Dense and absurd. Free-flying goofiness. Loads of characters who are deadly serious about their field of work, tempered by extreme eccentricity. Halfway through there is an abrupt shift in location and the tens of strangers Billy Twillig seems to run into every few pages are replaced by a half a dozen oddballs for the remainder of the novel. I was nervous that the lines stating, paraphrased, that there'd be "no more fun" were going to ring true for that latter half, but my worry was for nothing. Honestly only four pages of this book weren't rad. Scientific and supernatural theory in smorgasbord form.

My favorite DeLillo. It gets everything right: form and content, language and meaning, interpretation and hallucination, humor and rage. For fans of Silence, Cunning, and Exile.
-------------
Seconded. A rereading I was looking forward to so much I gave it to myself for my birthday. First read over 10 years ago, still splendid. To mimic Billy Twillig: "I make no review."

I was not able to appreciate this one. It felt as if DeLillo was struggling between describing a teenager discovering sexuality and a genius kid who does nothing other than wandering the Center. Even though DeLillo was praised for his ability to investigate maths and physics, etc, I wasn't able to make sense of much of what was described.

Respira! Splendi! Verbalizza! Muori!


...la matematica e gli alieni, il futuro, il passato,i buchi nel deserto, le grucce usate per scavare, mangiare i vermi della terra, gli scienziati impazziti e quelli già pazzi, il ritorno dei messaggi che ci mandiamo da soli, un orario indicato da una profezia, gente che sclera e gente che scappa...ma soprattutto "credici, idiota!"



cit.1

"- Sono la signora Laudabur, della Cooperativa missionaria biblica mondiale. Mi hanno detto di parlare con un certo signor Dyne.
- Che cosa vuole?
- Le nostre Bibbie sono incollate e cucite a mano da profughi. Mi hanno detto che il signor Dyne potrebbe essere interessato a un ordine in blocco.
- Se ne vada, - tagliò corto lui.
- Entrambi i testamenti. - insistette la donna. - Tradotti direttamente dalle lingue originali. Bozze corrette da soldati prigionieri. Cuoio fiore persiano.
- Non ci servono Bibbie. Abbiamo i film. Possiamo vedere film di Charlton Heston a raffica in ogni momento.
- Ordinando in blocco ci sono in regalo i coltelli da bistecca.
- Idolatra, - disse lui. - Beghina."


cit.2

"- Se mai le capitasse di finire in prigione, -disse Kyzyl, - tra i pochi posti buoni che rimangono ci sono le regioni autonome. I territori dell'Amministrazione fiduciaria degli Stati Uniti li definirei a malapena discreti. Parlando di torture, le consiglio di evitare le zone vicino ai canali. Torture fisiche, intendo. Botte, scorticamenti, bastonate sulle piante dei piedi, elettroshock. Parlando di torture psicologiche, le enclave repubblicane e i protettorati del Golfo non sono tra i posti peggiori. Nei protettorati, e parlo per esperienza personale, incappucciano con moderazione, non esagerano con i rumori monotoni, deprivano i corpi del sonno solo in rari casi. Al momento della scarcerazione accusi soltanto sintomi minimi. Riflessi di trasalimento: si, affermativo. Insonnia: possibile, ma non cronica. Spasmi sfinterici: poco poco. Minimo incremento dell'ansia. E pochissimo terrore. Quanto all'esperienza di incappucciamento, con o senza rumori monotoni, se una volta superata quella uno riesce a vivere con pochissimo terrore, allora si può considerare baciato dalla sorte."

Fragmentami wspaniała, ale znój przedzierania się przez nią zabija niemal całą radość czytania. Bardzo zyskuje w drugiej części, kiedy przestaje sprawiać wrażenie opisu gigantycznego gabinetu osobliwości i klarowniej wyłania się (imponujący!) zamysł Autora.

Pet zvezdic za čudovito in kompleksno manipejsko satiro, ki pa nima usmiljenja do bralca :)

This novel will outlast you - not in the cosmic sense, but during your more mundane ecstasies from page-to-page. It holds your pain in its tireless sentences and pole jumps over the moon. The two-bit snippet I held in my mind throughout to describe it was “rhapsodic cud.” I thought I might be able to understand its math or its etherial sensations of something like language. No dice - or, rather, infinite dice.

