Don DeLillo is one of my all time favourite novelists and I have deliberately not rushed to read all of his novels so that I can always have some lurking there waiting for when I feel that certain itch to immerse myself in his unique narrative style. DeLillo wrote two of the great post-modernist novels, one could even call them guidebooks to post-modernist thought - White Noise (1985) and Underworld (1997). Running Dog does not scale the lofty heights of those two novels, but it does deliver enough intellectual DeLillo thrills to illicit a certain literary smug satisfaction. Running Dog features a typical DeLillo premise: various shady factions maneuvering to get their hands on a film that purports to contain footage of Nazi's getting up to carnal naughtiness in the last days in Hitler's bunker as the Soviets creep ever closer. DeLillo pulls the reader into this circle of lust over the film, making you want to see and know just as much as the next nefarious 'businessman'.

Typically for a DeLillo novel Running Dog has an ensemble cast of characters, rather than one main protagonist leading the way. This is certainly not a weakness due to DeLillo's ability to bring alive the psychological core of a character in a just a few lines - "He appeared younger than twenty-two, looking a little like a teenager with a nervous disability. High forehead, prominent cheekbones, large teeth. He seemed intense, over-committed to something, his voice keening out of a lean bony face..." Coupled with DeLillo's dialogue, which is stripped down, yet bursting with a deeper complexity, irony and a rhetorical self awareness, the novel can't help but to delight. I burst out laughing a number of times, including after the very last line, which is a difficult thing for a novelist to achieve. Even more effective is the realisation that if the premise of the existence of an amateur Nazi porn film wasn't disturbing enough, the reality of what actually is on the film has its own subtly disturbing implications. I thoroughly enjoyed Running Dog at a time when I really needed something to take me away from our current reality, which, as we all know, has its own disturbing implications. I have no doubt that DeLillo will be one of those authors who pen a post-plague novel in the tradition of many great novelists.

I have an ongoing project where I am re-reading all of Don Delillo's books in publication order. There's no schedule attached to this project: I read the next book when the mood takes me. Running Dog, Delillo's sixth novel first published in 1978, is a slight exception to this because this was not actually a re-read: this is the only Delillo book that I have never read before (this true at the time of writing, August 2020, although I understand there is a new book coming soon).

As with many Delillo books, this is not a simple book to read. It centres around the rumour of a movie. If the rumours are true, the movie was made in 1945 in the Führerbunker and shows an orgy in progress with the Führer himself involved. Of course, in this review, I am not going to tell you whether the film actually exists or whether we get to find out what its contents are. You will have to read the book for yourself to find that out. There are several possible combinations of existing and contents and it's not clear until right towards the end which will be the one that forms part of this book.

Several people are interested in acquiring this movie. Or in acting as an agent on behalf of someone else who wants to acquire the movie. Instead of taking us on a journey in a standard linear plot, Delillo presents us with a whole series of episodes seen from the perspectives of different players in this "game". This becomes quite disorienting (deliberately, I think). At one point, a character is unsure whether the person he is looking at through a dirty window is the person he thinks it is and this could fairly well be said to describe the reader's experience through the book. Who is watching who? Who is working for who? Who is pursuing who?

It's confusing, yes, but it is also fun to read. There are moments when the penny drops and you realise what you are reading and what it is describing. I actually enjoyed trying to work out how the different characters related (it’s not that tricky in the cold light of day). In some ways, some of the writing foreshadows what Delillo did in his next novel, The Names (I am ignoring Amazons which was written under a pseudonym). I have read The Names a couple of times and will read it again soon. The second half of that novel is very difficult to make sense of and there are several passages here that tend in that direction. Running Dog has the clearest expression so far of the "Delillo dialogue" (no one writes dialogue like Delillo writes dialogue). At Kirkus Reviews, we read

If all this sounds confusing, you should know that DeLillo makes little effort to facilitate comprehension as he mixes and matches, in cinematic slow motion, imagined and realistic debasements of a society gone past all limits.

You also have to add Vietnam into the mix. The dark shadow of Vietnam lies across this novel which is not surprising given its original release date.

I have to confess that I don’t always understand Delillo. I understand him at the sentence level and, strangely, at the book level when I finish a book and look back on it. But there are some intermediate levels between sentences and books at which he can be quite hard to follow. I find it best to cling on for the ride and see where you end up.

A few of my favourite quotes:

A woman with a past. Isn't that what makes us interesting? For men, it's lack of a recorded past that proves so fascinating. Women, no. It's the shadows behind us that do the trick.

