This week I have read two Don DeLillo books; this one and White Noise, which thus far I have been too lazy to review. This may be regarded as a strange turn of events as after reading The Body Artist (my first foray into Don’s world), I had already bitterly sworn not to pick up another of his books. Anyway for one reason and another (causality :Don DeLillo books on sale for £2 each in HMV) here we are and I’ve read two more of his books with Underworld sitting, brooding darkly on my to-be-read shelf.

If you have ever:
Made a billion
Lost a billion
Played the markets
Killed a man
Married a woman you do not know
Selectively read half poems in bookshops
Laid naked in the street
Shot yourself

Then you may find it quite easy to empathise with protagonist Eric Packer, multi-billionaire, statistical genius and modern day lost soul. If not, then like me, you might struggle a bit. Similarly if you have an asymmetrical prostate then you’ll be all over this one.

Virtually the entire plot unfurls from within the confines of Packer’s ridiculous white stretch Limo which is enroute between his 48 rooms apartment and the barbers. But that is OK because the substance contained within the white Limo is a bit ridiculous too but then that is because the space and its content are an allegory, or a metaphor or an analogy for the journey through modern life.... or something. The strife on the streets matches, reflects and gives a voice to Packer’s own internal turmoil - a collective release and a ripple effect. He watches acts of anarchy on TV screens inside his Limo when the riots are taking place directly outside his window. Parker is the living breathing unattached buffered modern day man drifting through life with the trappings of things cutting of his view of the world.

The confining space is matched by the sparse, sharp edged confining descriptions and dialogue which made me feel a bit like someone was taking a paring knife to my temporal lobe in order to remove extraneous matter. The words are nakedly stripped in a way which is painful to read. I won’t pretend this book made total sense, much like I won’t pretend this review makes total sense either. Maybe that is DeLillo causality. Don DeLillo flaps his wings in the Amazon(.com) and my reviews stop making sense on goodreads.

I really enjoyed this book, enjoyed it in ways that I rarely enjoy novels. It is a couple of years since I read it and so I can only leave you with the impressions of it that have lasted. This is a book about the world that has built up around us and how even those who we might be excused for thinking ‘understand’ that world (we might perhaps even be tempted to claim they have ‘built’ that world) actually are as much acted upon and victims of it as we are.

The best summary I could give of this book is that it is the fictional version of Fooled by Randomness The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.

There are moments in DeLillo’s writing when I nearly forget to breathe. It doesn’t happen often, so I’ll count them out for you. There is that moment in the hotel room in Americana where the script is written on the hotel room’s walls. There is that couple of pages in Mao II where the women are watching the funeral on television (and perhaps the two weddings that start and end that novel too). There is also the fire at the mental institution in White Noise. These are all simply incomparable pieces of writing. If I had written any of these I think I would be able to die happy.

In this novel he has stolen his greatest image from Tunick’s work as documented in Naked States an utterly fascinating documentary (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0259453/). All the same, the idea of having the central character in this novel dressed and walking around bewildered in one of these photoshoots with seemingly thousands of naked people lying on the ground about him is perhaps one of the most interesting images I have received from a modern novel in quite some time.

I am at a complete loss on what to think about this book. It's filled with some of the coolest batshit crazy imagery I've read in a while, but the point (if there is one) is completely lost on me.

Certainly the premise seems Ulysses-esque in nature (man spends a day in the city), but I have yet to take that white whale, so it doesn't act as a guide for me.

There maybe a vein to mine in that this is set in a fictionalized New York during April 2000, but it was written after 9/11. Maybe its DeLillo's writing about a side of New York (the gaudy over the top rich) which he sees at odds with the experience of everyday people. But it thats the case, he misses his mark, or maybe that's the point. The characters I remember from DeLillo's works are schmucks we can't help but empathize with, Erick (the lead here) is anything but.

Look, with DeLillo, you're in good hands. Enjoy the ride, laugh at the absurdity, revel in the chaos, and then GTFO.

