thinking about The Body Artist and Cosmopolis, etc., but I regard Underworld as the culmination of Delillo's career writing books that are actually good; it came right after Libra, White Noise, and Mao II (not necessarily in that order), and I wanted to read as many of his books as I could before I tried this one, which turned out to be a good idea.

A great achievement!

Definitely not four, probably not exactly five. But sometimes five; fleeting moments, flickers, of five. The structure of Underworld was fantastic. It was an excavation novel. It was an extraction. It was a slow descent, a regression. I definitely have a pro-Delillo bias, but still think this novel (for me) fits among his best and strongest works. It was worth the time, the work, the emotional cost. Not Dostoevesky, but Underworld will be read, examined, analyzed throughout the next century while much that was written in the later-half of the 20th century is pulped, processed, and turned into IKEA furniture.

Με έναν αργό σταθερό, χαμηλών τόνων ρυθμο αφήγησης, απλώνεται ο καλειδοσκοπικος κόσμος του Ντε Λιλο, ενα ανθρωπινο μουρμουρητο, απο την αισθηση της οικογενειας μεσα σε μικρουλικα σπίτια στην ενδοχώρα , μια αίσθηση θαλπωρής και αθωότητας , μέχρι τον έξω ανεξευρευνητο κόσμο, την απέραντη γεωγραφία

Είναι ίσως η πορνογραφία της νοσταλγίας ή μήπως είναι κάτι ολότελα διαφορετικο?

Τα φαντάσματα περιδιαβαίνουν στους διαδρόμους κ η ήττα παραμονεύει.
Από μικρός πρέπει ο καθένας να είναι προετοιμασμένος να γονατίζει μπροστά σε αυτήν την αδυσώπητη, σκληρή δύναμη που λέγεται ήττα.

Στην πίστα οι καλεσμένοι χορεύουν Τουίστ με όλη την εύγλωττη παντομίμα ξεπαγωμενων νεκρών που γύρισαν στη γη των ζωντανών για μια μέρα

Ο Νικ κάνει τον απολογισμό του:

Που είναι οι μέρες της αναταραχής? Τότε που ήμουν οργισμένος κ αληθινός. Οι μέρες της αταξίας. Τότε που περπατούσα σε δρόμους γνήσιους κ έκανα πράγματα αυθόρμητα, νιώθοντας συνέχεια οργισμένος κ ετοιμοπόλεμος.

Επικίνδυνος για τους άλλους, απόμακρος κ αινιγματικος για τον ίδιο μου τον εαυτό

Ich bin ja sehr leidensfähig und breche ganz selten Bücher ab - das habe ich bei der Strudelhofstiege hinlänglich bewiesen - aber diese Qual war selbst mir zuviel. Da das Buch bei Seite 250 und nach Teil 2 sukzessive noch viel schlechter wurde, habe ich nun abgebrochen, möchte aber die Gründe darlegen:

Sprachlich extremes Herumgeschwurbele. Permanent wird dieses Baseball in die Handlung eingeführt als Spiel, als Ball, als gewichtiges historisches Ereignis und Erinnerung gleich dem Schuss auf Kennedy - was für ein Mumpitz.

Grottenschlechte Dramaturgie:
Erstens: Gedankensprünge und fehlende Bezüge in einem Absatz werden oft Satz für Satz bis zu vier Protagonisten nur mit Er bezeichnet.
Zweitens: Extreme Redundanzen - Vati ist schon gefühlte 20 Mal nicht vom Zigarettenholen zurückgekehrt - dies aber nicht nur von einem Ereignis sondern von mehr als 50 Ereignissen. Stellt Euch nun die Multiplikation der Wiederholungen auf Seite 150 nur einmal bildlich vor.
Drittens: Nur durch die ewigen Redundanzen erkennt man an den Er Bezügen jene, die gemeint sind.

Aber die grottenschlechte schriftstellerische Arbeit steigert sich noch weiter zur ultimativen Katastrophe.
Der längerfristige Handlungsaufbau mutiert bis Seite 250 zu einem weiteren Waterloo. Es besteht nach ein paar Kapiteln keine Chronologie da auch Zeitsprünge inflationär eingesetzt werden. Zusätzlich zu den anfänglichen Gedankensprüngen wird nun auch noch viel zuviel Personal in die Geschichte eingeführt. Was daraus reslutiert, ist ein beknacktes Wirwarr an Leuten und repetitiven Handlungen, die völlig aus den Zeiten gefallen sind. Mein Hirn schaltete ab, alles war Brei: Marvin, Brian und wer auch immer und dieser verfickte (sorry) Baseball. Nur Nick habe ich mir gemerkt.

Mich hat die ganze Geschichte wie eingangs erwähnt an die Qual mit Doderer erinnert, aber zu Wien hatte ich wenigstens irgendeinen Bezug, was mich dranbleiben ließ. In dieser Amerika Story gibt es aber gar nix, was die Folter dieses schlechten Handwerks lohnt. Hey - das Leben ist wirklich zu kurz für so ein furchtbares Buch und meine intellektuelle Eitelkeit ist vor allem bei den meist prinzipiell überschätzten und viel zu sehr bejubelten amerikanischen Autoren (es gibt auch Ausnahmen) nicht hoch genug, um mir das anzutun.

Ich war so gelangweilt und wütend, dass mir schon wieder so ein Murks von den Kritikern als gute Literatur verkauft wird. Deshalb möchte ich mal alle dieser begeisterten Jubler des Feuilletons fesseln, anbinden und zwingen, das Buch vor meinen Augen WIRKLICH Satz für Satz bis zum letzten Ende fertig zu lesen, während ich dies bei Essen und einem Glaserl Wein auch tatsächlich kontrolliere. Denn so etwas tun diese Herrschaften meistens nicht. Sie lesen einzelne Kapitel und Absätze und wenn ordentlich gehirnwichst und geschwurbelt wird, fallen sie in die Elogien ihrer Kollegen ein.
Weiters möchte ich diese angeblich so großen Literaten allesamt mal bei den Ohrwaschln (Ohren) packen, diese langziehen und wie unvernünftige und dumme Schulerbuben verpflichtend in ein professionelles Schreibseminar stecken. Damit sie endlich mal lernen, wie man wirklich einen Roman schreibt. Versteht mich nicht falsch, hin und wieder ein Bruch gegen die Regeln der Leserezeption finde ich kreativ und gut, aber gleichzeitig gegen alles zu verstoßen, was eine gute Geschichte ausmacht, ist nicht innovativ und künstlerisch, sondern nur Dreck. Ich lasse mir nicht gern Scheiße verkaufen und werde noch wütender, wenn mir diese von Kritikern als reines Gold angepriesen wird, das aber nur wirklich kluge, intellektuelle Leute verstehen können.

Structured in the shape of a mushroom cloud, the shot heard round the world to ultimate dissolution. Follow the bouncing baseball . . .