Non è stata una lettura semplice, DeLillo nei suoi romanzi parla di tante cose, tocca molti argomenti e spesso le sue opere non hanno un finale concreto (cosa che trovo comunque di importanza secondaria).
Per i miei gusti però Mao II è forse un po’ troppo frammentario, le vite dei 5 personaggi le ho trovate legate da un filo troppo sottile.

Sul significato del titolo Mao II (opera di Wharol in copertina), DeLillo rispose così «Warhol è una figura che in qualche modo si distacca dalla storia, galleggia sulla superficie delle cose, diventa icona, immagine “sacra”, come Elvis Presley e Mao Tse Tung. Il titolo del mio libro Mao II vuol dire questo. Siamo fuori dalla storia e dentro la ripetizione, la fotografia, la reiterazione di massa, l’obliterazione delle distinzioni, di ogni differenza». una descrizione che dà un’idea del romanzo stesso.

Ci circondano da ogni parte, a migliaia, i genitori, spaventati della nostra intensità. É questo che li spaventa. Noi crediamo davvero. Ci educano a credere, ma quando gli mostriamo la vera fede chiamano lo psichiatra e la polizia. Noi sappiamo chi è Dio, questo ci rende pazzi di fronte al mondo.

C’è un curioso nodo che lega romanzieri e terroristi. In Occidente noi scrittori diventiamo effigi famose mentre i nostri libri perdono il potere di formare e di influenzare. Anni fa credevo ancora che fosse possibile per un romanziere alterare la vita interiore della cultura. Adesso si sono impadroniti di quel territorio i fabbricanti di bombe e i terroristi. Ormai fanno delle vere e proprie incursioni nella coscienza umana. Era quanto solevano fare gli scrittori prima di essere mercificati. Stiamo cedendo il passo al terrore, ai notiziari del terrore, a registratori e telecamere, alle radio, alle bombe nascoste nelle radio. Le notizie dei disastri sono l’unica narrativa di cui la gente ha bisogno. Più sono cupe le notizie, più è grandiosa la narrativa.

Sappiamo tutti che la cosa che temiamo in segreto non è affatto un segreto ma quella cosa eterna e palese che predice il proprio ripresentarsi.

Se muori per un popolo e per una nazione la tua morte è massiccia e intensa. Se muori per gli oppressori, se muori lavorando per gli sfruttatori e i manipolatori, se muori egoista e vuoto voli via come una piuma del più piccolo degli uccelli.

Αλλο ενα απολαυστικο μυθιστορημα του Ντελιλο. Πραγματικα σοκαριστικο το ποσο to the point ειναι οσον αφορα στις εξελιξεις της κοινωνιας μας(γραφτηκε το 1991). Θιγει λιγο πολυ ολα τα θεματα που εμφανιζονται σε ολα τα μυθιστορηματα του συγγραφεα που εχω διαβασει, με κυριοτερο την τρομολαγνια που επικρατει και την ελειψη κριτικης σκεψης απο τον καθημερινο ανθρωπο .τα πληθη χειραγωγουνται πια απο ψευδο-ηγετες που τους καθοριζουν τη ζωη με οπλο τον τρομο, ενω τα "μεγαλα μυαλα" της κοινωνιας που δινουν τροφη για σκεψη αναγκαζονται πια να ζουν σε απομονωση ή να υποβαλλονται σε ακομη χειροτερη μοιρα. Μου αρεσε πολυ αν και δεν το θεωρω το καλυτερο εργο του Ντελιλο, ομως για αλλη μια φορα γινεται σαφες ποσο ιδιοφυης ειναι .
3.5 αστερια