‘Cosmópolis’ o de las intersecciones de la vida contemporánea (tardo-capitalista)

En Cosmópolis Don DeLillo, un autor con una visión del mundo desgarradora, crítica, satírica (e incluso algo cínica o al menos esa es la mirada que nos trasmiten sus novelas); hace una disección de la vida contemporánea a través de la parábola del especulador financiero self-made: obsesionado por su salud, adicto al sexo, egocéntrico, narcisista, hiperactivo….; la construcción del personaje de Eric Packer es magnífica como retrato de la descomposición moral de nuestra sociedad (o de la sociedad contemporánea norteamericana que en esencia es la sociedad global y ejemplifica a la humanidad como un todo).

Eric Packer es un ciudadano del mundo (no tendría nacionalidad, su nación es el capital), es un cosmopolita. La ciudad deviene su universo materializado en una flamante limusina-habitáculo-bunker en la que se siente seguro y a salvo de las necesidad/ amenazas del mundo exterior (la realidad que se desvanece). Lo sólido que, poco a poco, va a desaparecer. Y en la que se mueve por sus calles cuando los cortes de tráfico se lo permiten.

La crítica se ha referido a la propuesta de DeLillo como una novela de ideas y sin duda es una referencia acertada; el autor expone unas ideas muy concretas sobre el sistema tardo-capitalista caracterizado por la idea del flujo de capitales ilimitado –idea compartida por el pensador Slavoj Žižek—, la noción de que el capital se autorregula en un flujo ilimitado y autoconsciente y del cual, Eric Packer es conocedor; salvo la mañana en la que se inicia el relato, momento en el cual el valor del yen se desploma estrepitosamente abocándolo a un posible ruina financiera.

Al inicio de la novela, y en realidad es un tema del que gira parte de la trama, hay un diálogo sublime entre Packer y su asesor sobre el cual en el futuro la rata cotizará como moneda. Una rata, la rata-concepto símbolo hegemónico de la ciudad de Nueva York, como moneda de curso legal.

Dedicato a Paul Auster, che in Trilogia di New York aveva reso la città sfondo delle avventure postmoderne di un "investigatore per caso", Cosmopolis si spinge oltre: la finzione letteraria non gioca più solo con se stessa tramite un meccanismo di specchi e duplicazioni, ma gioca anche con la finzione digitale e tecnologica; la realtà del protagonista, il miliardario Eric Packer, infatti, è quasi sempre una realtà mediata da schermi e informazioni digitali, mentre il confronto con il mondo viene sempre rimandato (si veda il rapporto con la moglie Elise).

La mancata accettazione della realtà a vantaggio di una perfezione sovrumana (Eric tende sicuramente al superomismo) si dimostra lungo tutto il romanzo il vero punto debole del protagonista: avrebbe dovuto imparare dalla sua prostata asimmetrica che la realtà non sempre segue regole perfette e immutabili. Ma Eric non è consapevole di questa realtà, i suoi parametri sono indipendenti: basti pensare ai concetti di spazio e tempo del romanzo, proiezione di quelli del protagonista. Un giorno, una città diventano un'intera vita e un mondo intero. In questo DeLillo è un postmodernista insuperabile: la realtà di Cosmopolis non è un dato di fatto, uno sfondo, ma è la diretta proiezione della raffigurazione del mondo nella testa di Eric, raffigurazione, tra l'altro, mediata da strumenti tecnologici e digitali che trasformano il mondo in una serie di informazioni astratte.