People had bumper stickers. AMERICA—LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT. So this friend, it's clear as day, this well-meaning friend gave me a sticker of my very own, which I thought was so devilishly clever I immediately proceeded to affix it to the bumper of my little Swedish car. VIETNAM—LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT.

"I'm glad to see you, Slim. Were you afraid I wouldn't think you'd show up?"
"We'll have to go through that question point by point some time."
"It's a tricky one."

This book is all over the place. It doesn’t have the same kind of depth that other Don DeLillo books I’ve enjoyed have had, but it’s humorous and has just enough of that paranoid mystery to be enjoyable.

No more than thirty degrees now, dropping. Dry cold. A pure state. An elating state of cold. Not weather. It wasn't weather so much as memory. A category of being. The temperature kept dropping but this didn't signify change. It signified a concentration of the faculty of recall. A steadiness of image. No stray light.

It was snowing in the mountains. All behind him now. Cities, buildings, people, systems. All the relationships and links. The plan, the execution, the sequel. He could forget that now. He'd traveled the event. He'd come all the way down the straight white line.

[...]

All that incoherence. Selection, election, option, alternative. All behind him now. Codes and formats. Courses of action. Values, bias, predilection.

Choice is a subtle form of disease.

Simply put, this was a boring read. This book simply gave me nothing to care about. The recipe for this dull mess included overly odd plot lines, a jumpy narrative that made little tangible sense, and a rotating cast of sparsely developed characters. I’m assuming this was meant to be a thriller but it was never engaging enough to create any real suspense. This seemed more like a practice creative writing piece that was accidentally published.

Looking down at Krok's comment (comment number 1 and the only comment as I write these words), I have to agree. Maybe not with the ultimate ranking of DeLillo novels, but this is a remarkably under-appreciated work.

I doubt anyone has been paying attention, but I've been on a very slow and only periodically remembered task to read all of the DeLillo novels leading up to Underworld with the rough theory that Infinite Jest is a response or homage or a something to the pre-Underworld DeLillo. I meant to read them in order, but I realized I don't own Players yet, and the most recent troll on Karen's review of Underworld, made me want to dive back in to my mini-mission and I guess it's ok to skip a book, as long as I go back to it before I read Underworld.

DFW updates from this book? Some similar themes, but nothing really new. The film that everyone is after feels like The Entertainment in the way people are reacting. Besides some characters feeling sort of similar to ones that DFW populates Infinite Jest with there wasn't anything as overt here as in Great Jones Street or End Zone (you can find my reviews for these in my shelves, I'm too lazy to link to them even though this is probably costing me a few votes). I've been a lazy and distracted reader lately so I might have missed things.

The book? It's quite good. After Ratner's Star, which made me want to stab my eyes out with a rusty screwdriver rather than continue reading the book, this was great. I have some complaints, it feels a little underdeveloped. I think it's good as it is, but I feel like he could have done more with the characters, he has so many really good characters here but they are given a really limited amount of space to live in. This should have been his first BIG book, he had the story and the characters were more than just a series of quirky shadows spouting stylized dialogue like too many of the ones that populated RS. Maybe that is IJ's debt to this book, DFW gave the story line of the 'film' room to develop, I'm sort of grasping for straws here and I just thought of that, so I'm not sure if I stand behind it.

Ignoring RS and not having read Players, I'm still going to say that DeLillo's early / 1970's work is great. Jimmy Cline, etc. made a comment on Karen's above mentioned review (he's not the troll), he said, "I'm just conjecturing here, but it seems that his work does not age well at all, and that when his pomo navel-gazing gets at all over the top, the critics just pounce on him like rabid dogs. This is about Underworld, so I can't weigh in on that book, but I would say that DeLillo's early work is going to age quite well, he plays with some post-modern tricks in these early books, but he is more interested, it seems, in creating his own overly stylized version of America and the author, DeLillo, never appears to be making any appearances. Compared to the work of say John Barth, which mostly has aged as well as some hideous Park Avenue woman with too many face lifts and botox injections, there is still a freshness to the early (non RS(why is this one DeLillo's favorite early novel? Why?!?!) work. These early novels are quite good, maybe not developed as fully as they could be, maybe they could be longer and the themes delved into a bit deeper, the characters given some more room to stretch their legs and all of that, but they are still (in my not-so-humble opinion) some of the highlights of that dreary decade known as the 70's when authors appeared in book jackets wearing awful turtlenecks and people had key-parties and swinger orgies in between group readings of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Now on to the 1980's with DeLillo.

