Libra

Intuition is a funny thing. I'd been meaning to read Don DeLillo for years now, but was avoiding him. He appeared everywhere (usually accompanied by stellar praise), including my own bookshelf, where Libra sat and sat and sat. See, I've been intimidated by DeLillo. For no good reason, other than this intuitive idea I had that he would be difficult.

I was right, too. It took me weeks to read this book. Not because I didn't understand what was happening - but because I struggled, on a page-by-page basis, to connect to the material. DeLillo's writing style is both dense and cold. Added to this, a huge raft of characters to keep track of. The worst kind - FBI and CIA agents and their cronies, all of which get mixed into an annoying stew of interchangeableness. Plus, a constantly changing point of view, which wasn't a problem for me most recently in Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion, but well, that book has so much heart and soul in it, you can't help but get swept up by its tide.

I should probably back up a bit to mention that this book is a fictionalized account of JFK's assassination, and the "Libra" in question is Lee Harvey Oswald, the famous would-be shooter (or patsy?). I should also mention that I was raised by a father who was 14 years old on that fateful day in Dallas, and I inherited his lifelong curiosity about what really happened. He's read all the books, he's watched all the documentaries and the films. I watched them alongside him, I listened to his thoughts and theories and questions. So I went into this reading fairly knowledgable about the event, and with the expectation that I would likely find it as riveting as my father would.

It would be unfair and wrong to overlook the incredible amount of background detail that went into this 450 page novel. DeLillo does a spectacular job of providing the reader with the who, what, where, why, how. It's not a small thing, and I felt appreciation and admiration for what he does in these pages, if not interest or enjoyment.

Well, that's not entirely true. My interest flared up each time LHO entered the scene, because he was so strange, such an unknowable outsider. So young, so unpredictable, so mediocre, so idealistic, so poor... and also now this historical figure who is known by all his given names. My interest peaked on the November 22 chapter. DeLillo captured the events in such a powerful, cinematic way, I found myself recalling the iconic film sequence almost frame by frame, my heart pounding and clenching as President Kennedy waved, and mouthed "thank you" in the moments before the bullets flew, seconds before his wife would be holding part of his brains in her hands.

I also found it interesting the way the author interpreted the assassination to be rooted in CIA dissatisfaction, post Bay of Pigs. I similarly enjoyed learning about Oswald's defection to the USSR, his marriage to a Russian woman, and the importance U-2 aircraft play in the story.

Yet... I struggled to feel engaged in these pages. For the most part, I experienced a huge emotional distance between me and the text. Perhaps this was a deliberate outcome on the part of the author, but in my view, it does a disservice to an event that has painfully lodged itself in the hearts of people, worldwide. An event that serves as a reminder that we can’t always know the answers. That idealism can be shattered. That everything can go to shit. It’s the broken heart of one of the great unsolved mysteries.

The heart was missing here, or hearts, of the man who was always on the outside, let down by his country, and of the man who was bravely leading it.

This was my first Don DeLillo but it will not be my last. Libra was first published in 1988 but this audio version came out in 2016. It was a bit of a challenge in audio, demanding close attention so as not to miss the switch in narrator, the reader was decent and the story captivating.

Ah yes, the story -- the JFK assassination or rather a novelist suggesting a possible (and plausible) conspiracy. The assassination does not occur until lose to the end, but we all know it's coming and the basic facts about what, including Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald before anyone has heard his story of what happened. DeLillo's conspiracy starts with two disgruntled (one of whom has been demoted) CIA operatives coming up with a scheme to reveal what really happened with the Bay of Pigs. They are anti-Castro and cannot believe that the JFK administration has moved on to other issues post-Bay of Pigs. The plan calls for an attempted assassination of JFK in Miami.

The book is almost a biography of Oswald. Following what is known about his life, DeLillo builds Oswald's character using Oswald himself as the narrator. In the Oswald parts of the book, we are in Oswald's head, listening to him think and act. And he just gets stranger and stranger!

This book brought back those November days in 1963 when my sister and I sat glued to the TV. I can still see Ruby shooting Oswald and the pandemonium that resulted. Of course, we were in school when the President was shot. I remember that all the teaches left their classrooms and their students to go to the teachers' lounge to listen to the radio. They back, told us that JFK was dead and that the buses were coming to take us home.

I very much enjoyed this audiobook.

Attention everyone, an unpopular opinion is coming!! Please prepare your pitchforks!

I read DeLilllo’s White noise not so long ago, enjoyed its humor and weirdness and I cannot remember a thing from it. On the other hand, this book is plot plot so much plot. Too much plot? Too little anything else?

This is a historical fiction about a conspiracy theory version of events leading up to Kennedy’s assassination where it basically was all CIA’s plot to stop Kennedy from cozying up to Castro (not to kill but to attempt to kill). A lot of characters in the CIA, hired killers, Cubans who all sound the same and at some point I gave up on paying attention to who’s who, so similar they were. A book that reads more like a wikipedia page (admittedly a very long one) and hence I was a little interested because I know nothing about American history, but I am questioning what a person who knows it will get out of this book.

