Molto arduo da leggere, non tanto per la matematica, quanto per il carattere poliedrico e la moltitudine di idee e personaggi. Ricorda un po' L'incanto del lotto 49 di Pynchon, secondo me. La matematica � usata al fine estetico e stilistico, come strumento di linguaggio, per apprezzare la bellezza del formalismo nel modo di comunicare, ed � questo del libro l'aspetto che pi� mi � piaciuto. Ottima traduzione e incredibilmente moderno.

This comes off to me as someone self-consciously trying to write a postmodern novel and not quite succeeding. There are big swaths of Gaddis, Pynchon, and Heller and little hints of Gass and Barth throughout this novel, but those authors did a far better job of combining the intellectual concerns Ratner's Star takes on with interesting stories. When Gravity's Rainbow (still a terrific novel, mind) has more narrative coherence than what you're doing, you're sort of in trouble.

Ratner's Star is a novel with issues. DeLillo's characters are paper-thin, often demarcated by goofy gimmicks. "This guy dug himself into a hole! This guy shows people his nipples!" Contrast this against the still odd, still stilted, but also unforgettable characters of later novels, Murray in White Noise and DeLillo's interpretation of Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra, and you can tell that the guy still had a long way to go before he hit his later greatness in this early stage in the game. They don't really develop, either. Furthermore, while the novel tries to tell the fascinating story of decoding transmissions from far-off Ratner's Star, this terrific premise is unfortunately dropped off the nearest convenient cliff for long stretches at a time, only to be awkwardly shoehorned in later.

What saves this one's bacon, besides the fact that DeLillo is always funny, are the big long intellectual monologues, which are clumsily delivered and as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face but which are about topics that interest me. I've gained a certain amount of patience for interruptive discourse as long as it's about a topic I personally am into, and for as badly as this book wanders off-course (and it's not like I mind digressive books, I just don't find these particular digressions delivered as well as Gravity's Rainbow's digressions), it's fascinating to read so much about language, astronomy and mythology.

In the end, though, I only found Ratner's Star engaging in fits and starts. That third star is on account of a good concept and some cool content, as well as how much fun I had digging around for bits that reminded me of Infinite Jest: Billy Twillig is a less-developed Hal Incandenza, and there are those MIT language riots. I know DFW loved this book and understand why to a degree, but this is not the DeLillo of the '80s and '90s, that's for sure.

Avoiding Cosmic Fake News

Every community of human beings has its own way of thinking about things, its rules for connecting words and experiences. These rules constitute the community’s epistemology. Epistemology determines who to believe, what is valid and true, and ‘what counts’ in the language of the community - astronomy and simulation are ‘in’ among scientists, for example, and astrology and augury are out. To some degree a community’s epistemology depends on its technology - including its language - and the range of what can be detected and named by it. How events are recorded by technology often determines what is considered as a fact, a fiction, a random noise, or nothing at all.

When technology becomes developed enough to be used to investigate both the very small as well as the very large - as in quantum or astrophysics - it divorces human perception from direct contact with events. Our immediate experience is of the technology not events. Epistemology then becomes about the technology as much as the events it records. Can the technology be trusted? Is what we perceive through it real? Could it be that what we experience in the very small and very large is simply ourselves, that the technology is actually a mirror reflecting an image of the people who created it?

The community investigating Ratner’s Star, Field Experiment Number One, resembles that of organisations like the Santa Fe Institute, or the Rand Corporation and other so-called ‘think tanks’ and ‘skunk works’ in which highly educated people of various academic stripes consider issues of deep import. At least they presume the issues addressed are important because their collective epistemology says they are. They have faith in their technology - in the case of Field Experiment Number One, a new type of synthesis-telescopic array and an enormously powerful computer, the Space Brain - to deliver the scientific facts upon which the community can deliberate.

Most members of this community are savants in some abstruse field of inquiry... and they are clearly mad. Some may be genetically deficient and ‘on the spectrum’. Others are suffering from the stress induced by the difficult problems they are asked to address. But mostly they are mad because of the ultimate futility of their work. After all, every problem they solve creates new problems at an exponential rate - an epistemological paradox implying that scientific progress increases uncertainty about the world. It’s enough to drive any serious scientist crazy.

Billy, the fourteen year old protagonist and maths genius, meets community members in a series of down-the-rabbit-hole, Alice in Wonderland encounters while he literally explores the depths of Field Experiment Number One. It is clear that the epistemology of the the place is rather more flexible than that of conventional academia. The staff includes thirty-two Nobel prize-winners in diverse fields. But beyond this are also ‘alternative physicists’, aboriginal dreamers, a name-shaman and the occasional visiting Kabbala-reading rabbi, among others. No member of any of these ‘disciplines’ pays much attention to the epistemological opinions of the others. The result is a sort of liberality of method within a group of decided dogmatists. What constitutes ‘science’ is a matter of formal but unresolved debate within the community. So truth floats like pollen in the wind, fertilising a variety of considered conclusions.

