Un po’ come cadere di testa sull’asfalto.

Prima delusione secca con DeLillo.
L’ho finito per togliermelo dai piedi.
Qua proprio non c’aveva voglia. [58/100]

When I first read this I rushed through it in one day and finished if not having a single clue what I’d just read but knowing it was an instant 5 star. I always meant to sit down and actually reread this properly with a clear head and now I finally have.

Cosmopolis grapples with the post-yuppie early 2000s ultra rich of Manhattan and follows Eric who spends the book literally just trying to get a haircut. As his limo crawls through the streets he jumps in and out of the vehicle, entering restaurants and meeting colleagues, all to the behest of his bodyguard who keeps alerting him to the threat of danger where he appears to be a target.

At the core of this book is a creeping and almost humorous sense of paranoia that becomes more and more prominent as the book goes on. Like Ellis and Wolf who write about the 80s yuppie, DeLillo mirrors their tone and has a satirical yet gripping voice which moves rapidly from one scene to the next, unlike Eric’s limo.

Cosmopolis feels as though it could be taking place in the same time as American Psycho if it wasn’t for the distinct 2000s feeling to it. It has the same wit and dark humour in how it reveals the eventual downfall of the main character through their lack of control. It’s funny how Eric keeps repeating that he has an asymmetrical prostate but it is exactly this imbalance in his masculinity which causes his mind to spiral out of control.

Would really recommend for fans if Ellis and New York fiction with a focus on toxic masculinity.

Sarebbero due stelle e mezzo.
E per ora assegno due, poi eventualmente, dopo averlo fatto sedimentare, vediamo se posso assegnare tre.

Dopo aver letto di recente Zero K, che ho trovato intenso, mi aspettavo qualcosa di altrettanto intenso, ma invece non è stato così e questo romanzo mi ha lasciata con un senso di vuoto e di disorientamento.
È la storia di questo ventottenne alle prese con i grandi numeri della finanza che sposa una donna straricca per avere un'ulteriore stabilità.
L'ambientazione è quella del lusso sfrenato di New York, che sembra quasi fantascientifica.
Il tutto si risolve con la ripicca del suo dipendente che lo cerca per farlo fuori e ci riesce.
Mah.

Cosmopolis is about a day in the life of a young billionaire who takes a stretch limo across town for a hair cut. The vapid narcissism seems cruel when there anarchy unfolds around him. DeLillo tackles that turn of the century paranoia of doom and destruction by making the world sit on an unbalanced fulcrum.
DeLillo packs references to art, culture, music, classics and the very philosophy of knowledge. Eric Packer, the protagonist is obsessed with knowing and owning things of obscurity. He listens to Satie when an in-house elevator takes him down at one fourth speed. There is an appreciation for art to be appreciated and respected for what it is and at the same time he lacks the moral ground with blatant ignorance to what is happening around him.
The dialogues are flat and lacks emotional discourse, which I have come to see it as signature DeLillo . The protagonist uses "I" and "We" interchangeably over the course of the book. For a small book, DeLillo delivers a strong story. The main lacking point I see is the disjointedness between the characters who are all caricatures drawn from the same template. They change a little around the edges but essentially remain the collective "them".

A bit underwhelming but not an overall bad read. Added bonus being a short read.

Δεν ξέρω τι ακριβώς να γράψω εδώ: με πρόσχημα τη διαδρομή ενός ζάμπλουτου νέου Αμερικανού μέσα στην πόλη εν μέσω κυκλοφοριακής συμφόρησης μόνο και μόνο για να ρίξει ένα κουρεματάκι ο ΝτεΛίλο μας προσφέρει απλόχερα ένα εξτράβαγκαντ ανάγνωσμα που βγάζει-δε βγάζει λογική: κοινωνικοί προβληματισμοί, αναμειγμένοι με τις ψυχολογικές διακυμάνσεις του Πάρκερ (ο λεφτάς), συμμετρία εναντίον χάους, ο χρόνος, η ζωή, η τιμωρία, η δικαιοσύνη και άλλες διάφορες έννοιες περνάνε μέσα από το βιβλίο ή τουλάχιστον έτσι μου φάνηκε. Υπάρχει βέβαια εξέλιξη στο σενάριο αλλά είναι προσχηματική: κάθε γεγονός είναι μια αφετηρία για ένα ακόμα φιλοσοφικό στοχασμό. Μην προσπαθήσετε να εκλογικεύσετε το περιεχόμενο του, δεν θα τα καταφέρετε. Αφήστε το να σας παρασύρει και όπου πάει το ποτάμι. Ιδανική βαθμολογία κάπου ανάμεσα στο ένα με πέντε αστεράκια, όλα θα μπορούσανε να παίξουν αλλά επειδή μου άρεσε η ταινία και επειδή το αγόρασα φούλ τιμή και πρέπει να δικαιολογήσω την επιλογή μου, θα πάρει πέντε.

Supposedly, an old grad school teachers once said the following about a classmate's story: "There isn't an ounce of the milk of human kindness anywhere in this."

That pretty much applies here. I almost stopped on page 51 when the main character says, "I want to bottle-fuck you slowly with my sunglasses on," and then the woman climaxes without being touched. But I kept going because i hate giving up on books. Didn't get much better from there. Bad, choppy, inhuman dialogue. Overly preachy, pitifully oversimplified, aggressively cynical. A hateful world filled with hateful characters. Not an enjoyable read at all.

