I'm not a big fan of DeLillo..., he doesn't impress me.

I feel very safe when I read Delillo. I know I am going somewhere worthwhile, and I know that I can trust him to get me there smoothly and gently, that the time will pass and the journey and destination and details will all be taken care of. This novel is, by turns, deeply real and entirely metaphysical, an eloquent portrait of a small collection of individuals and individual drives and pains, and an entirely artificial means for Delillo to explore principles of art and meaning-making within the frame of larger political realities. It is a meditation on charismatic power and the function of literature in contemporary society, among other things.

I have heard that Delillo flirts with radical ideologies but rarely espouses them directly, preferring instead to allow their language and intentions to creep from the mouths of characters here and there. I was fascinated by those elements in this book - so potentially (falsely?) autobiographical at times. It is always dangerous to write about a writer, as all readers will secretly assume they see into the author him/herself. I think it is more likely, more useful, to see all characters, all situations, as products of the writer's mind, but not necessarily theses, not direct representations of belief or conviction, but merely maps of where that mind has been, seen in reflections and echoes and opposites.

Delillo's writer, Bill Gray - a character struggling with the nearly stereotypical writerly miseries of solipsism, doubt, and hatred of one's own work - has internalized the idea that writers are obsolete in the contemporary world. He decides that writers no longer hold the power to alter society's consciousness, cannot speak loudly enough or radically enough to create or catalyze change. Instead, the role of true belief and action has been taken over by the political concept of terror. Terrorists have become the only genuine voices of conviction and ideals that the world will listen to.

This idea is played out through a series of lucid and unlikely events that take on the glow and enchantment of one-act plays. Each is firmly rooted in the ground of the text, but has a meditative and inevitable quality that brings the reader in and out of the plot, rising and sinking along a fine line of abstraction and solidity. The writing is beautiful and familiar, the characters recognizable and strange, set against a backdrop of late 1980s and early 90s political iconography, and a thin running thread of Mao.

I think the premise of this book (which is repeated by the main character consistently) is incorrect. I believe novels have only on exceptional occasions, such as the work of Rousseau or Ralph Ellison for instance, played a decisive role within a literary culture in forming the total ideas of its citizens. For the most part this has always been the responsibility of political actors not limited to the artificial "terrorist" creation but comprising those who control it as well. And I couldn't help but find this whole obsession with "ideas" to be hopelessly epiphenomenal considering some of the other themes at play here.

In a sense this book is a great agonizing over the "death" of the "individual." How DeLillo's use of the crowd motif to this effect allows him to conflate things like the Korean Reunification Church and the Chinese Cultural Revolution can actually be a bit offensive to the reader's intelligence and sensibility, even racist. Perhaps he laments a present lack of a truly middle class subjectivity, seamlessly identifiable by both ruler and ruled.

The real events he draws upon are for the most part through the perspective lens of American propaganda; images similar yo the Time cover of starving Bosnians from the year after Mao II's publication come to mind. They scream of Oriental boogeymen or those in desperate need of Western liberation. Additionally, I found the Maoist group to be a pretty flimsy caricature in terms of ideology, even considering the state of Maoist parties now and at the time of writing.

That all being said there were a few gripping passages, especially the mass wedding at the beginning, and the overall narrative was interesting and compelling. The small number of characters makes for a good illustration of his ideas (Bill represents literature as a whole, Scott dedicated the preservation of its auratic qualities, Karen the new model citizen, Brita playing a commentary role similar to that of the Greek chorus.) And the interplay of divergence and concordance - the Caulfieldesque traveling comes to mind for the latger - from the source material of Salinger here makes Bill a well developed character; it is very difficult to infer what kind of novels Bill wrote exactly. That said it is a bit curious how passive the women are here on a conceptual level, huh? And I would've liked it had Karen's storyline been a little less pitiful. But maybe I'm just a very critical person. You might like it for all I know. Warhol disgusts me deeply.

Mao II centers around two events: the emergence of a reclusive author in New York and a hostage crisis in Lebanon. That both events are treated with the glibness and breakneck pace of news cycles isn't, in and of itself, reason to praise this novel, even if you consider that DeLillo does so as a commentary. What makes Mao II great, then, is that he goes all the way with commentary on the media, inviting the reader into the world of the twenty-four hour news rush, making you eagerly await every new update and feel as though you're part of something broader by following each post as it happens. If that wasn't enough, he uses the dark corners of the book as a place to put his understandable fear of what happens when the TV news gains too much influence and the people who watch are so caught up in the spectacle of events that they miss the broader picture, the driving forces behind them. Throw in a clairvoyant woman, a terrorist plot, and a brilliantly realized set piece about a mass Moonie marriage, and you've got better, sharper, smarter TV than most TV.