Sotto gli occhi di tutti

“Da qualche tempo ormai ho l'impressione che i romanzieri e i terroristi stiano giocando una partita che si conclude zero a zero. Quello che guadagnano i terroristi, lo perdono i romanzieri. Il potere dei terroristi di influenzare la coscienza di massa è la misura del nostro declino in quanto forgiatori della sensibilità e del pensiero. Il pericolo che essi rappresentano è pari alla nostra incapacità di essere pericolosi. […] Beckett è l'ultimo scrittore che abbia forgiato il nostro modo di pensare e di vedere. Dopo di lui, le opere principali comportano esplosioni a mezz'aria e crolli di edifici. Questa è la nuova narrativa tragica. […] Il loro modo di vivere nell'ombra, di vivere volontariamente con la morte. Il loro modo di odiare molte delle cose che odiate anche voi. La disciplina e l'astuzia. La coerenza delle loro vite. Il loro modo di provocare l'ammirazione, se la provocano. In società ridotte allo sperpero e alla sovrabbondanza, il terrore è l'unica azione significativa. C'è troppo di tutto, ci sono più cose e messaggi e significati di quanti ne possiamo usare in diecimila vite. Inerzia e isteria. E' possibile la storia? C'è qualche persona seria? Chi dobbiamo prendere sul serio? Solo il credente letale, la persona che uccide e muore per la fede. Tutto il resto viene assorbito. L'artista viene assorbito. Il pazzo per strada viene assorbito, trasformato e incorporato. Gli dài un dollaro, lo metti in uno spot televisivo. Solo il terrorista resta fuori. La cultura non ha ancora trovato il modo di assimilarlo. E' sconcertante quando uccidono l'innocente. Ma questo è precisamente il linguaggio per essere notati, l'unico linguaggio che l'Occidente comprenda. […] E' il romanziere che capisce la vita segreta, la rabbia che cova sotto ogni oscurità e negligenza. Voi siete dei mezzi assassini, quasi tutti voi”.

Don De Lillo è uno scrittore emozionale e intermittente; ma con una coscienza razionale inattaccabile. Non si accontenta mai di raggiungere narratività e stile. E' interessato a indagare i grandi temi umani: volontà, memoria, coscienza, libero arbitrio (capacità di distinguere tra bene e male, empatia, intelligenza emotiva). Mi pare che questo pensiero critico di una studiosa del NY Times sia ben rappresentativo del lavoro di De Lillo del 1991, con la sua prosa concettuale e performativa: “Ma lo scrittore è ancora pericoloso per il suo impegno nell'estendere la coscienza. Un romanziere crea un personaggio per rivelare qualcosa di ignoto, per aumentare il flusso di senso nel mondo. E' il sistema della letteratura di rispondere al potere e allontanare la paura, modulando nuove frequenze per la consapevolezza e le possibilità umane”. Due immagini sono state all’origine di Mao II, con le sue storie molteplici, intrecciate: il ritratto rubato di Salinger, apparso sul New York Post; e la fotografia che ritraeva il matrimonio collettivo della setta messianica e apocalittica del reverendo Moon. Questo libro, ambientato tra New York e Beirut, riesce in qualcosa di molto difficile: esprimere un discorso complesso e coinvolgente sul senso del dolore collettivo, sulla distruttività agita dalle masse, sulla specie umana contenitore della “nostra parte lunare che sogna un suolo devastato”. Riflette sui tentativi artistici e politici di eliminare il sé attraverso la sua riproduzione iconica, di creare un immaginario culturale come residuo antropologico di esperienza, un fossile vitale che si prolunghi oltre la mortalità. Percepisce l'essenza del male, come altri grandi scrittori novecenteschi hanno fatto: il male non ha a che fare tanto con oscure pulsioni di morte, ma con la volontà di sopravvivere a oltranza, con la insensata negazione della mortalità. Questo racconto è focalizzato sul nostro essere massa: seguaci, persone in lutto, spettatori, senzatetto, dimostranti, voci; collettività transitorie ferite e orgogliose, minacciate o pericolose, dimenticate o illuminate. Ritratte e rappresentate in fotografie che catturano il rischio, il corpo, la strada, l'istante, la nullità, il confine. Mao, Khomeini, il reverendo Moon, Tien an men, la folla in uno stadio, intrappolata o esaltata, lo scrittore recluso e disperato, l'ostaggio. De Lillo segnala così il doppio legame che si crea nell'esporre soggetti e oggetti, agenti e partecipanti, emittenti e destinatari alla violenza del discorso mass-mediatico. Amore e morte si sposano, inizio e fine si confondono, e caos e ragione non sono più in conflitto, ma prigionieri del medesimo impulso, dello stesso orrore, di un programma fuori controllo. Lo scrittore Bill Gray non riesce a resistere alla fermezza del valore conoscitivo, non può arretrare di fronte alla razionalità di mettersi in gioco, e in questo modo si condanna ad una fine biologica inaccessibile e silenziosa. Vive la solitudine come ossessione e non vuole più esporsi al giudizio di sé come restituito dagli altri. Quando crede che il mondo sia suo, ecco che questo lo schiaccia, soffoca il suo grido democratico. La sua vita sprofonda in se stessa tornando allo smarrimento del primo dolore. Tra resoconti, profezie e avvertimenti, non volendo provare ciò che prova la gente, realizza in un destino di estinzione la sua cosmologia del dolore.

