Νιώθω λίγο άσχημα που το θάβω αλλα δεν έχει κ την ανάγκη μου για να θεωρηθεί ένα πολύ ωραίο βιβλίο, απλά εγώ δεν αντέχω αυτή την καταιγιστική γραφή με σημεία στίξης κάθε 10 λέξεις (ειδικά στο δεύτερο μέρος) περιγράφοντας το παραμικρό σε κινήσεις, σκέψεις χωρίς να καταφέρνει να με κάνει να νιώσω οτιδήποτε για τους χαρακτήρες κ ιστορια.
Σα να διαβάζω το σενάριο του Mad Men.
It’s not you, it’s me

Exquisite. Prescient. An incredible debut from the best living American novelist. Like Mad Men's Don Draper, DeLillo's David Bell doesn't know who he is, and like Draper he is largely a fiction to himself and the world (though not as ostensibly as Draper). His journey of discovery tears him down while holding a mirror up to ourselves, our culture. The whole novel, for me, was a prequel to a single anecdotal story related by a secondary character (Sullivan) toward the end. What a writer DeLillo is. He is nothing shy of a genius. No detail escapes him. The story drags a bit in the second act, but I didn't care. I already know who I'm dealing with. DeLillo will reward me. I can't believe I save this for last. Read it. Read it. Read everything the man writes. And for the record, nobody writes about baseball like Don DeLillo.

Americana is a brilliant book - akin in its imagery rich rants to Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. It is experimental satire of high order; a book written in a more blessed time when a major publisher would risk printing a first novel that follows none of the predictable maxims of storytelling. It is a novel without villain unless that villain is at times the narrator, David Bell, himself. Bell in essence goes on a physical cross-country quest to remedy a growing disenchantment with his world and relationships. Using a film project as his medium, he approaches the riddle of his own life and broken marriage through third person usage of art. The meandering, often plotless seeming, portions of the novel are its greatest strength. The long imagery laden paragraphs that often stretch for pages and read more like free form poetry than action driven narrative are stunningly revelatory in capturing the changing moral landscape of America in the late 60's. It's an important novel, but unfortunately one unlikely to be read with any frequency in today's suspense/thriller James Patterson/Dan Brown world. It is one that I allowed myself time to read slowly and contemplate; and one I will likely read again.

Reading a writer’s first novel, especially one which has been more or less forgotten in larger conversations, is a lesson in craft and anti-craft. You see what they’re trying to do, where they’ve definitely succeeded, and then where it’s hard to tell. Could be pretentious nonsense or something more. This is the “soft white underbelly”—unsettling and demiurgic.

pensavo a qualcosa di epicamente meraviglioso sulla vita delle picvole cittadine americane...ibvece a metà mi è venuta l'angoscia ed ho dovuto interrompere la lettura

It tries to be Heller and Kerouac. It fails at both.

DeLillo applies his virtuoso prosody to that most dangerous, under-told story: the plight of the disillusioned yuppie. While his latent genius occasionally peaks through -- Death is Just Around the Corner, for instance, will live in my mind till my own demise, I'm sure -- it is for the most part bogged down by poor pacing, tedious Joyce allusions, and overall amateurishness. Valuable for the DeLillo completionist, because he does sketch out an early approach to his signature themes of death and the Image, but otherwise I would say skip this one. Some of my distaste I will attribute to the audiobook reader, who did not have a good grip on DeLillo's style.

Call me a bad person, but this is my favorite DeLillo. I get what he does with the hyper-flat parodically-inane dialogue in the White Noise period, and some of his jokes are genuinely funny, but I never really get into his mature work. This, however, has all the seams showing: him trying to write a kinda countercultural post-Beat novel with a dollop of his later style while parodying life in an advertising firm. Throw in some parodies of "real America" and a weird indie film and serve chilled. Lots of it doesn't work, but some of it does, and it's a messy, interesting peek behind the mask his prose later puts on.