Plus, this is at least the second Delillo book featuring a pivotal scene in which hundreds of people lie on the ground and pretend to be dead (also in White Noise). Somehow loses its flair the second time around.

an oil-and-water mix of brilliance and over-bearing allegory. the good outweighs the bad.

it's amazing that this book was written in 2003, because it ever-so-slightly predates the apex of corporate-greed-entropy in america. it's hard not to see mark zuckerberg in eric packer, the 28-year-old billionaire at the heart of the story. his icy, semi-autistic demeanor, technological zealotry and fascination with the movement of capital calls to mind the facebook guru immediately (they're even the same age as i type this). in the same breath, i'm also reminded of the 2008 financial crisis as packer's downfall unravels... not so much because it's a tragedy, but because it's the logical endgame of a vicious circle of privilege, where the very wealthy get wealthier by moving around other people's money. delillo seems horrified and fascinated by this, and he's quite good at laying out the odd fantasies that produce an eric packer - as well as the culture that's too complicit and solipsistic to bump him off of the gravy train. there's a particularly fatalistic passage in which packer's limo glides through an anarchist uprising that characterizes this perfectly. i'm excited to see what david cronenberg does with it on film. "team edward" could be a smart casting move after all...

on the other hand, not all of it works. and parts of cosmopolis feel like an endless string of unlikely non-sequiturs. there's a digression involving a sufi rap star that's almost embarrassingly misguided (delillo has many strengths; inventing rap lyrics isn't one of them), and some of the metaphorical maneuvers are annoyingly self-conscious. but i finished it with plenty of thoughts to untangle in my head, so the bumpy ride was certainly worth it.

My DeLillo experience is scattershot. I read Libra a long, cold spring weekend in the late nineties when I was depressed because of work and needed to pass the time. Then I read White Noise maybe a decade later but I read, from what I can remember, quickly and carelessly over a visit to my wife's family. I own Falling Man and used to own Underworld but I lent that book to someone, I think, and I never got the book back. No big deal. So when I picked up Cosmopolis in a literary lull, mostly because friends liked the film, I was more than pleasantly surprised that I really dug the novel. My DeLillo-loving friends, however, seem to dismiss Cosmopolis as one of the author's lesser works. In turn, I'm curious about checking out his other material, because if Cosmopolis is DeLillo at his weakest, then the rest of his catalog is set to blow me away.

Cosmopolis takes place mostly in a limo over the course of one day as an extremely rich man (I kept thinking of that 50 Shades of Grey guy) crosses town through gridlocked traffic on the way to a haircut. He shorts the yen and watches the market's tumult while visiting with various employees who stop by the limo and chat about perception, economics, sex, and proctology. Add protesters in rat suits, an old neighborhood barber, and a wealthy wisp of a poet wife, and the reader lands in a surreal, magical-realistic but gritty city that's symbolic of something, I'm sure, but I read this for fun and not for sterile critical analysis, and I had a blast. Next up, the movie, and Robert Pattison seems perfect for the starring role. I wonder if you get to see his ass.

More DeLillo soon, probably Falling Man.

If this is your first DeLillo, back away slowly and pick up a copy of White Noise or maybe the The Body Artist instead. (Unless you're breathless with anticipation to hear Robert Pattinson mutter the words "I want to bottle-fuck you slowly with my sunglasses on" while he submits to a prostate exam in crosstown traffic. In that case...well, carry on.)

Cosmopolis reads as more cultural theory/critique than novel, with exaggerated but vacant characters and implausible setpieces that are really no more than conduits for DeLillo's postmodernist riffs on global economics, innovation versus obsolescence, and the mystical patterns of nature and technology. However, I'm willing to forgive Mr. DeLillo his silly plotting because his writing is so insanely compelling. At the risk of repeating myself, Dude can write a fucking sentence.

Favorite moment: wading into the Spencer Tunick-style sea of nudity and - oh, why not? - deciding to join in. Runner-up, for sheer absurdity: the would-be Pie Assassin.

I also enjoyed Packer's mental meta-ramblings on anachronism (skyscrapers, ATMs), the abstraction of time, and the weird temporal displacement he observes on his fancy limo monitors and - at the book's culmination - on his even fancier watch.

The aforementioned prostate? It's asymmetrical. That might be all Eric Packer needs to know about his own obsolescence.

Regarding the movie adaptation...color me skeptical. For me, DeLillo's genius resides in his meticulous wordsmithing, not his plots, and I can't imagine translating the sublime experience of reading him to the screen. Although if anyone can create something delightfully weird and mildly unwatchable out of this, it's probably Cronenberg.

Ponestalo mi je reči kojima bih objasnila zašto me se Kosmopolis toliko dojmio. Ima ovde nešto uticaja Kamija, Ostera (kome pisac i posvećuje delo), delovi koje “piše” Beno Levin podsećaju na minijaturnu verziju Sabatovog Izveštaja o slepima. No, Kosmopolisom ipak dominira originalan i snažan izraz, haotičnost i gustina, vapaj za smislom i još mnogo motiva i slojeva koji zavise od stepena prijemčivosti čitaoca. Stoga, izbegavati u širokom luku ukoliko ste u fazi mira i harmonije sa sobom i okolnim svetom.

When I read Don DeLillo I always feel as if I've been transported to a place (exaggerated-to-a-perilous-burtsing-point) of human fears and follies. And that I'm being guided along by someone who knows as much as a a brain is capable of knowing, from quantum mechanics to the style of Shakespeare's sandals. All is otherworldly and yet grounded deeply in our flawed and f-cked up world at the same time - a trick most brilliant authors have up their sleeves (though he, like Salmon Rushdie, seems to have enough sleeves for fourteen arms). This is as good an introduction to DeLillo as any other of his shorter books before immersing oneself in the glorious longer ones.

It's hard not to compare Cosmopolis to DeLillo's other work. Not exactly as classic as White Noise, but it is at least complete and compelling, unlike, say, The Body Artist. The problem is that, unlike most of his work, Cosmopolis is cold. And that may be a necessity because of the subject matter (money -- what could be colder?) but that doesn't make me like it any more.