And the most well written character in the forefront of it all, Lee Harvey Oswald, an enigma of a man: is he ideological? A Trotsky reincarnate? Is he an idiot? A dreamer? A loser? Is he a kind and loving father who wants his little daughter to sleep on his side of the bed? Is he a violent man who starts beating his wife all of a sudden? Who knows? He’s all of these things! I don’t understand who he is at all. And I think that DeLillo, unlike for example Mantel who knows her Cromwel so well, knows his Oswald that much.
I mean he had to spell it out through the other character

“We have the positive Libran who has achieved self-mastery. He is well balanced, levelheaded, a sensible fellow respected by all. We have the negative Libran who is, let’s say, somewhat unsteady and impulsive. Easily, easily, easily influenced. Poised to make the dangerous leap. Either way, balance is the key.”

That’s the best you can count on. Or how about this:

He thought the only end to isolation was to reach the point where he was no longer separated from the true struggles that went on around him. The name we give this point is history.

The oldest and most obvious motivation of them all.

DeLillo’s writing is very detached, matter-of-fact, “manly” with unnatural dialogues that sound similarly false and that makes me sincerely doubt if he ever read a book written by a woman or had a meaningful conversation with one. There’s nothing beautiful in it, just staccato pow pow pow like bullets from the revolver, bullets that mostly miss (unlike that other bullet).

Do I believe this conspiracy theory? I am typically not big on them but certainly the amount of deaths surrounding LHO look very suspicious and the CIA hardly has a great track history. But the truth is we don’t know yet and maybe we will eventually.

What I'm trying to say: I never cared while reading this book, I wish I just read wiki page to be honest.

And what about DeLillo? Well, I’m still cautiously interested, yet he’s not Pynchon, not that everyone must be Pynchon of course. But you need to be a genius and have a great sense of humor and crazy literary dexterity to pull off this type of story for me personally. I did think "I wish this was written by Pynchon". Don't worry, we’ll get to Underworld eventually. But first Mao II. And now I have a suspicion that I overpraised White Noise!

A friend of mine once sat me down and made me watch the documentary Loose Change. For those that don't know Loose Change is a detailed documentary positing the idea that 9/11 was a false flag operation. Its modus operandi is to follow the money. Without question, it's a disturbingly convincing film on many levels but at a certain point I began to think about the urgency with which my friend needed to believe he now possessed secret inside information. I could sense how he felt it empowered him. To believe you have the secret to a plot is to be transformed from a bystander to an insider. And the zeal with which he wanted to convert me to his way of thinking was religious in essence. He had that glazed intent look Jehovah's Witnesses have on your doorstep. However, there's no denying the big four American conspiracy theories, all of which debunk the comforting notion that America is a democracy, are compelling stories. DeLillo described the JFK assassination as a story about our uncertain grip on the world and you could say the same about 9/11 and the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations. What they all had in common was they enabled hugely profitable wars to be continued or begun.

DeLillo in his novel doesn't follow the money nor does he pay much attention to Vietnam. Nevertheless, he creates a hugely plausible depiction of how JFK came to be killed. Libra is probably Delillo's only novel which has what might be described as an exciting plot. In fact, it's a novel that makes you think a lot about the role plot plays in life. A plot, you could say, is a kind of secret harmony of converging forces. We'd all like to think there's a plot to our lives. We're happiest when we feel we are in control of the plot. Unhappiest when it appears someone else is plotting against us. In DeLillo's book Oswald is constantly scrambling around on the fringes of conventionality in search of a plot for his life. What he most wants is to be seen, acknowledged - in other words, a slice of fame. He's a brilliant multifaceted character, riddled with warring contradictions. You like him for showing kindness to persecuted impoverished black men; you hate him for beating his wife. He's so slippery he eludes every attempt at pinning him down. He's like history itself in this sense.

Since this novel was published Oliver Stone's film JFK has offered a detailed alternative account of the assassination in which Oswald is wholly innocent. In Stone's overly tidy version of events everyone from vice president Johnson, the CIA, the FBI, the Mafia down to lowlife common criminals is in on the plot. The cover up, the doctoring of evidence which probably always takes place after any event that rocks a nation will always arouse the suspicion that the people doing the covering up also committed the crime. I'm not saying I don't believe Stone's version. How on earth can any of us really know? I do know official accounts of historical events are generally self-serving and bogus. But DeLillo's more muddy version of events is, in my eyes, more credible. It begins with an idea by two disgruntled ex CIA operatives who are angry Kennedy is seeking a rapprochement with Castro. Their idea though is to have someone fire a shot at JFK and miss and then blame it on Castro. The idea travels and in its travels changes.
For everyone who's never read DeLillo, the most important living novelist in my opinion, this is the ideal book to begin with.