*3.5

Un romanzo veramente cupo, che necessita di tempo per essere digerito del tutto.
C'è tanto su cui riflettere sicuramente, ma a differenza di Rumore bianco non mi ha conquistato, anzi; ho fatto un po' fatica in alcuni parti e i personaggi non mi hanno fatto impazzire.
Forse è uno di quei libri che si apprezza di più alla seconda lettura, per ora è una mezza delusione.

Чергова велика книга від великого автора. Книга де масовіть (натовп, фанати, фанатики) виступає проти індивідуальності (лідера, месії, правителя), кохання проти відчуття влади, мистецтво проти творця та терроризму. Й на питання, а що сильніше та впливовіше - автор прямої відповіді не дає. Як приклад, терористи викрадають поета, як людину мистецтва, щоб привернути увагу, так і фотограф з часом перемикається на фотографування терористів, коли вони їй стають цікавішими за письменників.

В романі піднімається питання релігійності та те, як вона може підкоряти собі простір, будь то військовим шляхом чи шляхом класичного розповсюдження. Так як Делілло пишучи про все, завжди тримає Америку на першому плані, то якраз для усього подальшого показана вступна сцена з масовим весіллям Церкви об'єднання Мун Сон Мьона, що проходила на стадіоні "Янкі".
Весілля десятків тисяч сектантів, як показник того, що вони посягають на все американське - свободу, місце та право самоідентифікації. Бейсбол - що може бути ще більш американським, яке символічно відбирають під свої забаганки ідейні "не-американці". Місце, що відволилось розвагам та де твориться спортивна історія, тепер стає напів священим для іноземців. Як то кажуть, бейсбол - це американська релігія.
(Також робиться акцент на тому, що таксисти та торговці шмаллю - це тільки приїжджі)
В завершенні вступної частини Делілло пише
"the future belongs to crowds", але дещо пізніше показує на прикладі репортажу в новинах про давку на стадіоні Хіллсборо в Шеффілді (що також працює як підказка до часу подій) де загинуло майже 100 людей, а більше 700-от отримало поранення, що все неконтролюючий натовп - це руйнівний хаос.

Роль місця та людини й як через різних людей змінюється сприйняття самого місця. Окрім сцени з масовим весіллям на бейсбольному стадіоні, є й інші приклади. Історія зустрічі втікачки з секти а потім і від батьків (що ведуть себе не гірше за сектантство, зменшуючи важливість особистого вибору за рахунок так само нав'язаного колективного "правильного") з помічником автора Скотом - ця зустріч сприймається як порятунок, але іронія в тому, що вона потрапляє під ще один вплив й теж свідомо стає "заручницею". Одночасно, те саме місце біля вокзалу згадує й фотограф у якої є знімок заснятий Евою Арнольд. Також подальша подорож до Бейруту письменника де він планував вплинути на рішення терористів.

Можна сказати про важливу тему заміни у полоні впливового та відомого письменника на менш відомого (ше й присутній дуалізм - один "заручник" свого фанату має рятувати другого заручника у якого теж над душею стоїть хлопчик) яка не відбулась, а тому й не сталось якогось впливу через людину+місце. Білл просто вмирає, а поленого "перепродують" далі як щось непотрібне.

Сам же автор-відлюдник постає для мас своєрідним месією, а те, що він уникає розголосу, якраз працює на параною та зайві додумування серед його читачів.

Ну й наостанок, письменник проходячи шлях від заручника до мнимої свободи завершує своє існування розтворюючись в реальності від якої сам увесь час втікав.

Книга, яку обов'язково треба перечитати! Добре буде, якщо з'явиться українською

“The future belongs to crowds.”

"The secret of me is that I'm only half here..."

Andy Warhol says this & perhaps because I'm a such a nonfan of his I was a super nonfan of this.

The novel infuses you with images and DeLillo attempts to do something wholly Warholesque with his own brand of literature. More discerning minds can tell me what that something is, and/or what specific effect it produces. The novel is also about: the indifference of society personified by crowds, the act of writing as a doppelganger for terrorism, and about "messianic returns" to humanity. The ego of the writer is totally implanted here, and though super PRETENTIOUS, I guess I did fall in love with DeLillo's comment on new lit versus old: before, everything new was explored and challenged while the newer years carry less original ideas so the modern writer uses news of the apocalypse for inspiration. (Yup, true.)

DeLillo has his motifs. The limousine (from "Cosmopolis") is employed once again in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo. His affinity for using only first names for all characters is damn whimsical. Mass hysteria stands in for individual paranoia and fear and the monster never EVER shows his actual face in a work by DeLillo.

Plot? thin threads but mostly about a writer and his assistants and how he is kind of a puppet (like the heroes (?) from the aforementioned "Cosmopolis" & the professor of "White Noise") but tries to redeem his terrorist acts of creating on the page by saving another lost writer. Very strange. There must be some poetry in the fact of that one missing writer is found & nudged into reading publicly the work of a fellow displaced writer.

