Ironico, visionario, globale e sottovalutato.

"Il male è un movimento in direzione del nulla". Bucky Wunderlich è una rockstar che si muove in direzione del male; un male inteso non come morte, ma come trasformazione. Bucky si sta trasformando, lo sente, lo percepisce, e come un animale al capolinea, sceglie il posto in cui passare il tempo che gli resta (le mura della casa della sua fidanzata in Great Jones Street, a Manhattan, dove si ritira insieme alla sua band mentre è all'apice del successo) prima di approdare ad uno stadio della vita successivo . Si sottrae alla forza risucchiatrice di una generazione che lo ha incoronato icona degli eccessi e che vorrebbe ancora vederlo protagonista sulla scena. Per il pubblico è evidente l'importanza di avere un punto di riferimento, ovunque esso sia e sotto qualsiasi forma, che lo aiuti ad illudersi che nulla possa davvero cambiare. Ma Bucky non crede più all'importanza di servire quell'illusione. Accarezzerà comunque, per un breve periodo di tempo, l'idea di tornare a calcare i palcoscenici del mondo; gli si prospetterà la possibilità di propinare al pubblico alcuni inediti "canti della montagna", suoni giovani, scritti in età giovane, che non torneranno più e che per vari motivi, si perderanno.
Durante questa presa di coscienza che lo porterà ad inevitabile sbandamento, qualcuno proverà ad approfittare della sua condizione ed allora entreranno nella storia giornalisti spietati a caccia di notizie sensazionali e membri di una misteriosa comunità agricola che tenteranno di piazzare una droga dagli effetti misteriosi.

Sarà tra le vittime degli eccessi di cui cantava, predicando come un cattivo maestro, che Bucky cercherà se stesso dopo essersi smarrito - dopo aver perduto il suo ruolo in una società da cui si è sempre più distaccato e da cui ormai ha preso le distanze. Le voci sulla sua presunta fine si moltiplicheranno e tra le più seducenti prenderà corpo - proprio in chiusura - quella che lo vorrebbe a compiere "buone azioni, tra vagabondi e sifilitici, santo patrono di tutti gli individui che ascoltano il canto dei misteri delle sirene lungo il fiume e subito dopo tornano a dormire tra i fumi del vino ai confini meridionali della città".
Un libro straordinario sul genere umano e sulla società portato avanti col solito linguaggio ironico, visionario e globale di De Lillo.

An early Don DeLillo novel, this one is largely inside the head of a rock and roller in 1973 who has decided to step off the fast track. Sarcastic, damaged, brilliant, burned-out, caught in the machine that was rock and roll promotion, DeLillo uses his standard long, beautiful sentences to capture the thoughts (as well as interactions through dialogue) of a person on the edge of a breakdown amidst a milieu that is beyond crazy. There's an aloof detachment here--as a reader, I didn't feel the fear or the angst--but as an intellectual exercise, this was brilliant. Many other characters are drawn largely through their dialogue, which absolutely shines here. The twist at the end was pretty impressive--foreshadowed, but I only appreciated it in retrospect. As there's virtually no jargon or lingo, the book has largely aged well and could describe any musician today in a similar position. (Well, but for a few homophobic parts that would have passed in the day and wouldn't today, but they aren't central to the book.) I can see many of the techniques being piloted here that were later central to his masterpieces like Underworld. The folks who didn't like this were probably expecting more of a plot--nearly the whole book is spent sitting around an apartment--but that seems an unfair expectation for a literary novel of the time. I enjoyed it.

Tone: dark satire. Characters: comic book. Plot: not really. Theme: recuperation but in relation to individual fulfillment not situationist politics.

This one really deserves 3 1/2 stars and I'm also grading it somewhat relatively to Don DeLillo's other novels and it does pale a bit in comparison. The main premise of this is that a big rock star lead singer gets bogged down within the realm of the mass consciousness and retreats unexpectantly and suddenly to the realm of the private. However, instead of his mountain hideout, he actually goes to an apt. in NYC. Some of this is my speculation but I think DeLillo was making some pretty accurate statements about one's anonymity in this city and the potential, like a single frail molecule, to dissolve. As expected, he meets some shady characters and gets roped into a really wretched drug ring. Throughout all of the chaos of the novel, the main character stays assuredly calm and doesn't seem to manifest any great fear of death or torture, which is atypical of most protagonists put in this position. The weakness in terms of that is you don't get a sense of him as a main character and he comes off as having a real flat affect. The strengths of this book by far are within the descriptions of NYC and not within the details of his characters. Also, although I thought I would really like this plot as I'm into music, I ended up not caring for it nearly as much as Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet. If you are looking for a DeLillo novel to start with, I wouldn't recommend this one as much as his classic White Noise, though I really liked Mao II much better.

