Se vedi immondizia dappertutto, è perché è davvero dappertutto.

3 ottobre 1951, Polo Grounds di New York: alla fine di un’epica partita di baseball i Giants sembrano ormai spacciati quando Bobby Thomson colpisce la palla della vittoria, mandandola dritta in tribuna dove verrà recuperata da un ragazzino nero di Harlem, Cotter Martin.
Ma quella palla non rimarrà a lungo in suo possesso, è anzi destinata a passare di mano in mano, attraverso i decenni, spettatore insolito e silenzioso della grande storia d’America, dalla guerra fredda al crollo dell’URSS, dalle dive di Hollywood alla crisi di Cuba.

Colossale. Ecco come descriverei quello che viene unanimamente riconosciuto come il capolavoro di Don DeLillo. E aggiungo densissimo, analitico e prolisso. Parentesi ed ellissi che si aprono una dietro l’altra. Una narrazione non-lineare che procede a ritroso nel tempo, nello stile squisitamente post-moderno.
Ma già dalle prime 60 pagine tutte focalizzate sulla leggendaria partita di baseball, the shot heard round the world, capiamo di star assistendo a un campionato di letteratura unico e molto esclusivo.

Seguendo il percorso della mitica palla assistiamo alla partita dei Giants contro i Dodgers del 1951, al grande blackout di NY nel 1965, ai primi esperimenti atomici russi, alla crisi missilistica di Cuba e molto altro.
Incontriamo personaggi storici come il direttore dell’FBI J. Edgar Hoover, i giocatori di baseball Thomson e Branca, il comico Lenny Bruce. Inseriti alla perfezione in una cornice letteraria sempre verosimile, diventano parte del grande poema dondelilliano.
I titoli dei capitoli poi sono essi stessi omaggi a opere letterarie e musicali, ma anche a spot pubblicitari del tempo.

Come ci si aspetterebbe dall’opera più matura di questo autore, i temi virano dal complottismo all’ossessione per lo sport, dal consumismo all’isteria mediatica, dalla pop art alla paura della morte e c’è tanta, tantissima spazzatura.
È un’America sporca, puzzolente, sommersa dai rifiuti e popolata da gente gretta e disillusa, dove un serial killer finisce per essere ripreso in un filmato amatoriale di una bambina durante un viaggio in auto e rimandato a video in loop.
È un’America da mondo sotterraneo, claustrofobica e allucinata, così disperata da non poter far altro che affidarsi alle glorie del passato, ai ricordi intrisi di simbolismo, come la magia di una partita di baseball che ha stupito tutto il Paese.

Ci viene detto fin da subito che la palla da baseball protagonista di questa storia non porta né fortuna né sfortuna, ma spinge chi la possiede a raccontare storie.
Starà poi a DeLillo intrecciarle e fonderle in un romanzo sontuoso, carico, da rileggere e rileggere e comunque mai capire fino in fondo.

Una lettura sfidante, spesso non facile, ma che regala grandi soddisfazioni.

I felt like this was one of those books where you kind of start getting drunk on the words and then you begin to think everything is super deep and has about 100 meanings and everything is interconnected. Then you start reading every sentence about 5 times and get lost in a daydream about how everything is related to waste, nuclear energy, more waste, and nuns.

When you finish the book you feel like you've gone on a journey but it's hard to talk about it and your not really sure exactly what happened.

Lost places e Underworld

  

La scorsa estate ad Amburgo per caso mi sono imbattuta in una interessante mostra fotografica dal titolo "Lost places". Le fotografie ritraevano luoghi antropizzati in cui l'uomo scompariva, del tutto reificato: vecchi capannoni industriali, piscine fatiscenti, strade periferiche dismesse.
Mentre leggevo Underworld non potevo fare a meno di pensare a quelle immagini, ad un mondo umano parallelo che l'uomo vive superficialmente e che quindi sembra abbandonato.
Il libro è un capolavoro. Ho amato questo libro perché DeLillo ha una prosa lucida e al contempo poetica.La costruzione del romanzo è perfetta, dalla struttura dei capitoli ai personaggi. Un affresco della modernità in cui il genius loci rappresenta le sue stigmate.
La storia prende avvio da una partita di baseball negli anni '50 e la palla della vittoria diventa il "testimone" che lega tutti i personaggi, in un modo o nell'altro. La storia in realtà è un polittico di umanità, di uomini e donne alla ricerca di senso, di una identità. Le vite di questi personaggi affondano in realtà urbane periferiche, in deserti e in luoghi in cui la spazzatura è onnipresente eppure si fermano ad osservare quel "qualcosa" che dia senso al loro vivere: la luce nuda su una parete, un tramonto nel deserto post-atomico, il gioco della campana di alcuni bambini.