Billy’s job is to make some sense of a message apparently received from a planetary satellite of Ratner’s Star. As a mathematician, Billy could care less about epistemology. He has no interest in how the binary-coded message got to him or what processes intervened between the distant solar system and the gigantic Space Brain maintained by the community. His data is only the readable version of the purported message which has been produced by Space Brain.

All Billy cares about is identifying any pattern contained in the message, its mathematical significance. Whether the numbers it contains have names other than the ones he knows, is an absurd irrelevance; only their general relationship with each other matters. Numbers, he believes, define each other entirely and give each other their unique identities. Their ultimate source and their connections to anything else in the universe is a metaphysical issue outside his area of interest.

Billy is still young enough to learn however. And he does. He hears and remembers the detail of all the advice he receives no matter how trivial or looney. He encounters the full range of scientific, philosophical and religious opinion face to face, as it were, and at its grittiest from very smart people. And some of the grittiest grit is provided by the eponymous Ratner himself who has turned from scientist to mystic during his life-long search for knowledge. His near-death bed testimony, given to the community’s assembled Nobel laureates through Billy’s intermediation, is unambiguous: en-sof, the “G-dash-D” with no name, the origin and end which is beyond language and number, is that for which they all have been looking. No one, including Billy, pays much attention to the old bat.

Billy’s learning appears to inhibit his enthusiasm for the project. He loses interest, gets depressed, sleeps a great deal, thinks about sex in a decidedly adolescent way, and avoids intellectual activity whenever possible. He is maturing. That is, he is going mad as well. But he receives a sort of therapy from an unexpected source, a hack journalist who turns to fiction-writing in order to avoid the “danger of the threat of belief,” a phrase which seems to sum up the whole of DeLillo’s novel. Belief, that is to say fixity of opinion about how words connect to experience, is as much a problem for scientists as it is for religious fanatics. Or, for that matter, as much as it is for an obsessive person who calls her obsession love.

The truth isn’t ‘out there’ as they say in the X Files; it’s not even ‘in here’ as some psychotherapeutic types have it. The truth is something that’s shared. Like all narrative, it’s communal property or it doesn’t exist. And, also like all narrative, it is both eternal as it is passed along, and temporary as it is surpassed by other more pressing or compelling narrative. Truth isn’t static; it moves. It is propelled by literature at every stage of its existence. Reading and writing is therefore an excellent way to say sane, especially if the writing is as elegant and varied as that provided by DeLillo.

Postscript: it seems to me that Ratner’s Star is the fictional equivalent of a decidedly philosophical work: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3.... I think the fiction is far more effective. Another novel with a similar theme by C.S. Forster, written over a century ago: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show.... Stanislaw Lem also an almost identical theme 25 years prior to Delillo: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I wasn't sure if I had it in me to finish this book. Apparently I did.
It's a never-ending banquet of absurd obsessions and perversions. I am totally dumbfounded by it. But somehow I feel that I have been transformed by the experience of it, perhaps on some microbial level.

3.5 stars. An original, clever, funny, satirical novel with little plot and fairly shallow characters. This book is not an easy read. The story is about 14 year old Billy Twillig, a maths genius who wins the Nobel Prize for mathematics. He is sent to a secret scientific location to decipher a coded signal, possibly received from outer space. There he meets a number of oddball characters who also are involved in trying to work out what the coded signal means.

There are lots of funny, clever, satirical paragraphs about subjects including scientists, reasoning, logic, astronomy and maths.

Here is a couple of quotes from the book:
‘It was amazing how often kind-looking people turned out to be crazy. He wondered gravely whether things had reached such a bad state that only crazy people attempted commonplace acts of kindness, that the crazy and the kind were one and the same.’
‘Shit is universal no matter which language.’

Early DeLillo is the best DeLillo.

I'm giving this two stars but only because I am not smart enough to understand it. This takes a good knowledge of mathematics, science, Kabbalah and other forms of mysticism. I'm pretty sure it's a masterpiece, if you understand those things...

Ratner’s Star is a profound(ly funny) work of metaphysical fiction. It is metaphysical in both the Ancient (Pythagorean/Parmenidean)sense, and the Modern (Dialectic of Enlightenment) sense.

It is an enormously ambitious novel that presents and resides in the age-old tension between reason and faith, truth and superstition, science and art, pure math and formal logic, mind and body, being and becoming, everything and nothing. Abstractly speaking--as the precocious young mathematician that serves as our protagonist would prefer--this all points to both the necessity and the problem of the One and the Zero; oppositional binaries that purportedly cannot be resolved without the destruction of the other. And yet here we are, constructing technology that runs on binary code, incorporating the opposition in every aspect of our lives. If we are to believe Horkheimer and Adorno, the history of the human species is just this: the dialectical process of scientific disenchantment and mythical re-enchantment, perpetuating itself ad infinitum. If I had to guess, I’d suspect DeLillo agrees with their conclusion.