I went down a DeLillo rabbit hold last weekend with Great Jones Street:

"Beauty is dangerous in narrow times, a knife in the slender neck of the rational man, and only those who live between the layers of these strange days can know its name and shape."

Great Jones Street is Don DeLillo's third novel, but in many ways it's the first one to reveal the themes that will consume the rest of his career: celebrity vs. privacy, possession in a consumer culture, and the undercurrents of society. It may be the roadmap to his later, superior works, but it contains the key to all of his best books: a tension that anything can happen, that characters are balanced on a knife edge, and that there is a fundamental human cost to ownership and consumption.

When DeLillo's narrator, Bucky Wunderlick, disappears from the rock'n'roll scene, he becomes the object of many questions. His publishing company, Transparanoia, and manager want more music, perhaps his fabled Mountain Tapes (a clear stalking horse for Bob Dylan & the Band's Basement Tapes, unreleased in 1973). An underground group treats not only drugs but also their couriers and dispensible commodities, and old associates begin to circle. What results is an imperfect book that points the way to ideas DeLillo would redevelop across the next 25 yeras.

The influence of Thomas Pynchon, especially The Crying of Lot 49, is pervasive, with "interviews" involving Bucky and song lyrics from his albums. Fans of Dylan will enjoy references to the baroque riddle that is Self Portrait. This may not be the place to start with DeLillo, but it was interesting as an ur-moment in his bibliography.

Video discussion and readings: https://youtu.be/BpZInD8x-V8

This book is very specifically exactly the kind of thing I would like: Lacking a classic kind of plot, centered around a bob-dylan esque figure in the 60s-70s, with a Pynchon-esque conspiracy-paranoia underlying the thing, characters that are just fucking weird, critique on society, fame and American culture in a way that is more relevant than ever and chock full of beautiful passages and word-use while not becoming verbose. (I mean that is why I picked up this thing, Delilo’s kinda famous for that).

The characters have a very specific way they talk, trying to emulate patterns of speech. They repeat themselves a lot. And they get rant-y. They say things that make sense to themselves.
At some point you realise the protaognist, Bucky, is the most normal person in his environment. Basically everyone around the rock star is crazier than him. He’s also the most passive, he doesn’t really want anything, or say much. He’s just charismatic. The ending is kind of wild though. After kind of nothing really happening for most of the book, it all kind of starts to escalate rapidly.

Notte alta, acqua che cade

“Eravamo come angeli che si davano ospitalità a vicenda nell'assenza di qualsiasi desiderio, inebetiti da una passività comune a vagare alla deriva tra particelle subatomiche. L'amore delle menti dovrebbe vivere oltre la vita materiale. E forse è così, come se ciascuna mente fosse una stella di neutroni, invisibile se non agli occhi della teoria, che impone la sua forza di gravità allo spazio per trovare un'amante”.

Great Jones Street è la storia rovesciata di una ricerca di libertà: un musicista celebre si ritira in un piccolo appartamento newyorchese e si isola, cercando così di smitizzarsi e tenersi nascosto, spogliandosi al minimo della leggenda e della fantasia di sé stesso. Naturalmente il mondo, reale e massmediatico, continua a portare contro la rockstar le sue zone di pressione, la gravità che impedisce di riconciliarsi con l'orrore anonimo, di resistere alla verità del fatto che egli si sente classificato nella categoria delle cose. Suoi vicini di casa sono l'anziana madre di un ragazzo disabile e un vecchio scrittore fallito, artefice di letteratura impossibile, su pornografia e finanza. L'energia è la forza dell'universo e Bucky sente un dolore solitario, opaco e senza radici: ad assediare il suo equilibrio arrivano numerosi antagonisti, che ruotano tutti intorno al “prodotto”, una droga fantascientifica che agisce sui centri del linguaggio inaridendo la facoltà di parola, e dall'altro lato sui misteriosi e segreti nastri della montagna, giovanili incisioni acustiche del cantante che contengono la sua anima più sincera, oggetto taumaturgico per l'avido mercato discografico. Così si sviluppano i pensieri e le narrazioni di De Lillo, orientate tra fama, eccesso e insania: l'uomo massificato non è libero; bisogna costruire spazi interiori. È l'unica direzione rimasta per costruire. Il male è un movimento in direzione del nulla. Spesso gli avvenimenti potenziali sono più importanti di quelli veri, nell'universo delle multinazionali come in quello delle comunità. L'uomo ha un retaggio di violenza nato insieme al pensiero astratto; quando abbiamo iniziato a pensare in astratto, abbiamo compiuto il passaggio dall'uccidere per mangiare all'uccidere per le parole e le idee. Forse la violenza insensata porterà a qualcosa di nuovo. Per ora siamo alla violenza per il nulla. Nulla a cui aspiriamo, in una quieta e paranoica disperazione: dove sciamani digitali manipolano informazioni e ordiscono complotti con la chiave della nostra incoscienza”.

