A generous four stars for DeLillo's take on Cheever's story "The Swimmer," a mythic trip through midtown gridlock for a haircut, a 28-year-old master of the digitized finance universe right around the time of the dot-com collapse. Easy reading, orderly, clean compared to Players or Ratner's Star (the last two DeLillo novels I read). Worth it for quick observations about ATMs and the like. An unreal ghost trip in a white stretch limo, hopping on and off for meals, sex (at least four sessions with four different women), a riot protest in Times Square reminiscent of recent events, a film shoot featuring a crowd of naked people playing dead. Interestingly interspersed with two sections of the confession of our Bret Easton Ellis-like anti-hero's eventual killer, providing just enough narrative drive. An ironically audacious scene of touchless empathy intercourse to completion while a doctor palpates Eric's asymmetrical prostate. Loved that he incorporated a common line of criticism - "his best songs were sensational and even the ones that were not good were good." This isn't his best but it's still good, or at least easy, thoughtful, fun, and filled with perceptions rendered with total attention to the sound and vision of every phrase.

За мен една от големите ми НЕпопадения тази година.
Издържах геройски до 150 страница, но ... толкова ми е достатъчно.
Не бих я препоръчала.

Mu esimene Delillo raamat, seega puudusid ka eelnevad ootused. Esimene pool tundus veidi tuim ja unelev, karakerid võõrastavad ja just kui “mitte päris”. (Ilmselt ka taotluslik) Samas, ega ma ka kedagi 2000ndate alguse Wall Street’ilt ei tunne. Seiklusrikas ja veidi absurd, piisavalt tavapäratu mu igapäevase lugemise sekka. Kokkuvõtvalt: tore, et sai midagi uut avastatud. Ehk autori järgnevaid romaane lugedes tekkib ka suurem võrdlusmoment ja kriitilisus.

The downward spiral of a young multimillionaire in the span of a day. Hypnotic and brutal, poetic and nihilistic at the same time had me totally entranced from the first page till the last. I felt the need to immediately reread it to grasp all the socio-economical, political and philosophical references as well as the parallelisms with James Joyce 'Ulysses.'

A great critique on the senseless brutality of capitalism, and eerily breathtaking.

White Noise was the greatest thing I've ever read, but every Delillo since has been a lukewarm glass of mehmonade.

Cosmopolis

Don DeLillo's short novel "Cosmopolis" (2003) is a tale of modern life filled with violence, money and materialism, the lust for sex and power, the apparently all-encompassing nature of technology and gadgetry, and self-centeredness. The novel fails because it is too full of itself and loses touch with the world it purports to describe.

The novel is set in New York City in April, 2000. The primary character is Eric Packer a wunderkind who at the age of 28 has become a billionaire as an investment manager. The story takes place over one day as Packer, suffering from sleeplessness and loneliness, decides to get a haircut across town. He so instructs the crew of his fully-equipped white stretch limo, who advise him that this is not the best of days to be out and about in the streets of New York. The President of the United States is in town and there have been threats to the President's life and to Packer's own. No matter. A haircut across town it will be.

In addition to insisting on his haircut, Packer shows his stubbornness and hubris in another way. He has taken the most severe risks financially by borrowing money in the currency exchange thinking that the Japanese yen will lose value. During the course of the day, the yen continues to rise, and Packer goes broke.

Packer's day-long journey in his limo is filled with visitors, including his doctor, who examines him every day, various economists and financial advisers, and sexual encounters including one with his young and wealthy wife of 22 days. There are scenes of riots in the streets, shootings, a suicide by burning, the funeral of a famous rapper of whom Packer is fond, a movie shooting in which 300 extras lie on the street naked, and violence, by and against Packer.

Portions of the book, especially the earliest pages, have a directness and immediacy to the writing that hold out promise. Unfortunately, the book does not succeed. I think the book's major shortcoming lies in its polemical style and in its attendant excess. DeLillo has no sympathy with what he perceives to be the modern world of high-tech and high finance. His writing about it is skewed, shrill, and unconvincing. On an individual scale, Eric Packer is portrayed as on the whole a brilliant but dislikable character whose human traits have been buried in the pursuit of wealth, power, knowledge, and sex. With the exception of a few moments, Packer and his fate didn't engage me. DeLillo draws him simply to fit his ideological vision of the unjust character of modern capitalism and the cataclysmic finish to which he believes it is leading. Packer's escapades are too outlandish in themselves to be meaningful commentary. For me the book falls flat.