It reminded me of the time I was learning L'Hôpital's rule as as student. There was a small quotation of the mathematician's loitering the the way of the numerals and infinity-signs, something biographical, emotive. It was like an alien’s fingerprint, or beacon-relic. There is something like this going on in this book, with its relentless pageant of strangely named characters, doing surreal things. DeLillo somehow does it without ever giving the sensation that he is juggling a bunch of ten-dollar words, too. I enjoyed this writing very, very much.

"There are things past spelling and far beyond counting. No word or number reaches there. You must live inside a schnitt not to know of this. I can only say tant pis, piccolissimo. I position you neither here nor elseplace. Oblivio obliviorum.” (147)

"There’s a structural model, the Alice books of Lewis Carroll…The connection, as I say, is structural. It involves format, not characters or themes or story except in the loosest sense. There is also a kind of guiding spirit. This is Pythagoras. The mathematician-mystic. The whole book is informed by this link or opposition, however you see it, and the characters keep bouncing between science and superstition. I wanted to produce a book that would be naked structure. The structure would be about the book and vice versa. I wanted the book to become what it was about. Abstract structures and connective patterns. A piece of mathematics, in short.” DeLillo in conversation with Thomas LeClair, 1982.

“Bi-Levelism teaches us to talk with an appearance of truth and falsity about all things and to make ourselves admired by the more learned." (66)

"The history of science is crosshatched with lines of additive and corrective thought. This is how we try to arrive at truth. Truth accumulates. It can be borrowed and paid back. We correct our predecessors, an effete form of assassination, and then we wait either in this life or the next for the corrective dagger to be slipped twixt our own meatless ribs. Here it comes, zip, the end of an entire cosmology.” (193)

The feeling always occurred when he was on the verge of solving a drawn-out mathematical problem. It seemed to mean, nearing the end, that he preferred to abandon all the structural forms, the intersecting perspectives, the entire weightless system of exact relationships; discard it all in exchange for the scantest condition of existence. The intuition of mathematical order occupied the deeper reaches of cognitive possibility, too old and indistinct for tracing, predating even the analytical scrapings of logic an language. Because his work's natural tendency was to provide a model of his own mind, of himself as a distinct individual, he was puzzled by the lack of an adequate vocabulary for mathematical invention, by his inability to understand what made his mathematics happen. In retaliation, as it were, against the secrecy of his own constructions, he engineered a desire to subsist on the minims of specific being. It was to this, the unknown self, that the basest nature was clearly preferable. (238)

Hard to talk about this one. For now, I’ll just quote Tree Man II: “All in fi nite sets are in fi nite but some are more in fi nite than others.”

3.4 ratners

I'm nearing the end of Delillo-thon. I read nine of his books last year, two more the year before that, and this is already my second this year. Though I was mostly marching forward chronologically, I'm having to loop back with a few of these, because I didn't own a copy of this or "Players" or "Amazons" (shhh...) when I set my list of nine last year. Coming off of a run of amazing '80s and '90s books, it's a little jarring to throw myself back into his mid-'70s style, which now seems almost like the work of a different author.

Delillo seems like a different writer in every decade. His most prolific time is clearly the '70s, with six novels in the '70s proper. (Seven if you consider 1980 the same as "nineteen seventy-ten.") As he was clawing his way into his craft, he incorporated a lot of elements that would burn off in later novels. It could be things as obvious as funny names, or more subtle modifications, in which large conspiratorial agencies are given terrifying autonomy, rather than humorous little foibles and bugaboos. Compare the government agency that's introducing the ultra-lethargy drug into the counterculture i "Great Jones Street" with arm of the government that's sending Nicholas Branch fictitious accounts of the Kennedy assassination in "Libra." Going backwards into Delillo's '70s work is to return both to a more carefree time, but also a more careless one, one in which the largest topics are addressed, but the final prognosis is something along the lines of, "well, that's academia for you! Always doting on bullshit."