"Questo romanzo è un gioiello. DeLillo ci conduce in un viaggio sconvolgente intorno alle versioni ufficiali della nostra storia quotidiana, a tutte quelle facili rassicurazioni su chi è chi. E lo fa con un occhio tanto attento e una voce cosí espressiva e diretta da non somigliare a nessun'altra". Thomas Pynchon

This one seems to get overlooked a bit, but for me, outside of Libra & Underworld, it's his third best novel having now read all but two - Ratner's Star & The Silence.

I never thought I'd consider a DeLillo novel boring. The prose is always too ominous and haunting, the image too starkly gorgeous, for me to be anything other than enraptured. Some of his books are slapdash (Falling Man, ahem) but there are always points of light, and at his best, DeLillo is the master writer of the modern American condition. Mao II, though... is... bad. I was bored, again and again. There were left-wing terrorist cells that were as boring as the middle-aged middle writer as the boring novel's core. As boring as an Andy Warhol Mao painting (why that there's my HOT TAKE).

This book was an excellent, prophetic look (written in 1991, but an apt lens in every year that has preceded it): "The future belongs to crowds." A recluse writer struggling to finish a never-ending novel, a kidnapped poet, a brainwashed ex-cult darling, and a group of terrorists come together in this explosive look at the individual vs. the mass mind, how art impacts each, and how media has perhaps made the individual disappear in mass thought. The pace of the second half is something unique to DeLillo and his style of literary fiction--it reads like commercial fiction, but the themes aren't lost.

1] A and B are having a conversation. A talks x, but B wants y. Over the time, A switches to y, and B responds to x. Then they talk about z.

2] Prologues good enough to collect together in a separate book . Has to do a lot with the theme, and less to plot. Starts with a crowd, mass-marriage here, baseball match in UW, mass arrival of college crowd in WN, and not so crowded one in Point Omega.

3] America bad, but reaaally good.

4] Sexy prose

Mao II is General DeLillo (1 + 2 + 3 + 4) + writers block and bombs.

About 15 years ago I bounced badly off Underworld, supposedly De Lillo's magnum opus but seeing the synopsis of this one decided to give him another crack.

An ultra reclusive author Bill Gray, his fanatically devoted PA, live in fan Scott, ex Moonie cult member Karen and obsessive photographer Brita are the main characters in this very relevant novel that examines terrorism, the subjection of the individual to the lure of mass movements and the threat to novels and novelists themselves.

" Mao said 'Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people' and this is what you fear, that history is passing into the hands of the crowd."

Damn right sir.

I found it took me a bit of time to adjust to De Lillo's style after reading a couple of more modernist books but once I did I found his characterization convincing and the plot compelling. Some have criticised the ending of the book but I found it both appropriate.and powerful.

The star of this book is for me " Bill Gray" as he became. Weighed down by early success, frightened of future failure and in many ways doomed from the outset.

" Bill felt joined to the past, to some bloodline of intimate and renewable pain"

I will soon take on "White Noise" , if it is as good as Mao II I will be a happy boy.

کاور فارسی مائوی دوم را پیدا نکردم
کتاب مائوی دوم را خواندم. رمان پست مدرنی است. عکاسی به نویسنده ای که همیشه دور از دسترس همه بوده است، دسترسی پیدا می کند. او از آن انزوا بیرون می آید. با اتفاقات سیاسی و تروریستی روبرو می شود. منجمله به اتفاقات ایران و تصاویر مراسم رحلت امام خمینی و منطقه خاورمیانه. همیشه با احترام و ترس از مائو. داستان پست مدرنی به نظر می رسد. کمی سخت بود خواندنش. مهم این است که کتاب بخوانیم و دیگران را در دوران وسوسه اسمارت فون ها به کتاب خوانی تشویق کنیم. نویسنده آن دان دلیلو و مترجمش مجتبی ویسی وناشرش نشر بوتیمار است.

Much to my disappointment, I found this mostly a tepid underwhelming experience, especially after being captured and swept away by Underworld. To me, this seems to be a treatise on the importance of author and the novel. But the aggrandized protagonist came across as no more than a writer specializing in run-on sentences whom infused his work with an inflated sense of importance.