“Collegare gli strumenti agli amplificatori, e poi sentirci percorrere il sangue da quel ronzio ben augurante di corrente elettrica, dare al pubblico il sangue che desiderava, vergini cieche nude su piedistalli di polistirolo, venditori di medicine antiche, maestri della trance, stoici neri che esibivano al mondo i buchi nelle vene, assassini di lama e di veleno, e i cervelli fondevano nel nostro sound sinuoso, in un ululato elettrico e le vecchie urlavano sulle sedie a rotelle, i bambini travestiti da donna, i banchieri dementi, i mercanti di vino e gli stupratori di bambini, i mistici in calore, i ragazzi traslucidi che palpavano le tette alle mogli dei missionari. Folle che si accalcavano una contro l'altra, incatenate a una storia invisibile, e i più giovani di quel pubblico erano ben consapevoli che fra i bisogni umani ce n'è uno superiore a tutti gli altri, vale a dire il bisogno di essere illetterati in un mondo di parole che si cancellano da sole”.

Very wordy, very surreal, absurd and poetic. Occassionally I think Delillo gets too caught up in theories and word choice and forgets his narrative, but overall (and excluding the bizarre and confusing ending) I enjoyed this. In basic terms, this is the thoroughly postmodern story of a rock icon, man-turned-myth, who becomes extremely depressed and maybe unhinged. He unfruitfilly seeks asylum in his girlfriend's New York apartment, where she dies and a mysterious commune involves him in drug trade.

Some of my favorite things about this novel:

Bucky's unreliability. From the very first chapter I questioned what he said. He kept repeating that he put on Opel's coat and I kept thinking to myself, "what is the deal with this coat?! is he taking it off over and over or does he forget it is already on??" He is a really endearing protagonist with a lot of snarky one-liners.

Everything Bucky says about Opel. It is beautiful! She is his center of gravity, his comfort and his muse, she is unattainable and fragile and mysterious and Bucky adored her. The part where he speaks to the phone operator and demands that a true nun, probably of German descent, come see to Opel's body (or no deal) is heartbreaking.

I am not really a rock and roll girl but the opening descriptions of his music make you truly feel what the genre is all about:
"We were the one group that people depended on to validate their emotions and this was to be a good night of above-average fury." I think this book did such a good job at portraying rock and roll that I became embarrassed for how I rated Daisy Jones and the Six and went back and lowered my rating!

Sound as a theme. It is so fitting that anytime Bucky talks to someone and becomes disinterested in what they are saying, he zones out and listens to sounds, like the musicality of a hammer one street over or the rhythm of Fenig upstairs, or the lyrics to the radio song in the background. So like a musical artist.

Delillo handles depression in a really interesting way. Suicide is a central theme. Throughout the novel Bucky craves isolation and feels disassociated from humanity. The passage at the end of the party Opel throws for him is my absolute favorite description in the book:
"I thought of all the inner organs in the room, considered apart from the people they belonged to. For that moment of thought we seemed a convocation of martyrs, visible behind our skin. The room was a cell in a mystical painting, full of divine kidneys, lungs aloft in smoke, entrails gleaming, bladders simmering in painless fire. This was a madman's truth, to paint us as sacs and flaming lariats, nearly godly in our light, perishable but never ending. I watched the pale girl touch her voluptuous navel. One by one, repacked in sallow cases, we all resumed our breathing."