In particolare, i dati da cui dipende la realtà di Eric sono quelli della finanza: la visione del mondo del protagonista è modellata sul sistema capitalista, che nel romanzo subisce un'accelerazione e viene portata all'estremo delle sue potenzialità. Per questo motivo, a ragione, DeLillo è stato considerato un profeta della crisi economica (Cosmopolis è stato pubblicato nel 2003). Io direi di più: DeLillo ha saputo capire in anticipo a quale raffigurazione del mondo ci avrebbe portato la rivoluzione digitale, e Cosmopolis non è altro che il prodotto di questa raffigurazione, la storia di Eric è la storia della sua narrazione della realtà. Come tutti i romanzi postmoderni, questo è un romanzo "alla seconda", un labirinto in cui non si sa a chi credere, una storia che, a ben guardare, è tutta nella visione del mondo del protagonista. Sì, tende a essere un romanzo cerebrale, ma è esattamente questa la forma di romanzo che rispecchia il nostro tempo.

read for class. admittedly, i found parts of this difficult to navigate. how much of that was me vs the text vs my terribly formatted pdf version? who’s to say.

there were definitely lots of interesting things going on. the relationship this book has with the passage of time is very interesting to me — on the level of content (no spoilers, but the shit w the watch) and form too (it all takes place in one day! pacing is pretty crazy). there are some interesting lines about how capitalism (yeah, capitalism) changes our relationship with time that i think provide some excellent clues for how we are meant to read this single day’s epic journey.

lots of other great questions posed by the text. questions about fate that are also about technological determinism. questions about violence and the impulse to rationalize it. and of course, so much about capitalism.

i found this to be technically interesting, full of notable lines, and eric packer is a strange and fascinating character, who feels like a trope except when he (really) doesn’t. did i understand or love every choice this book made? not really. did i find it a gripping page turner? also not really. but im thinking about it still, and i expect ill keep thinking! there’s so much on every page.

edit: was thinking in the shower about how packer relates to other people. are they real to him? are they stories? pawns? the train of thought started because i was thinking about the way he relates to women — as objects of desire mostly, even women who are his bodyguards (and even though he’s married). he similarly writes off and exoticizes people of colour. packer’s biases aside, this is kind of how he relates to everyone - as an object of curiosity, a means to his end. makes sense. capitalism etc.

second edit: i realized i didn’t explicitly mention the ending in this review. i liked the ending a lot. very weird, lots of suspense, definitely more page-turn-y than earlier parts of the book. and, thematically, such an interesting place to leave it !!

It's one of the good ones.

Perhaps it could've been a tad shorter and on point, but Don DeLillo's characters will take the time to philosophize about everything and nothing even if it pisses you off. COSMOPOLIS is somehow better suited for 2019, where entrepreneurship has become cool, people are addicted to work and get off in connecting work with everything. It's terrifying, full of complicated detours, but unlike for other DeLillo novels, it has a satisfying payoff at the end.

Oh and the prostate stuff has a payoff too. Freakin' DeLillo. He really got me going there.

Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis is about a thinking-man’s Patrick Bateman, set in the year 2000, who just wants to get across town to get a haircut while keeping tabs on the rise and fall of the Yen in the stock market. Sure, Eric Packer meets and encounters people along the way: financial advisors, a doctor, women whom he has sex with, and the guy that used to work for him and now wants him dead; there’s also the President making a visit to the city, a famous rapper’s funeral procession, and protester-anarchists set out to destroy and make their message known --some of whom are dressed in rodent-like spandex and carrying dead rats; however, this is the plot, like it or not, and it takes place while waiting in traffic.

Not to mention, it’s challenging. It isn’t very accessible, but insightful. To me, it’s mostly a vehicle to spur thought and discussion, yet packaged and sold as a novel. So, this is what it made me think about:

The passage in particular that resonates with me is-- “It pretends not to see the horror and death at the end of the schemes it builds. This is the protest against the future. They want to hold off the future. They want to normalize it, keep it from overwhelming the present” (91).