Moll was suspicious of quests. At the bottom of most long and obsessive searches, in her view, was some vital deficiency on the part of the individual in pursuit, a meagerness of spirit.

She sat in the dark, listening to Odell fiddle with the projector.

Even more depressing than the nature of a given quest was the likely result. Whether people searched for an object of some kind, or inner occasion, or answer, or state of being, it was almost always disappointing. Nothing but themselves. Of course there were those who believed the search itself was all that mattered. The search itself is the reward.

I had no idea Don DeLillo wrote a novel meant to be turned into a Coen brothers movie. There's a good deal of snarky, dark and black humor. The plot revolves around a whole number of people trying to get a hold of an old film reel that is purported to be of a sex orgy in the bunker in the last days of the third Reich. Maybe even Hitler's in it.

Having read a number of DeLillo's work there's a lot of the same kind of stuff. There's the usual DeLillean talk that all seems to revolve around it's own strangeness, lots of various phrases that buzz through the character's heads, some of it disconnected entirely from the conversation they're having. I don't know whether I like this aspect of DeLillo or not. It's probably his most unique characteristic in all of his writing but a lot of it tends to be unbelievable. There's a desert scene present as well as in Point Omega and there's a going back into one's past as in Part II of Americana.

If you've ever seen Burn After Reading by the Coens this seems to have a lot of the same goofiness about it yet it retains very serious characters all very obsessed with getting this film. Something I didn't expected to happen was the actual revelation of what was on the film. But we find out in a scene by scene basis what all the fuss is about.

The plot seems to spiral into a strange unusual reality that is not so strange for DeLillo but would be for any new readers to his work.

Il sesto romanzo di DeLillo, l’ultimo degli anni Settanta, emula un thriller di spionaggio. Ruota attorno a una vecchia pellicola girata nel bunker sotto la Cancelleria del Reich nell’aprile del 1945. Dovrebbe esserci Hitler, non più in gran forma, e qualcosa di pornografico. L’autenticità è dubbia, nessuno l’ha mai vista, ma molti vogliono possederla.
Ha salti di scena continui e non sempre fluidissimi. I personaggi sono solo abbozzati e i fili della trama non si uniscono mai del tutto. La scrittura è del tutto in linea con le aspettative, con dialoghi in buona parte ottimi. Temi ricorrenti: immagine, sguardo, potere. Finale con dissolvenza verso il West americano e il confine messicano, in una sorta di fuga e resa dei conti.
Copertina italiana tremenda. Fuori catalogo probabilmente da sempre.
Lo metterei tra i miei preferiti? No. Resta comunque sottovalutato.
Running Dog è il nome di una piccola rivista underground.

[74/100]

Frasario minimo/

Moll Robbins si aggirò un po’ incerta fra tutti quegli oggetti, sfiorando il coperchio di una teiera di porcellana (imperatore cinese con concubina, a prima vista), scrutando una moneta sotto vetro (greca, effusioni fra maschi).
– Hanno un’aria innocente, non trova?
– Non si muovono, – disse Lightborne.
– Non si muovono?
– Movimento, azione, fotogrammi al secondo. Questa è l’epoca in cui viviamo, nel bene e nel male. Qui dentro è tutto un po’ inespressivo. Statico. Nient’altro che massa e peso.
– Pura gravità.
– Certo, nulla è pienamente erotico a meno che non abbia la capacità di muoversi. Una donna che accavalla le gambe fa impazzire gli uomini. Si muove, mi spiego? Gesto, azione, spostamento. Oggi, perché l’erotismo sia totale, c’è bisogno di tutto questo.
– Qualcosa del genere, credo.

Chi non fa quel tragitto ogni giorno tende ad ammutolire, quando il treno passa per Harlem. Il silenzio non dipende tanto dallo shock o dalla tristezza, quanto dal puro fascino di quel luogo. Il piacere delle rovine. La gioia degli occhi che scoprono vedute istruttive. È così interessante da guardare, così torpidamente pittoresco, soprattutto se visto da questa distanza, e da un mezzo in movimento.

L’importante non era sapere se l’avesse colpito o meno. Questo non lo riguardava. Era un dettaglio tecnico.

Certe cose diventavano impossibili, quando si smetteva di sparare.

– Sta diventando un western, – disse.
– E prima cos’era?

Da lontano vide la forma d’onda, il profilo scarno delle Chisos Mountains, di un pallido color ardesia, distese su una superficie così piana che poteva essere solo una luce arbitraria, uno stato d’animo o un’invenzione.