"n  There's always more to it. This is what history consists of. It is the sum total of things they aren't telling us.n"

The novel is a tragic, speculative account of the people, places and things leading to the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. Delillo uses many of the actual words of Oswald and his mom Marguerite, as well as numerous documented facts surrounding the life and times of Lee Harvey Oswald, so that I had difficulty discerning where the public records stop and the fiction begins. This is likely why Delillo takes pains to remind us that his novel makes "no claim to literal truth" and that he "made no attempt to furnish factual answers to any questions raised by the assassination."

It is significant to note that the several films speculating on Lee Harvey Oswald, a conspiracy and the assassination of JFK, such as Oliver Stone's "JFK" from 1991, came after the 1988 publication of Delillo's Libra. Not realizing this, I initially gave the novel only 4 stars when I finished it earlier this year. The more I think about it, the more impressed I am with Delillo's brilliance and imaginative creation.

Delillo expertly saves this from being labeled a political novel by his character Nicholas Branch, a researcher who undertakes the nearly impossible task of looking for patterns in a mountain of data and trying distinguish them from mere coincidence. Branch/Delillo concludes that Kennedy's death was the product of a mixture of confederacy and chance, or "a rambling affair that succeeded in short term mainly due to chance."

Specifically, Delillo paints Oswald as a lonely and grotesque fringe dweller who becomes the perfect shill for a plot by current and former CIA operatives to take an errant shot at JFK, with the unsuccessful assassination attempt to be blamed on Cuba.

To get to the ultimate point, Delillo takes us on a truncated tour through Oswald's life of trying to escape his fate and futilely searching for a place where he could fit in.

First and foremost, Lee Harvey spends his life trying to forget that overbearing mother of his, Marguerite, who is both train-wreck compelling and revolting, depicted by Delillo via her unique manner of speech to a judge to whom she provides her list of excuses and complaints for the poverty in which she raised her son and the way he turned out.

Then, he is a Marine who, after discharge, defects to Soviet Russia, only to be disappointed in its Westernization and return to the States as a Marxist with a Russian wife. Finally, he sees Cuba as a possible vista.

A few things I found uniquely fascinating in this novel. One is the theme of entropy I have seen in other Delillo novels; that is, the fact it's impossible to control people and events pursuant to some type of plan.

Second, how Delillo has such an appreciation for the awkward vernacular of professionals, e.g., CIA, and the staccato dialect of the uneducated.

Third and most singular is how Delillo shows Oswald as being captivated by media imagery. I cannot help but believe that many of the recent mass murderers also project themselves as being played out in images on living room TV screens. After being shot by Ruby, Oswald imagines how the shot looked on camera. Back in Russia, when he tried to commit suicide just before being expelled, he views his razor slices across his wrist while a violin plays somewhere offstage. Finally, as Lee Harvey fades away, he pans out, watching himself from "a darkish room, someone's den."

4.5

Libra was my first DeLillo read and I found it to be a very compelling one. The first few hundred pages of the book meander menacingly along like a slow movement in a Shostacovich symphony. There is no humour, no quickening of the pulse anywhere: instead we see bleakness, we feel the oppressing humidity of the South and witness the claustrophobic plotting of 'men in small rooms'. At first I was less taken by DeLillo's montage technique, but I honestly can't see how he otherwise would have been able to weave such a dense matrix from which fate leaps forth. This is what is absolutely impressive about this book: as the story unfolds, the assassination plot starts to develop its own logic, with those who conceived it in the first place standing helplessly along the lines. The great engine of Fate grinds its way through History, sweeping the lives of minute individuals and the consciousness of a nation along with it. DeLillo masterfully lets the story run its own course. As a result, this is a novel which really gets under your skin.

Rating:78/100

As the young Lee Harvey Oswald was speeding through the underground railways of New York, my plane-ride was speeding down the line and leaping off the ground, with its final destination being the beautiful city of Wroclaw, Poland. Both of these acts happening simultaneously, reflected the enormous speeding forces of history that I was about to witness in this novel, moving toward its endpoint. It would of course be much more poetic if the plane also landed at the same time as this novel ended, because as it happens, this novel is very much like a plane-ride: it speeds like a tsunami at the beginning, while in the air, there are moments of turbulence and confusion (is it normal for it to shake this much, did lightning just hit the wing of the plane, jesus christ can that guy behind me stop kicking my fucking seat?), and simultaneous joy and fear at the prospect of a landing, a resolution to the turbulence in between. Like a plane ride, we all know the story. We know how it begins, and we know how it ends. History dictates that we do. But there is always possibility in the plot between the take-off and the landing. I think DeLillo's novel is very much about this center of possibility; of that which has not yet been explored properly surrounding the Kennedy Assassination; the conspiracies, the coincidences, the various drives and impulses of people and institutions, the forces and mechanisms of history and of spectacle.