In the "is this where Delillo becomes DELILLO" sweepstakes, "Ratner's Star" gets high marks. After three fairly uni-directional plots in a row, this is the first one where Delillo makes the structure of the book his big concern. Two things I learned while reading an interview with Delillo: 1. this book is meant to be all structure, like an advanced math problem, even if that results in cartoonish, one-dimensional characters, and 2. it's loosely based on "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass." (The two sections of the book are titled "Adventures," and "Reflections.")

This information is more useful than you'd think. Once you start to look for it, you see that a lot of the plot really does seem to involve our protagonist, 14-year old math prodigy Billy Twillig, meeting an assortment of the strangest people you could imagine, each from a different branch of science or pseudoscience, each seemingly hellbent on confusing him or offering him something. Billy's Nobel Prize for his work in an arcane mathematical concept called "zorgs" has brought him to the attention of Field Experiment Number One, a self-contained bio-dome containing nothing but Nobel winners and other geniuses, including a priest who divines the metaphysics of the world by tracking the secretions of red ants and Billy's predecessor, a math genius who now lives in a hole which he digs deeper with the help of a coat hanger. Field Experiment Number One is one of several autonomous research domes around the world all working on the same problem: a series of flashes reached the organization's radars dishes, seemingly aimed at Earth from a star named by reclusive, venerated astronomer Edmund Ratner. There's not much to the message -- 14 pulses, a space, then 28 pulses, a second gap, and then 56 pulses. That's it. It was only transmitted once, and it's only 101 moments, either pulse or not-pulse. And our math genius, Billy Twillig, is tasked with finding out what they're trying to tell us.

If you've read any other Delillo from this time, the first thing you'll notice is that the Weird Name Index is off the chart this round. Some have called this his most Pynchon-esque book, and it's not as much the density of the story or even the endless digressions of science and philosophy as it is the never-ending parade of people with names like Elux Troxl, Orang Mohole, Peregrine Fitzroy-Tapps, and the ominously-named Grbk. Because it doesn't quite fit Delillo's style, it gets pretty gratuitous pretty quickly.

The second thing you'll notice is how much science there is. Or maybe it's pseudoscience. My eyes rolled back in my head a few times, but my 1.5 years as a Chemistry major in college served me well enough. In "Great Jones Street" and "Running Dog," scientists and experts tend to have really absurd specialties. Billy's study in "Zorgs" is a good example. It's an almost entirely theoretical mathematical creation, one that Billy insists has no practical use. A lot of the science and and upper-level thought in this book is researched and presented in scrupulous detail, but it all seems to boil down to the fact that, with a message of this ambiguity, the only thing anyone can hope to do is throw far-flung expressions of human thought at the problem, and hope someone gets lucky.

The book flows along at a dream-cycle pace, the gist of the assignment getting more and more unclear, until Billy is kidnapped and taken to a second location underneath the Field Experiment One dome, called Logicon Project Minus-One. Billy's kidnapper is child-sized Adult Robert Softly, who believes Field Experiment One is getting too lazy, too unscientific in its approach. Softly no longer cares about what the pulses mean. He wants to know, in a greater sense, what it would take to communicate with another race of beings. To do this, he has assembled a team, cadged from the upper levels, aimed at breaking language down beyond words, beyond phonemes, into pure sounds, an ur-script that could be translated by creatures of any physical makeup.

The switch from the roots of upper-bound mathematics to the development of a primal language (and accompanying meta-language which will allow for extensive collection of data) is one of several curve-balls in this book. Another is Elux Troxl, a junk-mail and chain letter grandmaster who uses his fortunes to break into the harvesting-bat-guano-as-fertilizer market. Then there's the female reporter who is Softly's sex slave, the data-processing robot with realistic facial features, and a final stretch of the book which happens in all one night, during which perspective and point of view switch literally from sentence to sentence. (It took me a while before I realized that Jean Sweet Venable and Edna Lown were two different people; I thought it was some elaborate trick in which she was called one thing by half the people, and the other thing by the other half.)

