Spoilers -- kind of....

This is a really great book -- for most of it, I really loved this -- partially because I'm an assassination buff, but also because there's a taut intelligence and poetry in much of the writing, and also (I thought, at least) some really sublime characterization and lots of Plot MoMo. The treatment of David Ferrie -- for example when he meets with Carmine .... just great writing...

This is my first DeLillo - and I know a lot of people here think he's way overrated -- so I went in assuming he was no good -- in other words, I went in with anti-hype. And found him to be a moving, sensitive, very mortal writer -- writing about very moving and mortal things.

That said -- there were all through certain very subtle hints of weakness - very subtle -- DeL. sometimes spells things out for the reader that shouldn't have -- he should trust more in the reader's own insights... and then the ending, in my opinion, just failed -- for the very simple reason that a lot of time was spent rehearsing events that we've all seen a thousand times on video. He should have stopped 50 pages earlier...

That said -- I enjoyed this a lot...

Dead president’s corpse in the driver’s car. The engine runs on glue and tar…

Let’s devote our lives to understanding this moment, separating the elements of each crowded second. We will build theories that gleam like jade idols, intriguing systems of assumption, four-faced, graceful. We will follow the bullet trajectories backwards to the lives that occupy the shadows, actual men who moan in their dreams.

There is the system and there are those who serve the system. There are tomcats and there are cat’s paws.
Secret services saw in John Kennedy a real threat to their holding sway over the entire state:

“It’s not just Kennedy himself. He thinks he can make us a different kind of society. He’s trying to engineer a shift. We’re not smart enough for him… Do you know what charisma means to me? It means he holds the secrets. The dangerous secrets used to be held outside the government. Plots, conspiracies, secrets of revolution, secrets of the end of the social order. Now it’s the government that has a lock on the secrets that matter. All the danger is in the White House, from nuclear weapons on down.”

There is a secret world within the world… Clandestine movers and shakers live among us but they abide in the invisible world of their own.

Un intrigo da romanzo di spionaggio, con un discreto groviglio di personaggi e informazioni, forse troppe per i miei gusti. Anche se qui lo stile mi è sembrato molto a servizio della ricostruzione/speculazione storica, DeLillo si conferma il più imprendibile creatore di frasi ad effetto dell’universo letterario.
Richiede tempo e testa. Con Underworld, una delle opere più complesse.
Finale superlativo.

[80/100]

Frasario minimo/

∞ Il treno squarciava le tenebre. I passeggeri alle varie fermate fissavano il nulla con un’espressione messa a punto negli anni. Lo stridore arrivava a un parossismo doloroso che lui interiorizzava come una sfida personale. Nel rumore di quelle svolte c’era tanto ferro che quasi ne sentiva il sapore.
∞ Si sarebbe iscritto a una cellula comunista. Avrebbero fatto nottata parlando di teorie. Gli avrebbero assegnato degli incarichi. Si sarebbe vestito di scuro, avrebbe camminato sui tetti sotto la pioggia.
∞ Il messaggio sarebbe stato lampante, un attentato a lunga gittata, telescopico, di ampia angolazione, senza l’inutile baraonda umana provocata dal pazzo che esce dalla folla con la pistola di famiglia.
∞ Tutto dovrebbe essere qualcosa. Ma non lo è mai. È la natura dell’esistenza.
∞ Da qualche parte aveva anche una moglie. Questa era una complicazione su cui riflettere.
∞ - Mi chiedevo, - disse lei. - Che cosa si diranno le altre persone? - Quando? - Adesso. Voglio sapere che cosa si dicono. Magari ci sono cose a cui non abbiamo pensato, cose che dovremmo dire anche noi.
∞ - Adoro quella vestaglia, Larry. Assomigli a Orson Welles in campo lungo.
∞ - Come fa una persona a descrivere la propria malattia su un modulo prestampato?
∞ Nascose il fucile sul pavimento tra le file di scatoloni vicino al cartello che indicava le scale. Lo avrebbero trovato facilmente. Tuttavia doveva nasconderlo, solo per fare quello che si s’aspettavano da lui. Voleva dal loro qualcosa da scoprire, un primo strato da rimuovere.
∞ C’è questa battaglia quotidiana tra l’ora in cui mi sveglio e l’ora in cui tu vai a letto.
∞ Tutto se ne andava, le sensazioni periferiche si frantumavano nello spazio.

I Believe All That I Read Now

"I believe all that I read now
Night has come off the corners
Shadows flicker sweet and tame
Dancing like crazy mourners."

Howard Devoto, "Motorcade"

Plots That Move Toward Death

"Libra" has one of those plots that, in the words of Don DeLillo himself (from “White Noise"), “tends to move deathwards”.