In the book, Packer is shown as computing every logarithm and performing every study to support his belief that the value of the yen "must" fall. There is a strong message in the book about the limitations of knowledge and of chance -- the folly of thinking that, in any given case, any individual or group can be astute enough to identify and assess all the options and to reach a certain conclusion. This is wise advise indeed. Alas, in the case of this book, this wisdom is overwhelmed by a mass of stridency, shrillness, and self-certainty in the author in his own critique of aspects of modern life of which he greatly disapproves. The virtues of humility and the sense of human fallibility are valuable traits for writers and social critics -- as well as for billionaire financiers and for those obsessed with money and power.

Robin Friedman

3.5. I feel weird having to give this the same star rating as Libra, but goodreads is a garbage site. maybe it’s my fault for wanting to assign a numerical value to something like this.

“The rats were fine and right, thematically sound.”

His weirdest I’ve read yet. It operates like a dream, with countless and inconsequential murder, sex, appointments and events, all occupied by shadows of people you’re intimately familiar with or only vaguely recognizable, if at all. DeLillo’s writing here is closer to poetry than prose; you have to move through it one sentence at a time.

It’s funny and confusing. I struggled to match pace with the book, but he drops his trademark one-sentence profundities so often that you want to keep up with it. That being said, I can really only recommend it to fans.

Listened to this on audio during the commute and found the reader's voice really grating. Main character? Creepy and hateful, but not in a provocative way. More annoying. I don't generally enjoy reading (or listening) to lengthy soliloquies that are just excuses for phrases/random analogies or waxing on life's headier ponderances. Sounded forced, not ---ophical (insert prefix of choice). I wanted to perpetrate violence by the end of this story time, and I don't mean riotous/life-affirming violence but just cold, gangsta ass-kicking. In a word...huh?

Poetry pours from Cosmopolis, a sweaty rut of discourse and images about the nature of power in our world. Delillo is prescient and impactful, but he's always been, hasn't he?

The protagonist finds obsoletion everywhere and the reader cringes, suddenly questioning their own utility. The ending proved blurred but effective. I sense the message within. The dedication to Paul Auster was intriguing as well. I may see the film now.

“People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.”

I'm not completely sure what existential angst is, but I am pretty certain this book gave me it. And nightmares. And it made me laugh out loud in places too, and some of the language stopped me in my tracks - mostly in a good way.

This was horribly compelling, utterly terrifying and unfortunately rang an awful lot of bells. In many ways it was picaresque a sort of modern-day Tom Jones journey through Manhatten, or maybe more like Alice Through the Looking Glass (meets Bonfire of the Vanities). What was so awful was that the 'vision' portrayed has already come true, and that's what gave me the nightmares, because it didn't feel like a too-stretched or too-ironic take on our world. Our fear that we're missing out, our cult of obsolesence, the constant striving for the next new thing and the next - I wish I could say it felt exaggerated, but it didn't.

This sounds bleak beyond enjoyment and it was, often, but the humour saved it. I won't spoil it, but the doctor scene, and the pastry thrower had me in stitches. I'm a major fan of Don DeLillo, but he's a writer I have to take in very small doses. In fact, I'm not going to OD on very, very light romance as an antidote.

I would highly recommend this - but don't read it if you're already depressed, and definitely don't read it just before you go to sleep.

1) His prostate was asymmetrical, you know.

2) I'd like hours of my life back. And reparations, with damages for pain and suffering.

3) I spent time with two texts about billionaires today: one was this, and the other was Dynasty (2017--) 2.1, and I liked Dynasty better. It had a really good line about chamomile tea.

4) (No, but seriously, this to me is a Rorschach test of a novel, only as profound as the reader strives to make it, while spewing offensive triteness peppered with pretentious intellectualisms, and at its core reproducing what it satirises and subjecting the reader to concentrated misogyny, objectification and bile. Don't @ me. I could easily interpret this seven different ways to Sunday - the Eastern European elements, the currency references and Herbert connection, the gun violence, the sexism, the Marxism... bodies as fragile, each of those can be taken as starting points and taken to a three-to-ten page essay form, but I get bored before I finish the first topic sentence of that essay because this novel is just not as smart as it pretends to be. All glitter, no gold. And given how much of it is about money as a shared hallucination, this is probably its point, but even that annoys and bores me.)

5) In conclusion, blah.