– Cos’hai comprato?
– Un bolo da guerriglia filippino.
– E la giungla dov’è?
– L’ho comprato per il nome.
– Se non te l’hanno venduto insieme a una giungla, ti hanno truffato.
– Mi piace il nome, – disse Selvy al vecchio. – È romantico.

Forte sensazione di assistere allo svolgersi di un dramma. Un ricordo, un film. Flusso di fantasticherie adolescenziali. Aveva immaginato quella situazione centinaia di volte, anche se mai fino in fondo.

La terra era una tavolozza levigata. Il potere della tempesta di lucidare e rinnovare, pensò, non era mai stato così evidente. Il cielo era perfetto. Le cose esistevano. Il giorno era commisurato alle pure gradazioni dell’essere e del sentire.

All worth it for the section with the pimp-mobile.

Moll Robbins is a journalist for Running Dog who is in a rut. Suddenly, she gets the wind of a new but very exciting storys which mainly concerns a very small piece of celluloid which turns out to be a pornographic film which is lead to believe that it was filmed in a bunker during thr climactic days of Berlin's fall and it turns out it is starring Hitler. On the other side, another individual claims to have complete access to this very unique pieces of Naziana which makes a lot more indivudual wanting it. Sadly for Moll, within the black-market world of erotica, the currency are blackmail, torture, corruption and no type of price is too high.

This is the first novel i've read that is written by Don Delillo and my main reason for given it three out of five stars is mainly because going into the novel was hard to get into within the dialogue of the novel which had made me think this novel could have been written by the playwriter Harold Pinter (1930 - 2008). Moving on to the positive aspects, I hope to read more of Don DeLillo works including White Noise and Underworld.

Other positive aspects which are more to do with the writing is that as the paranoia builds in the novel and the antagonist loseing sights of their own motives, souls and even the object itself, Don DeLillo slowly reveals to the reader the terrible truth that is behind our own greed which i'm not going to give away because that whould be a spoiler which I am not going to do for anyone who would want to read this novel.

The following review has been copied from http://behnamriahi.tumblr.com

Running Dog, written by Don DeLillo and published by Alfred A. Knopf, is a third-person novel following several points-of-view, most notably journalist Moll Robbins and secret agent Glen Selvy. When an art dealer comes upon an erotic film made in Hitler’s bunker, everyone wants to get their hands on it—senators, pornographers, transvestites, and even one crazed Vietnam vet. Only no one has seen the film and it exists in rumor alone. Working for a politician wishing to keep his collection secret, Selvy is sent out to get his hands on it when he finds himself in the throes of romance with a journalist for a magazine named Running Dog, Moll Robbins. Except Moll wants the scoop on whom Selvy represents, though Selvy isn’t really out to protect the politician’s interest at all—only setting him up for a bigger fall, despite he himself being set up to be hunted down. As the film emerges, Selvy is forced to make haste to the ends of the earth, like a running dog.

This is one of the books that my ex-roommate, Wyatt, gave me. It’s the third I’ve read by DeLillo, including Americana and End Zone. And it’s not the last DeLillo book I intend to read this year, though every novel I manage to pick up by him is extraordinarily different from each other. As far as modern novelists go, DeLillo is by far one of my favorites because of his careful use of spirituality tied to sentiment and the context of that in the absence of sentiment. DeLillo writes about departures: David Bell in Americana leaving the world of television to find his roots, Gary Harkness in End Zone abandoning football to understand nuclear holocaust, and now Glen Selvy, the pivotal character of Running Dog, truly running away from his governmental roles to complete all of his unfinished business. These departures not only resound with an audience familiar with deep-seeded feelings of disconnection, but they directly relate to some measure of honor and expectation for the end, like one man looking both at his past and his future. Of course, I can’t tell you everything that happens. That would spoil it for you.

Kicking off this review, I’d like to start by pointing out some of the more unusual things about this book: It isn’t all that long, but there are so many goddamn characters. There were moments while reading this where I’d catch a name and had to scroll back a few pages in order to remind myself just who that name belonged to. DeLillo is no stranger to unnecessary amounts of characters though and very rarely does he ever tie up the ends of their stories. Some people just continue to live on, as though unaffected by the events in the novel, and we just have to let them live on that way. While I did long to see what happened to some folks, I found myself engaged to exactly what this novel was about—the big movie introduced at the very opening of the novel.