Here, nothing stays long enough to make sense.

Is that "Warhol"?

I’ve read this book seven or eight times, and I long ago decided it’s a modern masterpiece, but – as I read it yet again for a class – it feels fresh yet again.

If you’ve never read DeLillo and want to start, I think this is the one to begin with. It’s less ambitious than Underworld, but then so is almost everything else. I find White Noise vastly overrated; I didn’t enjoy it in its time when it was cutting edge enough to explore the early implications of image-is-everything postmodernism. Now, with that phenomenon old news, I think that book is even less interesting.

In contrast, Mao II is a book that seems to stay new, that seems to reveal new insights as we move ever deeper into the dystopic future DeLillo saw more than 25 years ago.

As I like to put it, this is probably the best post 9/11 novel I know of, even though it was written a decade before the disaster. It must have been eerie in the 1990s to read the reflections of terror that he wrapped around the image of the Twin Towers; from this vantage, it’s all the more striking. In a novel that talks about the nature of the future – as a time when crowds overwhelm the capacity of the individual and when terrorists encroach on the imaginative authority of the novelist – it’s all the more striking to see it after the fact.

There is a bit of woe-is-the-author self-pity that animates this – something I can’t help finding a bit funny as I re-read it and think of DeLillo bemoaning his own late-middle-age fate – but I forgive it. There’s so much skill, I have to write it off as a rare joke from one of our least humorous great writers.

What most compels me on this reading, though, is that we live in a moment where terrorists really are trying to wrest narrative authority from our writers. Our President’s cries of “fake news” are an unsubtle effort (one disturbingly successful) to assert that he, and he along, has the power to narrate experience to us. That’s often consisted of his self-aggrandizement and boasting – sometimes crassly harmless and sometimes dangerous for its justification of harmful policy. In this moment of election campaigning, though, his narrative has become a drumbeat of fear. Today it’s his imagining of a caravan of miserable refugees as something worthy of a military deployment. Tomorrow it will be something else.

But at bottom it will always be about stoking fear, about exaggerating a threat so that, to those inclined toward him, he can exaggerate his own power to defend.

And, of course, the fear he unleashes has the power to hurt in directions he cannot control. It’s barely a week since the massacre at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, but I can’t help seeing DeLillo’s prognostication in effect. The gunmen – and the mail bomber barely two days before – were working to make real the story our President is telling. They wanted to bring into the real world the terror born of his fantasy.

Mao II is more sophisticated than anything so simple, but its bedrock question still resonates. When the terrorists determine they will shape the consciousness of the world with their violence, what place is there for the writer? If you know the end of this, the answer is a very bleak one.

Dispassionate opinion: This book has a lot of merits.

Subjective opinion: None of them are important to me.

I can't think of the last book I read with a writer as the protagonist that appealed to me. I'm also not a big fan of clever, and this book is clever both stylistically and thematically. There are a lot of repeating motifs that, were one enthused enough, could probably be outlined and translated into a comment on modern life (circa 1990), but it all seems so contrived somehow. Repeating images, á la Warhol's Mao series. television, and crowds play a role, as well as the relationship between terrorists and novelists. There's more--lot's more, and DeLillo brings them forward in repetitious waves of circumstance and chance until the result seems like a flood of meaning where everything was disconnected before. This is great fun if you like it (and there's no reason not to, I suppose), except the meaning might be that that, looked at a certain way, the world is disintegrating into its separate parts. I'm not sure I needed to read a book to know that.

I'll give DeLillo one thing--he doesn't overtly cram this stuff down your throat. He brings his observations to the table (helping after helping of them), but it's up to you to fill your plate. Which means the effect of a book like this is going to depend always on the reader. So, if you've like DeLillo before, I'm betting there's a decent chance you'll like this one as well.

Books like this tend to make me cranky--I don't know why. Probably because I tend to feel like the authors of Delillo's brand live a rather rarefied existence, and when they try to explain the world to me, I feel like they don't really know what they're talking about. I feel like I'm reading their research rather than their experience. Most modern literature reads that way to me--perhaps its authors should be journalists rather than novelists; that's probably why I think so highly of Sebald.

In the end, the book is a lot like Warhol's work itself. I can examine it, and sometimes it seems to be saying a great deal about the modern world. On the other hand, it's just a picture of a soup can. If the meaning is that the world is ultimately meaningless, then Mao II is a pretty good vehicle for expressing that.