E come si fa a capire se questo è vero, dal momento che siamo già influenzati dal sistema, preparati a semicredere a tutto?

Ci si chiede cosa sia reale perché si comprende che il sistema influenza tutto, vende altre realtà mistificando quella in cui si vive e ponendo l'uomo nel suo mondo artificiale lo manipola, lo depaupera di qualsiasi senso, lo riduce a "spazzatura", a qualcosa che ha una scadenza. L'arte e il linguaggio sembrano le uniche vie di fuga, la possibilità di trasformarsi da spazzatura in Watts Towers.

Personalmente ho sempre odiato le classifiche, tipo quelle di Hornby in 'High fidelity' - che tra l'altro mi è piaciuto. Oppure quelle stronzate da 'libro nell'isola deserta', che pochi hanno visto e pochi possono permettersi - a meno di naufragare in un serial tv americano, dove di libri ne appaiono comunque assai pochi...
Ad ogni modo, nell'ipotesi ridicola di dover salvare un solo libro dal Diluvio Universale, imbarcandolo a fianco di Noè e dei suoi animali copulatori, penso che questo testo di narrativa potrebbe permettere di ricostruire da zero la civiltà statunitense dell'ultima metà del secolo scorso, nella sua materialità, immaterialità e religiosità, laica e non.
Ci sono frasi, paragrafi e intere pagine che, come le olive, possono essere spremute a freddo, a caldo, trasformate in pasta, e saranno sempre generose di senso e significato. La loro densità è così pregna da poter generare storie infinite negli occhi del lettore.
La potenza delle immagini, degli intercalari, dei dialoghi, è qualcosa che va oltre la narrativa finora conosciuta. Un prodotto dalla potenza di un diamante grezzo radioattivo e uno schiaffo molisano ai mediocri scrittori che popolano le classifiche da spiaggia.

I read this a few years ago and was blown away. (I taught WHITE NOISE, but never this.) A few weeks ago, Michiko Kakutani in the TIMES declared a re-reading of UNDERWORLD to be imperative on her "bucket list" of things to do before summer flies away from us all. I decided to follow her advice. So, on a second reading, my evaluation can be summed up in the same single word that I thought of the first time: BRILLIANT. Now that I'm writing on Goodreads, I'll add: this is one of the most important, most ingenious, most brilliant American novels written in the late 20th century - or ever. It's not for everyone. At 800+ pages and and with a demanding manner of narration, large cast of characters, abundant allusions and references, and non-linear time lines, it requires a good, attentive literary reading. But oh, the rewards! DeLillo knew in 1997, the date of publication, just how screwed up this American nation had become. But he also knew how to capture the essence of memories and the indelible meaning of the past and connectedness. And everyone, perhaps in the whole wide world, should read the Prologue, DeLillo's narrative (which can stand alone, but which also impinges importantly on the totality of the novel) about the Dodgers-Giants' pennant game of 1951 when Bobby Thomson hit "the shot heard round the world" and the world kept hearing the chant, "The Giants win the pennant." One of those moments after which things would never be the same. . . DeLillo is a genius. (Like ULYSSES, UNDERWORLD can be, should be, read and re-read over and over again by devotees. More will come clear with each re-reading.)

I believe this was my fourth time reading this book. I know for certain I have read it three times (1999 when the edition I have was printed, 2018 and 2021), but I am fairly sure I also read it sometime around 2010.

I only mention this because what I learned from this re-read (part of an ongoing project where I am re-reading all of Delillo's books in publication order) is that it definitely reveals more of itself the more times you read it.

This time through, I think I appreciated Delillo's writing more than on previous occasions. There's some interesting stuff here in terms of almost stream of consciousness narrative that takes several different threads and progresses them all in a swirling mass of text. And the dialogue. The dialogue in Underworld is stylised, I know, but it is fascinating to read.

It remains a book, for me, primarily about connections. If it had been told in chronological order, that would have given one view of these connections. But I think the decision to work backwards in time gives a better view: it gives a real sense of digging into the past and discovering connections and I think that's a different thing to working your way forward in time and revealing connections. I'm not expressing this very well, but hopefully you catch my drift.

It's a wonderful book and I imagine reading number 5 will happen in a few years. Is it my favourite Delillo? Quite possibly. I think my favourite Delillo is normally the one I have read most recently out of this and Libra. I re-read Libra not that long ago and it has been my favourite until I just finished Underworld a few minutes ago. Now Underworld will be my favourite until I read Libra again.