Of course I wouldn't have finished it if there was nothing redeeming. I love Delillo's understated yet powerful prose; he's adept at creating passages that stay with the reader without coming across as hyperbolic. (True, he treats the mundane with an elevated sense of drama but it's mostly effective and lacks gimmickry.) Delillo is that special type of writer that reveals the readers' own inner secrets, but the heavy handed approach in Mao II fell flat for me.

Consuming Images

Don Delillo’s 1991 novel (his 10th) isn't just about the individual versus the crowd, but about the written word against the picture or the image.

Fiction is the preserve of the writer, while television (and now social media) is the vehicle of the mass media. Early in the novel, DeLillo’s character, Karen, observes:

“It was interesting how you could make up the news as you went along by sticking to picture only.” (32)

We've got used to consuming images, whether with or without words. Words are the product of thinking, and require thinking in order to consume and absorb them. For DeLillo's characters, images are for the unthinking masses, who will ingest any image force-fed to them by the media. Images are for the undiscriminating. After a while, "they are reduced to blur and glut":

“The streets run with images. They cover walls and clothing - pictures of martyrs, clerics, fighting men, holidays in Tahiti.” (229)

“In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too.” (37)

“The more banal, the more commonplace, the more predictable, the triter, the staler, the dumber, the better.” (111)

“Let's destroy the mind that makes words and sentences.” (161)

The writer, the individual, the individual writer, is, apparently, the enemy of ordinary people. The masses have him (or her) in their sights. (S)he is a threatened species.

Remoteness from the Masses, Retreat from the Crowd

The proper role of the writer, or at least DeLillo's author Bill Gray, is to remain remote from the masses and the mass media. The pain of writing enhances the separation of the writer from the masses:

“I have my own cosmology of pain. Leave me alone with it.” (45)

“I exaggerate the pain of writing, the pain of solitude, the failure, the rage, the confusion, the helplessness, the fear, the humiliation.” (37)

“Only writing could soak up his loneliness and pain. Written words could tell him who he was.” (204)

“Everything we do that isn't directly centred on work revolves around concealment, seclusion, ways of evasion.” (45)

Bill Gray chooses loneliness and remoteness from other people. Withdrawal. Seclusion. Evasion. Escape. Recoil. Flight. Refuge. Retreat from the crowd. "Silence, exile and cunning."



Terrorist News and Raids on Human Consciousness

Writers are no longer as influential on people as they once might have been (at least in Bill's opinion):

“Do you know why I believe in the novel? It's a democratic shout...The spray of talent, the spray of ideas.” (159)

“Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen [i.e., terrorists] have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness...Because we're giving way to terror, to news of terror, to tape recorders and cameras, to radios, to bombs stashed in radios. News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative.” (41-42)

“What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous.”

“Who do we take seriously? Only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith...Only the terrorist stands outside. The culture hasn't figured out how to assimilate him. It's confusing when they kill the innocent. But this is precisely the language of being noticed, the only language the West understands.” (157)

“The novelists feed our search for meaning. Quoting Bill. It was a great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don't need the novel. Quoting Bill. We don't even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings.” (72)

“A writer creates a character as a way to reveal consciousness, increase the flow of meaning. This is how we reply to power and beat back our fear. By extending the pitch of consciousness and human possibility.” (200)

Writers can no longer influence those for whom words are meaningless or secondary.

Delirious Crowds and Lethal Believers

Like the cult members (in the (fictional) mass wedding in Yankee Stadium in the prologue - It was actually modelled on a wedding in Seoul), the masses end up “programmed, brainwashed, indoctrinated" by the mass media.

"The future belongs to crowds." (16)

“This is what you fear, that history is passing into the hands of the crowd.” (162)

“Delirious crowds swirling beneath enormous photographs of holy men.” (174)

Ironically, Delillo's descriptions of the crowd scenes, some juxtaposed with more private scenes (the mass wedding, the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini, and the Beiruti wedding that ends the novel), are beautully worded portrayals of scenes that could perhaps have been adequately captured by the images themselves (alone).

Into the Glow

Reality has been superseded by the artifice of the media:

“Nature has given way to aura...All the material in every life is channelled into the glow.” (44)

The writer is more concerned with the truth than the glow (of televisi9n):

“On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language...There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.” (48)

Bill Gray doubts whether anybody values this swing or integrity or moral force anymore.