"Does the future belong to crowds?" appears to be the central question of Mao 2. Is there such as thing as benevolent collective conscience? What happens to individual thinking if the society creates in its spurious ways a system that makes is exceedingly easier to think alike, to feel like; the mass surrender of the individual consciousness to create a collective one far too susceptible to indoctrination and thought reform. Who raids the consciousness of the people now? Is it the novelist, the creator of inwardness, or the gunmen and bombmakers? Does the novelist no longer hold the power to change the inner workings of a culture? Does art hold the power to affect us anymore or is it now completely within the territory of news that seems so incessant and unending that one can't help but become desensitised?

Bill Gray is a reclusive American novelist, who has been contacted by an old friend in London who works in the literary industry, informing him of a poet who has been held hostage by a terrorist group in Beirut. Why him? What did he do? The obvious response seems to be: why not? That's the whole point behind a terror attack surely? The innocence and blamelessness of the victim is what drives the point of terror which is mostly about control; to handover their distinctiveness for a "greater cause"? how does one perform the thought-reform process if one is aware and insisting of not letting their individuality to be corroded by the incessant tyranny of mass-thinking? Quoting DeLillo "It is possible to change history by changing the basic nature of a people". But why Bill Gray must now come to the aid of this hostage? Because who else can be more understanding of this hostage, held in isolation not of his own accord, but Bill, who has accepted this life of glorious solitude, willingly, solely to perform the act of thinking, to place thought after thought into the world, sustaining a thought after thought in the form of writing.

Mao 2 was published in 1991, and I thought of Mr. Rushdie's Fatwa all along although Delillo might not have drawn any inspiration from this event. But he makes a splendid case for the importance of writing as a democratic tool; to be able to exercise the right to sustain an individual thought devoid of any tyranny, political or otherwise. DeLillo is, arguably, my favourite living novelist, and Mao 2, although just under 250 pages still feels very slow going because DeLillo bombards readers with more questions that are unanswerable. These are pertinent questions, now timely than ever. And the legitimacy of these questions appears alarmingly urgent. Mid-Tier DeLillo but as always, he makes me look at the world a little differently every time I read. He has had the profoundest of impact on this twenty something reader than any writer I could think of.

Mao 2 was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. And a PEN Faulkner Award Winner.

On the one hand, DeLillo would appear to care more about the sentence as an art form than anyone I can think of this side of Donald Barthelme (and let's be clear: Barthelme might have cared as much as DeLillo does, but I don’t think he could do some of the things DeLillo seems to do almost instinctively –– certainly not over the course of whole novels).

And yet, in the early stages of many DeLillo books you get preposterous crap like this:

"He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows. Please Jesus let me work. Every book is a bug-eyed race, let's face it. Must finish. Can't die yet. He struck enough keys to make a sentence and thought about going down to say goodbye to her but it would only embarrass them both. Got what she came for, didn't she? I'm a picture now, flat as birdshit on a Buick."

So I've got a theory: In order to be the Don DeLillo who doesn’t apply his hypertalent for word and phrase to this kind of overwrought silliness, he needs to be operating within a conceptual arena appropriate to his particular set of gifts (which I guess I’d provisionally describe as on the one hand a relentless impulse to impose nomenclatural order, to use language as a kind of basket in which what we know of experience can be perfectly arranged {i.e. precision}; but on the other an uncanny capacity to send those blade-tipped sentences lancing into regions of experience that are ordinarily impervious to probe, to use language as a weapon that opens up the obscure {exploration? illumination?} {as I read it, The Names is in some respects a meta-meditation on DeLillo’s own obsession with language as both tool of demystification and portal into further mystery}), otherwise he seems to slip into the kind of sonorous wheel-spinning for which less enthusiastic readers sometimes take him to task.

At his best, DeLillo is simultaneously a lyric poet and a philosopher of the postmodern age, arraying the expression of his far-ranging thought as a jewelry store’s worth of sentence-gems –– but he isn’t always at his best. My theory (and in interviews DeLillo has nearly said as much) is that he needs to write his way into knowing what he wants to write about. So a typical book can take fifty or a hundred pages to warm itself up. Sometimes –– as in, for instance, White Noise –– this kind of pre-game calisthenics can be quite entertaining: the miniature set-pieces on campus and in Gladney’s home are of course quite funny, though that book’s first part only hints at the shape the whole novel will ultimately take. Sometimes –– as in Mao II and, to a lesser extent, The Names –– the wait for DeLillo to get going is kind of a drag.

But pace a substanceless parody I once read on McSweeney’s website, DeLillo rewards the reader’s patience with genuine vision, the latter stages of every novel I’ve read (six now, and counting) ascend into series of skywalks lined with windows opening onto pure mystery, and until I come to the end of a novel unaltered, I will continue to work through his oeuvre (maybe omitting The Body Artist, which I’ve heard from a number of sources is pretty unequivocally bad) even if it means wading through the occasional “Please Jesus let me work.”