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ORIGINAL REVIEW
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"Did you see the paper, Father?"
"Please, we know each other too well. You are required to call me Andy now. Yes, I stole a look at someone’s Daily News. They’re calling it the Shot Heard Round the World."
"How did we detect evidence of the blast, I wonder. We must have aircraft flying near their borders with instruments that measure radiation. Or well-placed agents perhaps."
"No no no no. We’re speaking about the home run. Bobby Thomson’s heroic shot. The tabloids have dubbed it for posterity."

Two events happen on the same day (3 October 1951). Bobby Thomson hits a home run off pitcher Ralph Branca. And Russia explodes a test nuclear bomb significantly ramping up the Cold War tensions. Underworld tells the story of the Cold War years by concentrating on the story of the baseball (the actual ball, not the game) rather than the story of the bomb. It focuses on people and details rather than any kind of over story. In doing so, it incorporates the big story but from a human perspective. By concentrating on specific individuals, DeLillo is able to reflect on the paranoia and angst generated by the Cold War and the novel becomes a wonderful examination of the social changes in America through the second half of the twentieth century (e.g. the sexual revolution of the 60s/70s, the drug culture and the civil rights movement).

We begin (in a present tense narrative) in 1951 with the story of "the shot heard round the world" at the Polo Grounds in New York City, and we meet the boy (Cotter Martin) who leaves the stadium with the ball. Then we jump to (now in past tense) 1992 (roughly contemporary with the time when the book was written) and meet Nick Shay, the current owner of what is believed to be that ball. Subsequent parts of the book then track back through time concentrating on specific people (mostly Nick and an artist called Klara Sax with whom he had a brief affair and then, after 40 years, meets again) and repeatedly returning to the history of the ball. Always, we are conscious that the people interacting the ball are aware there is a crucial period immediately after its acquisition which cannot be accounted for, so the provenance is uncertain. In three short passages between parts of the book, we, the reader, get to read about that missing time period, the first time the ball changed hands.

It is very difficult to know how to review this book. It is huge (827 pages of dense text) and its scope is enormous. If you Google "DeLillo Underworld", you will not only find a lot of reviews but also lengthy essays about the book’s importance and multitude of themes plus links to whole other books that serve as readers’ guides. But one key theme, at least to me, seems to be that of interconnection. By working with a backwards chronology for most of this book, DeLillo is able to mine the past layer by layer to explore some of these connections.

"He was thinking about his paranoid episode at the bombed party the night before. He felt he’d glimpsed some horrific system of connections in which you can’t tell the difference between one thing another, between a soup can and a car bomb, because they are made by the same people in the same way and ultimately refer to the same thing."

And

"He thought of the photograph of Nixon and wondered if the state had taken on the paranoia of the individual or was it the other way round.
He remembered how he felt cranking film across the light box and wondering where the dots connected.
Because everything connects in the end, or only seems to, or seems to only because it does."

DeLillo is digging back into the past to see that everything is connected. If this idea is true, the book is still relevant today because it captures the second half of the 20th century and that must be part of the foundation for where we (or at least, America) are now. And still we should be recognising that there is nothing new that doesn’t flow out of something old.

This theme of the interconnectedness of everything is probably one of the main reasons why I love this book so much. It is a common theme in many of my favourite books. For example, I think one of the things Ali Smith is doing in her seasonal quartet is illustrating how we are only where we are are now because of where we have come from. And my favourite author, Richard Powers, is always connecting things and exploring links and cause/consequence. Tom McCarthy in Satin Island looked at a similar topic. It never does us any harm to reflect on the influence of the past on our present and future. The more I learn about my other main passion, nature, the more I discover that things are connected more intimately and more complexly than we have yet understood. This book explores that.

There is an awful lot more in this book. I refer you to these reviews for some further background:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/14...
https://www.spikemagazine.com/structu...

These make it patently clear that I have barely scratched the surface.

As an aside, for those who are interested in this kind of thing (I am!), DeLillo lifted one chapter of Underworld and part of the epilogue, re-worked them and made them the title story in his collection The Angel Esmeralda. It is possible (I know because I did it) to spend a happy hour or so comparing the versions because DeLillo made several changes. It’s probably the closest I will get to to watching a world famous author at work.

Saying "Masterpiece is an overused word" is possibly an overused statement. But I think this is one. A masterpiece, I mean.