If that sounds confusing, it is. A bit, anyway. Anyone who's read "Ulysses" or "Gravity' Rainbow" or "The Recognitions" probably won't find this much of a challenge. Delillo stays on the linear side of murky. Still, it's stuffed tightly with astronomical concepts and mathematic theory and issues of time and space and distance and all that, and it's a lot to keep in your head. Is it fun? No, not quite fun. Is it funny? Now and again, definitely. Is it line-by-line good reading? For sure. But because it's from this era, there's a flippancy about it that makes it now seem worth it to sift through all this guano.

Now, by the time I was about 150 pages away from the end, I was definitely glad I stuck it out, and by the end, it had easily drifted up into the top half of his books. It looks for a long time like it's not going to pay off, but it eventually does. It finally travels past the futility of academia and philosophy and intellectual pretensions and starts stabbing at the pink squishy matter of human frailty and fear, and our complete and utter feeling of isolation against the vast expanse of the sky. It's even a little optimistic at times, though those lines are usually spoken by complete idiots, who knows.

This was a hard go, and it just barely avoided the fate of Not Being Worth the Effort. But it was worth the effort, so feel free to make the effort. You might be glad you did. Or maybe not; what do you I know about your tastes?

Underworld notwithstanding, DeLillo's best novels seem to be those he keeps under 300 pages (as if to prove the point, the two most memorable set pieces from that 1997 behemoth were published to great success as stand-alone novellas). But while Ratner's Star inevitably bogs down or sidesteps into occasional blind alleys, and takes its Lewis Carroll parallel maybe a tad far, it's still easy to see why DeLillo counts it—with reason—as the work he himself is proudest of.

Many reviewers have opined that DeLillo was merely jumping on the Barth/Pynchon/Gaddis/Gass bandwagon with the imposing word count of Ratner's Star (I don't want to imagine what that bandwagon would look like, incidentally, or what those guys would be doing up there); I'll concede the "big and baggy" point with the proviso that it is at best irrelevant and at worst lazy merely to point out that DeLillo was in tune with a certain maximalist Zeitgeist. What is more interesting to me is that Ratner's Star is still more tightly constructed than most of the seriocomic mega-novels those four writers had published up to that point.

Like several of DeLillo's novels—most recently to date the initially-maligned Cosmopolis—the characters, situations, and themes here are far enough ahead of their time that they suffer a relevance lag, and Ratner's Star has had to wait perhaps the longest of all (jury's still out on Zero K). With its heavily-surveilled sinister proto-Googleplex full of geniuses trying to crack an apparent extraterrestrial code, looming extinction-level event, and shady offshore commodities cartel, it would take only the most cursory rewrite to pass this off as a new work today, although DeLillo has no faith in the power of Reason (or Big Data) to solve the Big Existential Threats we humans bring upon ourselves.

Probably DeLillo's strangest novel, Ratner's Star is fuelled by an absurd, near-nonsensical sense of humour, at the same time as being a profoundly horrifying meditation on what happens when the subject is destroyed, replaced by mathematical equations and deeply abstract theories.

If Goodreads permitted, I would have given this novel 4.5 stars. It is a beautiful work, filled with DeLillo's incredible prose that is as fresh and philosophically dense as always, detailing the spiral and downfall of a cast of characters whose obsessive anti-humanism can lead only to self-destruction.

This novel was a rough ride, and I made it through out of pure obstinacy. It helped that only a brilliant mind could have written it, but the reader's picture of this author's brilliant mind becomes a little twisted as the narrative progresses.

The structure of the book appears to be nothing more than a long procession of weird intelligences that present themselves, one by one, to the protagonist, who must decide what to take and what to leave of their thoughts. There does exist a cumulative effect from all of this perspective, and the plot increasingly thickens around the story's focal point: extraterrestrial intelligence. The greatest thing I can say about this book is that it gives that concept a treatment serious enough to be in the order of Stanislaw Lem or Arthur C. Clark.

Unlike those authors, Dilillo has priorities beyond the simple conveyance of his (brilliant) story idea. He is presumably incapable (or utterly unwilling) to render a narrative that is free of ambiguities and strenuous, unanswerable questions.

In the event that we are to view this effort in the context of science fiction, we can conclude that it's one that adds the full weight of human ambivalence and doubt to what is already an interesting tale. If we're to see it as a contemporary novel, then the promise of alien intelligence is a necessary justification for the dense concentration of odd personalities that populate it.