The history of Pythagoreanism provides a helpful topology for understanding the tension or “dilemma” of the novel. Iamblichus (3-4th C.) tells us in On the Pythagorean Way of Life that followers of the mathematical-genius-cum-mystical-sage split in two after his death in the late 4th C. BCE. One discipleship, the mathematikoi professed to deal only with Truth. They pursued Pythagoras’ mathematical insights, and sought to expand his work on ratios and the table of opposites. The other group, the akousmatikoi (literally “the ones eager to hear”--the root of our word acoustic and all it implies), were not recognized by the mathematikoi as genuine Pythagoreans. The akousmatikoi were circumspectly treated as a superstitious, mystical and undisciplined cult. This split, in a very fundamental sense, marks the beginning of the dialectic of Enlightenment: it is the beginning of the rejection of mysticism or myth in favor of scientific-mathematical truth.

But it is worth noting that Pythagoras himself fell on neither side of this divide, but believed that both myth (read: spirituality) and mathematics informed and depended upon one another. Pythagoras understood that human life--how we live and how we should live--is not decipherable nor discoverable via pure mathematics. Perhaps, on Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading, Pythagoras was the last real Mensch: he daringly lived well in the opposition before the opposition, and for that reason is rightly venerated.

I’d suggest DeLillo, or at least the younger DeLillo that wrote Ratner’s Star, was fully aware of Pythagoras’s mensch-ness, and wrote a (literary/untrue) novel about (mathematics/truth) to explore the tension and how to resolve it.

first half: a clever (though definitely off-kilter) satire of the scientific community peppered with allusions to philosophy. Also, it's pretty funny.

second half: digresses into an incomprehensible vortex of weirdness, leaving all possible insights or coherence buried under piles of bat guano ... literally.

The entire second part seems oddly extraneous, or maybe I'm just not intelligent enough to grasp it.

This satire draws on a silly postmodernism: that science is created does not mean it lacks objectivity/rationality.

My reactions to this novel can be put rather succinctly. If David Foster Wallace is indeed a fan of Don Delillo, this is the novel he has stolen from most. If Don Delillo is indeed a fan of Thomas Pynchon, this is the novel that Pynchon most directly inspired. But regardless of its influences or the work it later inspired, because those things are speculatory, it is certainly true that this novel, Delillo's fourth, is his first great novel.

The novel centers around child math prodigy Billy Terwilliger. At fourteen years old, Billy has already won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work with "zorgs" (as near as I can figure, Delillo made this term up) and now lives a life of quiet seclusion at a mathematics academy for genius teenagers. He is called, somewhat against his will, to a remote laboratory (named Field Experiment Number One) to decipher a string of code believed to have come from a newly discovered planet coined Ratner's Star.

This is a wildly funny novel with sequences of surrealistic absurdity and populated with bizarre characters. There's Henrik Endor, who, before Billy, failed to break the code and now lives in a hole, spending his days digging and feeding on larvae. There's Orang Mohole, the acknowledged kingpin of alternate physics, who subsists on strange green pills and vicarious threesomes. There's Shazar Lazarus Ratner, a renowned astronomer turned mystic so diseased that he now lives in a plastic bubble so that oxygen cannot kill him. There's Elux Troxl, the entrepeneur, who, alongside his oddly-perverted sidekick Grbk, deals in leased computer time, chain letters, and bat guano. There's Cheops Feeley, who annually awards a prize to the mathematician whose new ideas holds the highest "madness content." There's also Chester Greylag Dent, ninety-two-years old and ending his days in a secret submarine somewhere off the shore of Europe.

It's hard saying what purpose this novel is intended to serve, what point Delillo is trying to make. But it seems obvious that there is something to be said here about the stupidity of science, the differences between thinking analytically, thinking logically, and thinking superstitiously. And, despite its humor, there is an overwhelming sense of attempting to understand the complex emotional distance and sadness people feel when they truly are more brilliant than the people around them.

This is as close to a five star novel as I have read in a while. Distinctly Delillo, it shows definite strides in the direction of becoming the novelist he will eventually become.

A pretty complex book. DeLillo stated that he wanted to write not just a book about mathematics, but a book like mathematics with patterns, order, and harmony. A young mathematician is called in to solve a message from space. It's a bit satire, a bit surrealistic, a bit non-traditional in its structure, but overall not a bad book. Many strange characters that seem decompose and reform much like modern physics. Parts of the book I was really hooked and parts of the book took me nowhere.