Underworld is concerned with history, with the inexorable passage of time, the ways in which events change and define us collectively, and how pieces of the past once misplaced can be irrevocably lost. When I reached page 382 of the novel, I was surprised to find that the next page was numbered 415, meaning that there were 32 pages of missing text. Never before had I seen an author tamper with page numbers: what an innovative and intriguing device! By creating intentional gaps in the text, Delillo (I reasoned) is imprinting the themes of his novel in the book's physical structure, mirroring the uncertainty of the lineage of the home run baseball that is the focus of the plot. This adds an additional layer to the mystery, an implication that the reader is expected to take an active involvement in its unraveling. And Delillo has left more clues: by adding together the digits of the page number – 382 – you get 13, a clear reference to the novel’s recurring numerological obsession with the number.

But my excitement at this discovery was short-lived. When I saw that the next 32 pages were duplicated consecutively, it became clear that this was not some brilliant postmodern trick, but a simple misprint (the wrong 32 pages had been inserted during binding), which was limited entirely to my own copy of the book. For me, this was quite the anticlimax, and it led me to realise two things about the novel:

1. I was far more excited about the potential implications of the misprint than I had been about the actual story.
2. The narrative is so loose and bloated that removing large chunks of text at random seems to cause no noticeable problems.

Misprints aside, the actual novel itself not terribly compelling. While the beginning and (to a lesser extent) the ending are powerful, the thread that links the intervening pages is incredibly thin, and so while Underworld explores many potentially interesting themes, it does so in a loose, haphazard and meandering fashion. It lacks cohesion or a strong unifying force. Though the novel does effectively capture something of the atmosphere of the latter Twentieth Century, it seems to do so mainly by virtue of its length - I suppose it would be difficult to write about any topic for eight hundred pages and manage to capture nothing at all about the subject matter.

All that being said, I didn't dislike Underworld. It was a generally enjoyable read, though a little dull, with some outstanding moments. But many of its themes are just not very relatable for someone like me: a non-baseball-loving non-American, who reached political awareness after the Cold War had already ended. I connected with the commonalities of experience, but I expect that much of this novel's true appeal lies in recollecting a specific era - a time and place that I think you had to be part of to really appreciate.

DeLillo's masterpiece, they say. The one that might win him the Nobel Prize for literature, they say.

I do not dispute it, though I am not qualified to confirm it. I will say that UNDERWORLD is a wonderful read. Provocative and ambitious, it is about escaping our inevitably messy past and what baggage must accompany us on the journey.

There other themes too. One is the author's musing about the role that garbage might play in the 21st century.

It goes without saying that Mr. DeLillo's talent for story-telling is unique. As a subplot, he imagines a life of old-fashioned religious servitude for J. Edgar Hoover's twin sister. We always wondered what happened to her. Didn't we?

Best of all, DeLillo’s gift for word play never fails him. That makes his longish novel a quick read filled with humor, but not without uncomfortable situations as he portrays, in mostly reverse order, the timeline of Nick Shay’s life. Shay barely escapes the Bronx of his childhood during the 1950s. Only to wind up as a successful executive in a waste handling company located in Phoenix in the first decade of the 21st Century.

The trajectory of Shay’s life is intertwined with the fate of the baseball that Bobby Thompson launched out of the Old Polo Grounds defeating the Brooklyn Dodgers and sending the Giants to the World Series against the Yankees in 1951.

How can you not admire the imagination required to write such a tale?

A baseball game prologue is stupendous and has to be one of the greatest openings of any novel I've read. I thought the central construct brilliant: the ownership lineage of a certain ball from said game is then traced from the present (1997) backward in time about half a century. The prose is often beautiful but for me Delillo drifts a bit too much and too often from his central construct. There might be a 500-page masterpiece within this 800+ page novel. I MIGHT revisit this novel one day, but because I can't say I MUST reread this, I can't quite give this five stars.

I read this a few years back and it was definitely my favorite DeLillo, easily better than Mao II, Libra, or White Noise (all of his other books being far inferior IMO than these four). It is a serious book for baseball fans about a treasure hunt for an infamous baseball hit during a raucous match between the Giants and the Dodgers in NYC back in 1951. It is a voyage back in time to a much different Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. A myriad of interesting characters and a relatively breathtaking plot.
One I need to read again.

It's March 2020. The city is shut down due to COVID-19 and I'm stuck at home. I ask myself, what would be the most enjoyable and relaxing way to use all this free time I now have? What's that? I decided to read a massive, 800+ page work that's been sitting on my shelf for several years? Well then, I'm more of a masochist than I thought.