Andy Warhol's Fused Images

Paradoxically, the writer's will to live combats the tendency of all plots to move deathwards, which direction is shared by terrorism.

It's no coincidence that, after 23 years, Bill Gray can't finish (or hasn’t finished) his last novel. To finish it would be a premonition of his own death.

In the first chapter, Scott (Bill's personal assistant) visits an exhibition of Andy Warhol silkscreen prints, where he views a work called “Crowd" and several editions of “Mao", a print of one of which (“Mao II”) he buys for Karen, an ex-Moonie who attended the mass wedding, with whom he lives in Bill's home. It's significant within the structure of the novel that people know Mao Zedong, more as a result of consuming images of him than by ever having seen him in person (or even on TV) or in context, and thought about what he and his work means/signifies.

At another Warhol exhibition, the portrait photographer, Brita Nilsson (who has been engaged to photograph Bill for posterity, i.e., after his death), detected in Warhol's work “a maximum statement about the dissolvability of the artist and the exaltation of the public figure, about how it's possible to fuse images.” (134) Warhol’s silk screen on canvas painting of Mikhail Gorbachev was “reprocessed through painted chains of being, peering out over the crowd from a pair of burnished Russian eyes.” (135)

Trudging, Totally Calm in the Long Lens

The individual has become secondary to the crowd, the mass(es), the swarm, the flock, the following. Scott says:

“Crowds...People trudging along wide streets, pushing carts or riding bikes, crowd after crowd in the long lens of the camera so they seem even closer together than they really are, totally jam packed, and I think of how they merge with the future, how the future makes room for the nonachiever, the nonaggressor, the trudged, the nonindividual. Totally calm in the long lens, crowd on top of crowd, pedalling, trudging, faceless, sort of surviving nicely.” (70)

“Bill doesn't understand how people need to blend in, lose themselves in something larger. The point of mass marriage is to show that we have to survive as a community instead of individuals trying to master every complex force. Mass interracial marriage.” (89)

Bill doesn't want to blend in, he wants to stand out, on the outside, even if he still wants to have influence.


SOUNDTRACK:

The Beatles - "Revolution"

https://youtu.be/BGLGzRXY5Bw

"But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao
You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow."

Ayatollah Khomeini Funeral

https://youtu.be/2k7mpnPJWDo

The hardest thing about reading a Don Delillo novel is everything is quotable, every sentence he writes is a sentence only Don Delillo could've written, anyway you look at it. This is a short book, shouldn't take one more than a few days, but it's such a rich, deeply profound book that needs to be read slowly, with much concentration lest you miss out on all the cool stuff. Some of it isn't accessible, not right away, but when you mull over it, you do see it make sense. See it define your life somehow, coz that's what a Don Delillo novel does, it defines you, at least at some existential level. It's also a sad sad book, that will break your heart and leave you restless with longing, especially with what happens to all those cool Characters, but it's not all despairing because you can see it coming, I mean, the writer, Bill Gray is like Rorschach and his king-size death wish in Alan Moore's Watchmen. His struggle for total alienation is futile, but so enjoyable to follow him all through his metaphysical blundering.

I know I said a lot of the sentences are very quotable, but here are some of my favourite, at least the ones that resonate--

"We're all drawn to the idea of remoteness. A hard-to-reach place is necessarily beautiful. [...] And a person who becomes inaccessible has a grace and a wholeness the rest of us envy."

"The narrower the boundaries of my life, the more I exaggerate myself."

"The language of my books has shaped me as a man."

"There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live."

"The deeper I become entangled in the process of getting a sentence right in its syllables and rhythms, the more I learn about myself."

"This book and these years have worn me down."

"Does writing come out of bitterness and rage or does it produce bitterness and rage?
Or both?"

"Time became peculiar, the original thing that is always there. It seeped into his fever and delirium, into the question of who he was."

"Through out history it's the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark."

"Survival means you lean how to narrow the space you take up for fear of arousing antagonistic interest and it also means you hide what you own inside something else so that you may seem to possess one chief thing when it is really many things bundled and tied and placed inside each other, a secret universe of things, unwhisperable, plastic bags inside plastic bags, and the woman is somewhere in there too, bagged with her possessions."

"What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous. [...] And the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art."

"The only way to be in the world was to write himself there. His thoughts and words were dying. Let him write ten words and he would come into being once again."

"Is there time for a final thought?"