People are increasingly living behind screens. But it’s no longer just at home. You can now access the internet from your very own cell phone; you can also take pictures, play games, and text, too. I think it’s funny that people can’t even sit and wait patiently for someone to arrive at a coffee shop anymore; they instead nervously pull out their phone and do …something, or pretend to. Speaking of these phones, you can also comparative shop in brick and mortar stores just by snapping a photo of the item, or by taking down an e-note to buy later, on Amazon of course. But if you aren’t going to actually buy anything from the physical store that you’re in, how will this or other stores, survive? My neighborhood Target closed. Let me say that again – Target. If a Target has to close its doors, what does that say? So, if we have more and more abandoned buildings, with more and more layoffs, what’s going to happen to people? Do the people playing Angry Birds on their cell phones ponder this question? Does it cross their mind the second before they snap the photo of the book that’s already on sale for 30% off from their local independent bookstore? I don’t know. But I don’t know a lot of things, and this is what I’m realizing with each day. I don’t know how a radio really works. I mean, how does the music actually get from the radio station to my ears? Could you explain it step by step? ...and then there's, what, xm? Or your money in the bank… You transfer funds around all the time, but does the money actually move? And where is it all, exactly? Do you have your own special drawer with your name on it? I don’t understand, but I accept. We accept.

We have all of this technology at our fingertips, some of it is supposed to make our lives easier, and some of it to make us feel in-touch and social with our friends, but it’s just making us more isolated and lonely. And if that’s not true, it will be. Because when all of the stores are closed for business, people will have nowhere to go.

This is a depressing book review... I’m sorry. I hardly even discussed the book, but like I said, it’s more-so what it makes you think about. I thought these thoughts before I read Cosmopolis, but I like that it made me think and consider and ponder and question.

So read it; it’ll make you love life (!!!). Or don’t, but go buy something from some place in town, and do it while hanging out with friends and family. And then maybe go see the movie, where Robert Pattinson will say things such as, "I want to bottle-fuck you slowly with my sunglasses on."

Though written in 2003, Cosmopolis’s America still largely reflects our own. This cuts several ways. Happily, we are still corporeal beings with all the old animal urges of sweat and secretion. The new flesh of pure mind promised by Silicon Valley’s overlords has yet to materialize—it is always a few years off—and yet we live and work and commune in the Internet’s incorporeal shadow spaces. Their most fanciful projections have already subsumed our world, such that time is now negatively defined by how much of it we spend away from screens. To paraphrase Underworld, the world has become a thing inside the Internet, rather than the other way around.

As DeLillo persuasively diagnoses, America’s 21st-century heart is found in a confluence: between its institutions, financial and otherwise, that are vulnerable to the vagaries of single powerful individuals, and the enveloping, anomie-plagued Internet, which similarly grants its anonymous participants both a freedom from consequences and an outsize power to manipulate. In this formulation, we are all free agents, noncitizens, unaccountable to each other, and may he or she win who is most ruthless and least beholden to the old restraints of shame, guilt, privacy. We live in public (which is now another synonym for the digital), and yet “life” in any natural sense is far from what happens online.

This is the world wunderkind investor Eric Packer wakes up to make or break every day, so concentrated is his wealth and power, so vast is his global reach. Allowed to borrow currency in exorbitant sums, Packer (and the real-life multibillionaires he represents) carries a mandate potent enough to ruin the global financial system, fueled by nothing more than a hunch and delusive clairvoyance. What virus, what cataclysm, cocoons inside this system, awaiting form? (The Great Recession of 2008 was one manifestation.) What kind of society permits such a weakness to imperil its core ability to function? Is it, too, self-destructive, as doom-eager as our protagonist? How is the person wielding such power affected by that self-same knowledge? (Here, as in our current politics, the answer is: unpredictably.) These uneasy questions—omens in DeLillo’s hands—background Packer’s “self-engineered” downfall. The main point of Cosmopolis is this: Of all possible epochs throughout human history, only ours has made a person of this type possible.