Il giovane e ricco David Bell fugge dal benessere newyorkese per girare un antifilm; un documentario tutto inquadrature fisse, stacchi e niente dissolvenze, "un'esercitazione diametrale intesa a distruggere ogni significato".
Un viaggio nell'America periferica, l'America dei primi anni '70 tra masse in movimento, immagini da cinepresa, immensi spazi aperti e scantinati con lampadine a basso voltaggio; il set domestico e minimale, dialoghi e monologhi felliniani e surreali, lo spot pubblicitario come autentica ispirazione.
L'esordio del prolifico prestigiatore di parole Don DeLillo è uno di quei libri che vanno al di là delle intenzioni dell'autore stesso.
Un libro che resta nel perimetro intellettuale di chi lo scrive, del resto, non sempre è un grande libro; il libro che apre mille porte a fantasie ed interpretazioni spesso è qualcosa di grande.
Lo stile di DeLillo sembra plasmato per ogni speculazione letturale; una ridda di immagini, con l'uso sapiente ed acrobatico della parola, a disegnare mille traiettorie. Un Joyce popolare, con la gran differenza che il maestro irlandese fornisce percorsi in certo modo obbligati, che forgiano la cultura del lettore, spronando i più pigri a trovare le esatte connessioni con la mitologia, la filosofia, la religione etc.
DeLillo invece spalanca le sue cento finestre sul mondo moderno e le sue contraddizioni, giocando sulle luminose e invadenti immagini della TV, sulle fragilità e le durezze dell'homo americanus, sulla deprimente carica mortifera del sesso negli USA. Si fa in un certo modo - pur nella finezza del suo linguaggio - oggetto di distorsione; spande generosamente la sua potenza immaginaria, lasciando che il percorso di ricerca di David Bell penetri nei meandri della riflessione e lì subisca il suo processo di trasformazione.
Americana è il ritratto dell'America meno fotogenica, in fondo, di quella bellezza che nasconde una marcescenza interiore; la grande illusione lisergica del '68, la grande illusione dolorosa di una ricerca esteriore, carnale, intellettuale, destinata mestamente a comprare il biglietto di ritorno.

Anti-romanticization of media’s portrayal of the West and “soft white underbelly” of America. I felt a sort of connection to Bell’s desire to feel something so moving and literary, and this book was entirely depressing in that sense. Nihilistic and without a fulfilling payoff if you are looking for the character to come to some grand self-realization. In a way, I prefer this ending. Maybe there is something romantic about the unfulfilled search for meaning and belonging, but I doubt that’s supposed to be the takeaway. Anyways, I’m looking forward to reading more of DeLillo. His pop culture references and intentional prose alone make his novels worth checking out.

Parole su carta e immagini evocate, sfocate, tagliate, rubate: "Americana" è uno dei connubi più riusciti tra letteratura e cinema, forte di uno stile limpido e di un'eccellente narrazione che si esalta in alcuni passaggi di grande bellezza.
David ha scelto di diventare il regista della propria vita, di farne un grande film senza spettatori paganti, ricco di rapporti fragili e adrenalinici, incarnando alla perfezione un adorabile cliché. Nel profondo, però, resta un vuoto da colmare. DeLillo come Fellini foggia un personaggio di talento e avvenenza, eppure pieno di incertezze, in preda a una confusione artistica che diventa lo stimolo maggiore per un'opera nuova, vera, che ricerca l'autenticità proprio perché il creatore è saturo delle messinscene che hanno riempito la propria esistenza. La macchina da presa, allora, cessa di essere strumento di finzione e diventa il testimone di vite lontane e sconosciute, spesso incorrotte e meravigliosamente genuine. Il progetto di David diventa il riflesso del libro: lungo, frammentario, poco lineare, sostanzialmente senza trama e senza una direzione precisa. Ma indelebile. Un'opera sull'America e il suo sogno, sulla società postmoderna, i media, le tecnologie (già) invasive, l'Arte, sulle vite di ognuno e sulla Vita di tutti.

It's been ages since I read any DeLillo and so going back and reading his first book was an odd experience. Clearly I wasn't going to get something on the scale of Underworld which, at least in memory, is an amazing book but I was hoping for something as good as White Noise. For some reason this didn't quite get there for me. The writing style is consistently good and hits brilliant heights in places - I loved the sections on the main character's pal who does talk radio in a complete monologue in style akin to Tom Waits at his weirdest.
Where I think I struggled was never really warming to the central character, David, who seems to go through the book in a detached manner, experiencing pieces of Americana in all its wild and wackiness without ever really being connected to it. Then again maybe that's the point of the book and I'd missed it as I got embroiled in it. As he says "Experience is something I'd like to have without going through all the trouble of getting it"