Underworld by Don DeLillo is a staggering, monumental, gargantuan monster of a novel that is intricately crafted and detailed to the point of disbelief. I can't even begin to summarize the plot or themes because... well, there's just too much to talk about. It's about New York and Arizona, the city vs the desert, the Cold War, love and heartbreak, death, growing old, nostalgia for childhood, urban landscapes, poverty, baseball, the search for meaning in a meaningless world, family, art, a serial killer, infidelity, rebellious youth... you get the idea. Trying to neatly summarize all this book has to say into a single statement is similar to describing the rise and fall of the Roman Empire in 2 or 3 sentences. It's possible perhaps, but what you'll end up with is so general and vague that it's more or less meaningless.

But I'll try to get creative. I would say that Underworld attempts to describe what it means to be human in a world that is so large and complex that it renders individuals basically irrelevant. In other words, picture yourself walking down a street lined with apartment buildings. As you walk down the street, you look into every single window you pass by - hundreds upon hundreds of them. In each window you see various people - all with their own stories, pasts, and hardships. As you walk down this street, you realize that the lives of all these people are unique and special, and yet they are all interconnected in a way because they all co-exist together under an umbrella of shared values. Now, some of these people are wealthy, some are poor, some are content, many are miserable. They are all individuals, and yet because they live in this one place, they all structure their lives somewhat similarly. For example, they may all have different jobs, but they all work. They may have different political beliefs, but they all participate in a common wider political ideology (be it capitalism, communism, or whatever you like). They all have different families, but these families are structured remarkably similarly. And very occasionally, events occur that are so unbelievably large and momentous that they change the fabric of the lives of every single one of these people. This is exemplified in the novel by 2 events - the detonation of a nuclear weapon by the Soviet Union, marking the beginnings of the Cold War, and a baseball game in New York unlike any other.

The structure of the book is incredibly hard to follow. There are several key characters that the book follows throughout their lives, jumping back and forth through time (over decades). Usually, it goes backwards rather than forwards, which makes for a disorienting experience. And yet, notwithstanding the jumbled and chaotic experience that reading this book was for me, this structure, as well as the wide-reaching themes DeLillo writes about, left me with an impression that was more vivid and intense than most of my typical reading experiences.

DeLillo's writing is quite impressive, although his style is long-winded at times. There were some sentences and descriptions that simply took my breath away. There were also pages upon pages that were a complete slog to get through, for example, various recurring scenes of a comedian's stand-up routine which go on and on and on. Still, even the most boring and repetitive sections of the novel have a part to play. After all, this is a book about life. What is life but a collection of repetitive, boring, and difficult moments?

There's a lot more I could say about this novel. Is it pretentious? Unnecessarily long? Overly repetitive? Needlessly difficult in terms of its structure, number of characters and plots? I would say definitely. And yet, there are some amazing gems of truth hidden away within these 827 pages. Perhaps another writer could have tackled these themes in a more straightforward, readable and succinct way. Perhaps. But what DeLillo has managed to accomplish here is impressive at the very least, and possibly even revelatory.

Would I recommend this novel? Yes and no. I think if one goes into this prepared to be challenged and in it for a long time, it's more than doable. I'm not a very patient (or all that experienced) reader, and I managed to get through it in a week and a half (being in quarantine helped). If you have the patience and stamina to get through this, I would say go for it. That being said, if you have relatively little time to read, and if reading Underworld would take the place of 4 or 5 books that you could read otherwise, I couldn't fault you for skipping it. This is a very good novel, but the fact is, I don't think it's worth everyone's time equally. For my end, I'm glad I stuck with it and read it when I did, but I will never read it again, and I think it'll be a few years before I pick up another DeLillo novel. Parts of this book were 5/5, parts were 3/5, so overall I think a 4 is the best rating I could give it, as silly as giving a single number to a book this size feels.

seriously, why does everyone suck this book's dick so much?

this book was recommended to me by an ex (who also recommended zuleika dobson and the joke, so he had a good track record until then) who knew how much i liked infinite jest so he thought i would like this one. and if i only liked infinite jest because it was a long book written by a white male, then i suppose i would have liked this book. but i didn't, so it must be something else i'm drawn to in the wallace.

i remember i was reading this at the airport where i was going to meet him, like a dutiful girlfriend, and just having my jaw drop at the first part. not because it was soooo goooood like everyone here seems to think. am i really the only one who felt embarrassed by the whole life magazine thing? i remember looking around after i read that part to see if someone was playing a trick on me. when he got off the plane, i just sat there, shaking my head at him sadly. it was the beginning of the end.

look - i really liked white noise, but this i just felt to be a bloated, wooden, oddly-phrased book whose language didn't charm me, but made me unhappy. and then he goes and publishes the first bit as a separate book? who does that?? sorry, delillo - its not terrible, so it gets no 2 stars, but i barely cared about anything in this book, and it ruined a relationship. if i die alone, it's your fault.

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