But, as he comes to realize—and here DeLillo reveals his sympathies—this godlike power to sever the relationship between act and consequence, this exemption from reprisal, is dehumanizing. It is as though the basic rules of cause and effect have ceased to apply and have left him less than a person: a pure mind floating in space without attachment and imposing its will without conscience. In a muttered command over the phone or with a few mouse-clicks, he marshals the self-justifying logic of money as an end in itself; not as a means of accomplishing other ends, but simply for its own perpetuation. (As one cabinet bootlicker said in a different context after the 2016 election, “Its authority shall not be questioned.”) The effects, it is clear, in novel as in life, are monstrous and indiscriminately ravaging. Other people have no reality to him; they are, quite literally, blind spots. As we are told continually, he has no idea of his closest confederates’ appearances, he struggles to pick his wife out of a crowd, can only recognize facial features with a great effort of concentration. In this sense, the story can be interpreted as an elegy for America’s former sense of self, rooted in the material facts of family history and community, and a dark prophecy regarding the fate of the formerly inviolate human being, reduced to grist for the electronic brain. Toward the end, Packer foresees a future in which death has become obsolete because consciousness never leaves the cloud. Remember, this was in 2003; DeLillo had no way of knowing about Neuralink, Elon Musk’s remarkably similar-sounding venture:

The idea was to live outside the given limits, on a disk, as data, in whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from void...It is happening now, an evolutionary advance that needed only the practical mapping of the nervous system onto digital memory. It would be the master thrust of cyber capital, to extend the human experience toward infinity as a medium for corporate growth and investment, for the accumulation of profits and vigorous reinvestment. (pgs. 206–207)

Packer is finally shocked into being by a proof of the mind’s connection to the body, of his connection to other people, in witnessing a man’s self-immolation during an anti-globalization protest. The sacrifice bursts his defenses, his remove from the world, and it sets him on his self-destructive path to a hopeless liberation. Later, he will offer up his own relatively minor sacrifice, whose pain sets him free. From what? Technological determinism, you could say. DeLillo’s theme of warped vision extends from the biological to the cyber eye, suggesting an oppressive second sight. At different points, Packer believes (hallucinates?) that the screens in his limo show events that have yet to happen but soon will. A self-inflicted bullet hole through the hand replaces virtual supra-reality with his true reality as a person who can suffer as others have, from time immemorial. It rescues him from the delusion that he is exempt, for the inexorable pain confirms that he, too, will die.

American literature features some remarkable tales of willful self-destruction. Few of them feature captains of the global economy; for this reason, for the height of the fall alone, Packer’s descent is memorable. One comparison that comes to mind is Appointment in Samarra’s Julian English. Like Packer, English, top of the country club set, feels himself above heeding consequences. The difference is in English’s fearsome self-disgust, which limns the extent of his carnage and enables the burning of all bridges toward a total annihilation. He is completely, soul-sickly, done with life. (Compare with the moral exhaustion felt by Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch.) Packer, by contrast, courts death in order to more fully live, shedding his screens and limousine to mix with the canaille, come what may. He intentionally loses his and his wife’s fortunes, goes looking for the credible threat on his life, even “accidentally on purpose” commits a murder. And yet, for all his misdeeds, his decision to interact with life unfiltered makes him, not sympathetic, not relatable, but something human. This intensification of typical dramaturgy, wherein the protagonist takes a pre-third-act stand to direct the story’s outcome, is self-determination taken to its logical endpoint. Packer indeed shakes off the totalizing hold of Profit and, in an inverse assertion of force, finds liberty in losing it all.