Apart from that, there isn’t much that I disliked about the novel. The points-of-view, though all told in the same voice, are unique, in that DeLillo carefully conveys each person’s beliefs and frustrations as a reflection of those characters in following their pursuits. Points-of-view tend to shift with paragraph breaks, so it’s easy to see when you’re looking through someone else’s eyes as the story progresses forward and he makes no secret about who exactly you’re watching the world from. Only on very few occasions does he meander from one point-of-view to another, but it’s appropriate nonetheless in how seamless it works and what exactly that shift represents.

One of the more interesting things about this book is that, in a lot of ways, it is a parody of a conspiracy thriller, though parody might be a strong word. Laced in the criminal activities of the characters of this novel is a very primitive sense of spirituality and complex layer of philosophy that determine each character’s path and motivations from beginning to end. It isn’t so much the action but the integrity of the characters in their beliefs that push the story forward, although DeLillo seems no stranger to action either. Each fight scene is carefully choreographed, with the characters spaced out clearly on the map of the battlefield, no different than how he placed characters on the football field in End Zone. These fights not only convey action, but also intent and strategy while revealing the enormity of each individual character’s determination to survive these conflicts.

Much like in a military thriller, DeLillo shows familiarity with firearms, military vehicles, protocol. And in spite of the year this novel is set in, sometime in the 1970’s, the novel feels frighteningly modern. There’s no cell phone use and while that could, theoretically affect a story from that era, it doesn’t—the novel is completely acceptable at face value as a modern story. In fact, if not for the mention that it’s set in the 70’s, I would’ve simply assumed it was set in 2014, although, by that theory, he published it awfully quickly. Nonetheless, the use of technology like military-grade weaponry flawlessly edges the story forward without blunting the audience with unnecessary jargon or outdated images. Although, I guess the Vietnam vets are still young enough to kill people. I’m not sure that’s plausible in the 2010’s, but I wouldn’t doubt it.

What makes this novel brilliant is the item that ties it all together—the secret film from the Nazi bunker. DeLillo engages the audience by creating a curious mythos around a fictional item and perpetuates that by building the drama of others trying to get their hands on it. Even while Glen Selvy is off, running for his life, we’re still engaged to that item and exactly what it contains. Is Hitler in an orgy? You don’t know until you get to the end, but you want to know so badly. The big reveal of the film itself ties the whole story together, including Moll and Glen’s connection to each other, and creates a finale that’s both beautiful, meaningful, spiritual, and without the staggering sentiment so common in literature that comes to a “romantic” conclusion. The very fact that this film is the center of the conflict doesn’t deter us from the character’s individual conflicts either, as we find ourselves watching the world through two scopes: the first being that the film is the holy grail and the second being that the film’s existence is a reasonable excuse for other, darker intentions to be unleashed.

As noted in my other reviews, DeLillo is still a word-smith. Though his similes and eloquence aren’t nearly as loquacious as they were in his debut novel, he continues to write things in a way that only a skewed perspective on the military, wars, and their aftermath could. As though experiencing feelings and events in the story for the first time as an adult himself upon starting it, each phrase refines the prose to the point of perfection by capturing original concepts about so many cliched expectations of how a gun feels, how a man bleeds, what love is. The clever use of language is only an addition to the plot itself though—he never hammers an idea into our head. He states events as though they’re minutiae, though brilliantly, and leaves it on the audience’s pallet as other events occur as a result. Hints of a film-shaped cookie tin carried off in a paper bag mean more to the story than by stating directly what one character’s intent with the cookie tin was—it’s left up to the audience to find the truth in the beauty, the Hemingway mentality of omission. The very things that aren’t written are the things we have to pay attention to, thus making the story that much more engaging as the audience discovers what they already know when they peer past the great beauty of his writing.

Don’t buy this book if you’re easily bored or lost—it’s not a slow book but it’s one that requires a careful eye and a strong memory. I’ll be honest, I couldn’t wait to finish it and now that it’s over, I already miss it.

Even by DeLillo standards, Running Dog is a strange beast. A radical journalist investigates rumors of a pornographic movie featuring Adolf Hitler, which leads her into a tangle of corrupt politicians and smut peddlers, government bureaucrats and Vietnamese death squads. Structurally it's much more conventional than your average DeLillo work, resembling the paranoid thrillers so popular in the mid-'70s, but at service of an utterly weird plot whose strands don't entirely coalesce. Ultimately it fades into familiar thematic threads of much ado about nothing: money is spent, ink is spilled blood is shed and reputation ruined, all for a weird relic of dubious authenticity. Such is life, DeLillo says.