Here, DeLillo repeats and elaborates on his aphorism:

n  
n  “Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot. A narrative plot is no less than a conspiracy of armed men. The tighter the plot of a story, the more likely it will come to death. A plot in fiction, he believed, is the way we localize the force of the death outside the book, play it off, contain it. The ancients staged mock battles to parallel the tempest in nature and reduce their fear of gods who warred across the sky.”n  
n

There are 24 chapters in the novel. They alternate between place (e.g., “In Dallas") and time (e.g., “22 November"), as the narrative moves inexorably towards the assassination of JFK and then, two days later, the murder of the apparent perpetrator, Lee Harvey Oswald, by nightclub owner, Jack Ruby. It's interesting that we describe one act of extreme violence as an “assassination" and the other as a (mere) “murder", when in fact both are murders. Does the identity of the victim somehow elevate the crime?

If there's one factor that subjectively differentiates assassinations and murders, it's their place in history. The murder of a politician or a prominent figure is destined to make it part of history, whereas the murder of a less public figure is more likely to obtain some temporary tabloid notoriety.

The Secret World Inside the World

Although DeLillo reveals much about the personal lives of the characters, his main concern seems to be their part in history, the personal story in the public history.

As easy as it is to make these distinctions, it’s also arguable that DeLillo’s achievement is to obliterate the boundary between public and private, which he does by outlining so much of the private in the make-up of the public event. A person remains a person when they're part of a crowd, no matter how much they might assume the characteristics of a mob mentality. It's no excuse to be part of a mob.

Several times, DeLillo writes, “There is a world inside the world.” It's this world he's interested in, no matter how personal or intimate or secret it might seem. The CIA operative, Win Everett, uses a domestic analogy:

n  
n  “When my daughter tells me a secret, her hands get very busy. She takes my arm, grabs me by the shirt collar, pulls me close, pulls me into her life. She knows how intimate secrets are. She likes to tell me things before she goes to sleep. Secrets are an exalted state, almost a dream state. They're a way of arresting motion, stopping the world so we can see ourselves in it. This is why you're here. All I had to do was provide a place and time...You're here because there's something vitalising in a secret.”n

DeLillo describes the secret in almost spiritual terms, as “the life-insight, the life-secret.” To this extent, the novel can be summed up as a descriptive abstraction.

Coherence in Some Criminal Act

It's arguable that DeLillo's interest in conspiracy or, at least, conspiracy theories/theorists is secondary. It's an extension of his interest in secrecy and mystery (or mysticism), an issue that pervades his earlier novels.

Another CIA agent, Laurence Parmenter, sings:

n  
n  “Oh we are the jolly coverts,
We lie and we spy till it hurts.”n  
n

Later, Delillo adds:

n  
n  “Spy work, undercover work, we invent a society where it's always wartime.”

“Spy planes, drone aircraft, satellites with cameras that can see from three hundred miles what you can see from a hundred feet. They see and they hear. Like ancient monks, you know, who recorded knowledge, wrote it painstakingly down. These systems collect and process. All the secret knowledge of the world.”

“Strip the man of his powerful secrets. Take his secrets and he's nothing.”

“The thing that hovers over every secret is betrayal. Sooner or later someone reaches the point where he wants to tell what he knows.”n  
n

Innocents Before the Mystery

Towards the end of the novel, DeLillo writes (in the guise of the secret CIA historian, Nicholas Branch):

n  
n  “If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.”n  
n

In contrast, he describes secrecy in the community like this:

n  
n  “After dark the stillness falls, the hour of withdrawal, houses in shadow, the street a private place, a set of mysteries. Whatever we know about our neighbours is hushed and lulled by the deep repose. It becomes a form of intimacy, jasmine-scented, that deceives us into truthfulness.”n  
n

The Whirl of History Inside Him

Even at school, the patsy assassin, Oswald, “wanted subjects and ideas of historic scope, ideas that touched his life, his true life, the whirl of time inside him.”

Concerned with social justice and the plight of the working class (traits of a Libran), the people of Russia represent to Oswald “the other world, the secret that covers one-sixth of the land surface of the earth.”

For him, men like Lenin and Trotsky “lived in isolation for long periods, lived close to death through long winters in exile or prison, feeling history in the room, waiting for the moment when it would surge through the walls, taking them with it. History was a force to these men, a presence in the room. They felt it and waited.”