This description of modern culture. And similar places in the book that made me pause and think oh, this is true and important:
"in a millennium or two, a seeming paradox of our civilization will be best understood by those men versed in the methods of counter-archeology. They will study us not by digging into the earth but by climbing vast dunes of industrial rubble and mutilated steel, seeking to reach the tops of our buildings. Here they'll chip lovingly away at our spires, mansards, turrets, parapets, belfries, water tanks, flower pots, pidgeon lofts and chimneys...back in their universities in the earth, the counter-archeologoists will sort their reasons for our demise, citing as prominent the fact that we stored our beauty in the air, for birds of prey to see, while placing at eye level nothing more edifying than hardware, machinery, and the implements of torture"
Not only is this passage gorgeous, it hits something real: a warning against the dangers of inclining toward the abstract and dematerialization. Perhaps this is why Bucky eventually rejects words and reverts to sound, finding peace in the unfamiliarness of objects without title.

ENTRE LO GENIAL Y LA DESMESURA


Hace tiempo que a DeLillo le llevo dando una oportunidad. Sé, o creo saber, mientras no encuentre pruebas que me demuestren lo contrario, que un gran Don DeLillo se oculta detrás de sus libros, tras cada uno de sus párrafos, presto a salir, pero el caso es que me cuesta dar con él. En primer lugar fue la deficiente El hombre del salto, una aproximación al drama del 11-S demasiado apresurada, interesada y comercial, chapucera, como para ser tenida en serio dentro de su extensa bibliografía; un suspenso a todas luces, y es una lástima que un escritor norteamericano no se mostrara más serio y más sensible produciendo un trabajo acorde a su calidad literaria a la hora de tratar un asunto tan delicado. Aunque en su descargo cabe destacar otra maniobra del mismo estilo en la persona de John Updike, y mira que lo admiro, con el agravante en este escritor que su Terrorista pasará a los anales como su última novela, otro intento timorato y aprovechado, a la carrera, utilizando el anzuelo del revuelo post atentado al World Trade Center, donde la historia de células terroristas islámicas, y asuntos por el estilo, traídas por los pelos y la desgana, manchan una impecable trayectoria literaria.
Volviendo a Don DeLillo, y a mi historia con las oportunidades perdidas, tras la decepcionante El hombre del salto, llegó otra aún peor, Body Art, de un barroquismo plúmbeo, un delirio ególatra hasta el extremo, y una de las obras de DeLillo menos salvables, sino la peor. Finalmente, acometí la lectura de Libra, un libro en todo excesivo, con la esperanza de hallar en ella la redención de su autor… y bueno, aquí empezó a descollar otro DeLillo, si bien lastrado por una extensión imposible, por el propio peso de los acontecimientos y de intentar abarcar un sinfín de situaciones y personajes… Libra ya era otra historia que, sin satisfacerme del todo, al menos dejaba mostrar las cualidades de ese DeLillo de quien tanto había oído hablar.
Es La calle Great Jones, su tercera novela, y es más de lo mismo en este sentido, y lo lamento, porque me van quedando pocas ganas de otorgarle nuevas oportunidades. Sí que, tras el vodevil sobre el rock and roll y la cultura de masas que representa el texto, del cual se pondría en pie una interesante opereta rock, aparecen las virtudes de ese que se supone es el mejor DeLillo: unos párrafos demoledores, en ocasiones unas descripciones de una originalidad brillantísima, junto con algunos personajes realmente inspirados, como es el caso del retrato que hace del escritor clandestino y de sus hábitos de trabajo. Por el contrario, los males son los males de siempre, el barroquismo exacerbado de su prosa, la incontinencia verbal, el excesivo recorrido de un libro al que parecen sobrarle continuamente páginas, muchas veces incluso nos da la sensación de estar leyendo, literalmente, prosa de relleno, junto a una trama casi insostenible, gratuitamente enmarañada y que, si bien goza de algún personaje magnífico, muestra un número bastante alto de otros actantes secundarios ciertamente poco atractivos, por no decir que gratuitamente poco definidos. El libro, además, va de más a menos, pierde mucho fuelle en sus capítulos finales, para terminar cansando. La historia necesitaba de un cierre muchísimo antes.
Sin embargo, de entre todo ello, aparece ese DeLillo deslumbrante con el juego del lenguaje, con ciertas perspectivas en la narración y en la construcción literaria, trufada de reflexiones interesantes, de comparaciones sorprendentes, y con un humor extraño y delirante (en la transcripción de las canciones del grupo de rock, por ejemplo) que hacen que leer La calle Great Jones, en algunos momentos, haya merecido la pena y no haya sido una completa pérdida de tiempo, y que incluso, después, le pueda segir dando una nueva oportunidad a su autor. Pero ya le resta poco crédito, en eso le ocurre igual que a Thomas Pynchon, de quién, tras haber leído El arco iris de gravedad y La subasta del lote 49, y ratificarme plenamente en mi decepción, tan sólo le concederé ya la clemencia de V, como última oportunidad de redención. La elección de una novela más de DeLillo será determinante en la suerte de este autor, y no soy ajeno a sus grandes triunfos como Submundo, Ruido de fondo, Mao II o Cosmópolis; de entre una de ellas aparecerá el DeLillo que me subyugue o el DeLillo que aborrezca. Por lo pronto, de La calle Great Jones, salvo la tibieza que deja su lectura, con el recuerdo de algún momento narrativo memorable y algún retrato literario aceptable, poco más se puede argumentar. Un libro que colocar en la hilera de obras publicadas por DeLillo, que pierde fuelle, y aún perderá más fuelle con el paso de los años, pese a algunos aciertos más que evidentes albergados en su inflamado y por momentos monótono interior.