I read Cosmopolis as dystopic–realistic science fiction. DeLillo doesn’t shy away from the sheer weirdness of a person who is this wealthy and this isolated. Everything in his life turns on an egocentric symmetry: daily medical checkups, mirrors that give BMI readouts, his penthouse apartment’s rotating bedroom, two elevators designed to invoke an apposite mood in their passengers, surveillance screens that monitor movements inside and outside the armored sanctuary of his limousine, and, not least, his esoteric mathematical formula for anticipating the market fluctuations of currency, itself modeled on the symmetries of nature. Every step, every breath, every moment is an opportunity for advantage, to be measured and graphed for maximal efficiency. Conversations in the limo, where Packer conducts most business, flow in the typically clipped, elliptical cadences of DeLillo’s previous work. Disorientation is greater in Cosmopolis, but it’s hard to pin down the reasons. Perhaps one reason is the muddling of signposts, the diffusions of time and place during a ride around Manhattan. Another reason could be a lack of authentic character differentiation, and a fugue-like atmosphere that, I believe intentionally, obfuscates motivation and leaves the reader uncertain and second-guessing what certain actions portend. Our distance recedes in proportion to Packer’s transformation, but the fog remains. Perhaps this is appropriate given that the limo—and our experience of the Internet, for that matter—is foremost a liminal space, an estranging shell that loses its aura of untouchability as Packer sheds his mania for control. “Let it express itself,” indeed.

When an ex-employee accuses Packer of treating workers as “helpless robot soldiers,” we might ruefully consider how far corporations have gone to turn their employees into servile units of production. There is Amazon’s policy of minutely tracking warehouse work performance, or the hair-raising electronic monitoring of long-haul truckers, some of whom must “drive a fifty-foot flatbed truck six hundred miles a day with a video camera staring them down the entire time, watching their eyes, their knuckles, their twitches, their whistles, their neck movements” (from an article in the NYRB). Any system controlled this tightly by one man, whether we mean Packer—prone to superstitions, whims, biases, and flaws, like you or I—or any of his real-world avatars (take your pick), can unravel just as easily, by fiat. It is just another toy. We, who depend on various systems controlled by unitary executives, can only hope that the next dismantling resembles a performance of purging spectacle, like the protest setpiece in this book, and not a conflagration that immiserates all.

I was hoping by page 24 that the protagonist of this novel would be dragged from his limousine and beaten by children with Tickle Me Elmo dolls loaded with bricks. And then we would never hear from him again. But that ain't what happened. Unfortunately. A terrible novel by a great writer.

αυτο ειναι το 3ο βιβλιο του Delillo που διαβασα και αυτο που μου αρεσε περισσοτερο. σιγουρα θα αναζητησω κσι αλλα εργα του συγγραφεα αυτου.

Η ιστορια εκτυλισσεται κατα κυριο λογο κ σχεδον αποκλειστικα στην τεραστια λιμουζινα του 28χρονου πολυεκατομμυριουχου Ερικ.Ξεκινα μια διαδρομη για ενα..κουρεμα.Εμεις λοιπον τον ακολουθουμε σε αυτη την διαδρομη στη Νεα Υορκη του 2000 στην οποια επικρατει αναβρασμος εν μεσω διαδηλωσεων, επιθεσεων(ακομη και εναντια στον πρωταγωνιστη ως εκπροσωπου του καπιταλισμου) , επισκεψεων του προεδρου των ΗΠΑ ,ακομη και της κηδειας ενος διασημου ραπερ(μια απο τις αγαπημενες μου σκηνες).ολη αυτη η "αναστατωση" λοιπον τι αλλο θα μπορουσε να προμηνυει παρα δυσαρεστα γεγονοτα..και εκει ακριβως οδηγειται η κατασταση.εκει θελει να μας οδηγησει ο συγγραφεας.στο κλισε οτι το χρημα μπορει να αγορασει τα παντα ,αλλα οχι και την ισορροπία και την αθανασια..και ακριβως σε αυτο το κλισε καταληγει η ιστορια αλλα η διαδρομη ως εκει (με λιμουζινα, παρακαλω) καθε αλλο παρα κλισε ειναι..
4 αστερια.

"He said, 'My prostrate is assymetrical.'
His voice was barely audible. There was a pause that lasted half a minute. He felt the subject regard him carefully, the other. There was a sense of human involvement.
'So is mine,' Benno whispered."

nahhhhh.
I don't have time for this, ironic or not.