The Secret of Who You Are

Oswald read Marxist books to fuel and develop his interests.

n  
n  “The books were private, like something you find and hide, some lucky piece that contains the secret of who you are. The books themselves were secret. Forbidden and hard to read. They altered the room, charged it with meaning. The drabness of his surroundings, his own shabby clothes were explained and transformed by these books. He saw himself as part of something vast and sweeping. He was the product of a sweeping history, he and his mother, locked into a process, a system of money and property that diminished their human worth every day, as if by scientific law.”n  
n  
n  “Life is hostile, he believed. The struggle is to merge your life with the greater tide of history.”

“History means to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin. He knew what Trotsky had written, that revolution leads us out of the dark night of the isolated self. We live forever in history, outside ego and id.”n  
n

He must become part of history. He doesn't want to be “a zero in the system.”

Another CIA operative, David Ferrie, says to Oswald, “I've studied patterns of coincidence. Coincidence is a science waiting to be discovered. How patterns emerge outside the bounds of cause and effect. I studied geopolitics at Baldwin-Wallace before it was called geopolitics.”

n  
n  “We don't know what to call it, so we say coincidence. It goes deeper...There's a hidden principle. Every process contains its own outcome.”n  
n

This hidden principle is more real for Oswald than other aspects of normal social life:

n  
n  “These were important things, family, money, the past, but they did not touch his real life, the inward-spinning self...”n  
n

Real life is the self that spins within history, just as much as the history that spins within the self, “the whirl of time, the true life inside him.”



The Scripted Gunman

Win Everett is the CIA agent who formulates a plot to shoot at JFK but miss him (in revenge for Kennedy's refusal to order air support for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba)(This is Delillo's fictionalised version of at least one of the JFK conspiracy theories). He builds a profile of the kind of shooter he wants to carry out the plot. Like a novelist, he would “put someone together, build an identity, a skein of persuasion and habit, ever so subtle. He wanted a man with believable quirks.” He was “devising a general shape, a life. He would script a gunman out of ordinary dog-eared paper, the contents of a wallet...pocket litter.” He would “show the secret symmetries in a nondescript life.”

Evoking James Joyce, DeLillo writes, “It lies so flat on the page, hangs so still in the lazy air, lost to syntax and other arrangement, that it resembles a kind of mind-spatter, a poetry of lives muddied and dripping in language.”

Everett would later insert Oswald into this shape, this life. In the same way, DeLillo would insert and extend the processes of fiction into the mechanism of history. Oswald would inhabit and personify the historical design.

Parmenter says to Oswald, “You're a quirk of history. You're a coincidence. They devise a plan, you fit it perfectly.”

Similarly, DeLillo suggests that the CIA made Jack Ruby “a dupe of history.”

The Deepest Levels of the Self

Ferrie elaborates with respect to Oswald:

n  
n  “Think of two parallel lines. One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It’s not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognise or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his Destiny.”n  
n

The Secret History of the Mystery

DeLillo used the fictitious CIA employee, Nicholas Branch, to write the secret history of the assassination in “his room of theories" at Langley. “He is writing a history, not a study of the ways in which people succumb to paranoia.”

n  
n  “There is enough mystery in the facts as we know them, enough of conspiracy, coincidence, loose ends, multiple interpretations. There is no need, he thinks, to invent the grand and masterful scheme, the plot that reaches flawlessly in a dozen directions.”n  
n

A Deception So Mysterious and Complex

Attached to history is a concern with the role of destiny:

n  
n  “Destiny is larger than facts or events. It is something to believe in outside the ordinary borders of the senses, with God so distant from our lives.”n  
n  
n  “The nature of things was to be elusive. Things slipped through his perceptions. He could not get a grip on the runaway world.”n

Parmenter believed that “nothing can be finally known that involves human motive and need. There is always another level, another secret, a way in which the heart breeds a deception so mysterious and complex it can only be taken for a deeper kind of truth.”

Mystery inhabits the gap or space between facts or knowledge (or words).

There is Superstition

For all our re-enactment of life's mysteries in the form of art and fiction, we still can't truly comprehend them. Instead, we institutionalise them, so that they master and tame us, and lead us into submission.

n  
n  “The real Control Apparatus is precisely what we can't see or name...It is the mystery we can't get hold of, the plot we can’t uncover.”n  
n

Likewise, Parmenter opines, “Religion just holds us back. It's an arm of the state.”

As DeLillo achieves with Oswald’s own story, it is this mystery that puts us in our place and time (in history).


SOUNDTRACK:

Stevie Wonder - "Superstition"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CFuC...

Jeff Beck - "Superstition"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHVPa...

Magazine - "Motorcade"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZvI-...

Magazine - "Motorcade" [Live on "So It Goes"]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gui2s...

Luxuria - "Redneck"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffcPW...

Bob Dylan - "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" (Live at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, 17 May, 1966)

https://youtu.be/af7ngGxEusE

"The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense
Take what you have gathered from coincidence"