El libro va de más a menos, acaba de una forma decepcionante, y el sentimiento, tras haberlo leído, es ese, de haber asistido a una novela fracasada, de que era una idea ambiciosa en la cabeza del autor, que podría haber sido mucho más, pero que se ha quedado en menos precisamente por un tratamiento errado del texto, en su mayor parte demasiado grandilocuente, y que desmejora, así, algunos de los momentos buenos y de los evidentes aciertos que posee.

This was an interesting short and experimental novel from DeLillo written in 1973. Spoilers follow. It centers on Bucky at the height of the frenzy of his music career -- he seems to represent an iconic person of the times perhaps in the shade of John Lennon, Bob Dillon or Jim Morrison -- he's at that sort of top level acclaim. But for a number of reasons he has had it, it's not so much emotional and personal burn out but just displeasure on a number of levels. He retreats to a small room/apt., in the industrial part of New York on Great Jones Street. Again, this is the 1970's so no gentrification and Starbuck's etc. DeLillo captures this time in New York and the characters that room the gritty and lonely streets. Bucky seems to be pushing back against the corporate/materialism of the music industry and all culture. The story weaves in and out and meanders a bit into some sort of high level dealings with a newly developed drug -- and again flirts with corporate greed posing as cool downtown. DeLillo includes all of Bucky's music and lyrics -- in large sections making me recall a more recent novel about the music business that did sort of the same thing/but with power point. And to note, some of the novel may seem dated, DeLillo sort of fixates as does Bucky on technology of landline phones and trying to track someone, or make up a story about where someone is which today (2017) is much more logistically difficult but still this story has something interesting and illusive about it.

Set in the early seventies, a famous rock star abdicates and retreats to the dereliction and sanctuary of the titular Great Jones Street,NY..The themes and ideas are interesting,fame,privacy,freedom,the media etc.The characterisation is poor and the plot descends into the absurd.However the descriptive writing particularly in the opening chapters is excellent.I had higher expectations from a major writer.Two stars,maybe two and a half.

Representation: Black characters
Trigger warnings: Drug use
Score: Five out of ten.
Find this review on The StoryGraph.

Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo is another disappointing piece of literary fiction.

Well that was a unique reading experience. I wanted to read Great Jones Street when they got it last year but I put it off for months before finally picking it up. I glanced at the blurb, making it seem intriguing, but I lowered my expectations after seeing the ratings, and when I closed the final page, I thought it was average.

It starts with Bucky Wunderlick leaving New York in the 1970s after forgoing fame and fortune when he left his rock and roll band to pursue peace by travelling across the world in the opening pages. I enjoyed the beginning but Great Jones Street got stale from there as its slow pacing didn't do wonders for it as it disengaged me from the narrative. For a piece of literary fiction, Great Jones Street's plot is surprisingly simple even though it tries focuses on the theme of escaping from fame and riches. Tries. Still, it's superficial since the story is mostly about Bucky going to places and talking to so many characters I couldn't keep track of, and they were hard to connect or relate with. At least I interpreted a message saying being a celebrity has unintended consequences (which is true,) but making the narrative more engaging would've cleared everything up. The conclusion has slightly more action as Bucky arrives at a place called Happy Valley, where he takes a drug that makes him forget to speak until the last pages. What a finish.