Ein Monolith, dem schwer beizukommen ist. Ich habe mich etwas schwer getan, die Intention des Textes zu erfassen. Auch jetzt kann ich (noch?) nicht sagen, ihn in Gänze verstanden zu haben. Vielleicht tut sich ja noch etwas nach Lektüre von Sekundärliteratur

i've tried and failed several times to put into words the fullness of my admiration for this author. then:

DON DELILLO DROVE ME INSANE BY MAKING MY BRAIN EXPLODE AT REGULAR INTERVALS. THEN HE WOULD REEL ALL THE PIECES BACK IN AND WEAVE THEM TOGETHER...ONLY TO BLOW THEM UP AGAIN WITH THE NEXT PARAGRAPH!! I DIDN'T EVEN REALIZE I WAS IN A FOREST, FOR ALL THE TIMES I WOULD GO BACK AND READ THAT ONE TREE, JUST THAT ONE TREE, OVER AND OVER BEFORE I WAS ABLE TO TEAR MYSELF AWAY AND MOVE ONTO THE NEXT PAGE. IN CASE YOU DIDN'T NOTICE, I HAVE TO USE ALL-CAPS WHEN TALKING ABOUT DON DELILLO, BECAUSE IF I WAS TELLING YOU THIS INSIDE OF REAL LIFE, I COULD LIKEWISE ONLY DO SO WITH INCREASED VOLUME. AS I WAS BEING DESTROYED BY THIS BOOK, I WAS FORCED TO EXERCISE A NAUSEATING LEVEL OF SELF-CONTROL, FOR EVERY NOW AND THEN I WOULD ENCOUNTER A PASSAGE SO DEVASTATINGLY PROFOUND, I WAS TRANSLATED INTO A RAVING LUNATIC WHOSE "ONLY" ACCEPTABLE RESPONSE WOULD HAVE BEEN TO YELL AND SCREAM AS LOUD AS I COULD. EVEN AS I WAS HOLDING BACK MY CRAZY VERBAL OUTBURSTS I WOULD FEEL A STING OF GUILT FOR INSULTING THIS BOOK BY NOT PRAISING IT THE WAY IT SHOULD BE PRAISED; BY SCREAMING AND YELLING LIKE A MADMAN. TOO MANY TIMES I ACTUALLY HAD TO CLOSE. THE. BOOK. AND WALK AWAY, ELSE RISK HAVING A SEIZURE. A SEIZURE, PEOPLE! A SEIZURE!

and that is what i thought. if the term 'thinking' even applies in this case, and i'm quite sure it did not. the actual scope and story of it all, the forest, i could care less about, except where the actual themes are concerned (the names?). our protagonist wanders around, and has some conversations and thinks about some stuff. i dunno, i guess some things happen. i suppose my brain was too busy exploding.

I can't figure out what to write about this book. This review does have a soundtrack though, it's a Leonard Cohen song, listen to it here.

With the exception of The Players, I feel like I'm through with what I think of as the 'early Delillo'. Next up is White Noise, which I feel is vastly overrated but which I'm going to give another try, and then there is Libra, a departure from what I normally think of Delillo but a pretty awesome historical novel and then his novel about a Pynchon-like author, Mao II which leads to his novel that probably begs comparison to Pynchon just for it's sheer size, Underworld. So, being done with the 'early' period and moving into his 'major' period (after Underworld I think there is another period, but I'm not sure how to classify it yet), I think it's safe to say that his early novels (with the exception of Ratner's Star, and maybe The Players (since I haven't read it yet)) are pretty damn satisfying. A definite highlight of American Literature written roughly during my lifetime.

I don't really know what to write about this particular book. On the sentence level is is stunning. Delillo writes sentences and dialogue like John Woo filmed violence (in his Hong Kong films, ignore that American shit). Overly stylized and very artificial but so beautiful that the lack of realism is an afterthought to the enjoyment.

On the bigger level, I'm not sure if this novel is successful. I never quite got what Delillo was doing in the novel, I could make out the various themes, but I'm not sure exactly where he was going sometimes with their development. But, even if the total narrative wasn't entirely successful (to me) or if I thought he could have done more with some of the threads, and maybe been more explicit about other things in the novel, on the whole I really enjoyed it. Each page was great, it's just sometimes thinking about how all the pages went together that I would start to scratch my head and wonder if I really was getting what I was supposed to get.

The song I linked to above really doesn't have anything to do with this particular novel of Delillo's but it started to play on my Spotify thing tonight and I was struck by how similar it was to many of the reoccurring themes that pop-up in Delillo's books. New York. The Desert. The longing for place. It's not a direct, oh my god this is just like Delillo novels, but more like wow, I never noticed this before but this song sort of catches the feeling I get from quite a few of these novels.

DFW update? I didn't get any feeling of there being connections between Infinite Jest and this book. Maybe there were some loose thematic connections, but they are all things that are fairly common Delillo things and nothing in particular stood out in this book. Maybe my theory is starting to run out of steam, but I think there are some interesting connections between the first few Delillo novels and DFW. Maybe sometime later this year I'll commit myself to giving Infinite Jest a third read and try to incorporate some of them into how I approach the book (the first time would have been not knowing what to expect, the second time was knowing what to expect and being given the obvious (to me it wasn't because I'm stupid) Hamlet parallels by Karen, and this third time will of course be read through the lens of the great big awful thing that would happen, and with whatever other bits and pieces I'm brining to the novel that I didn't have last time. I don't know if I'll be able to bring myself to read it over again yet though, I still can't quite deal with the great big awful thing).

Blah, sorry this wasn't much of a review. Should I review a bit? Ok, this is sort of turning the American expatriate novel on it's head. Instead of some artistic bohemians we get economic 'hitmen' sorts living in Greece and traveling through African and MIddle East countries in the late 1970's in the interest of banks, insurance and oil companies while violence and terrorism are on the rise. While Beirut and Tehran become hotspots with hostages and killing in the streets a mysterious cult is going about Greece, the Mideast and India killing ritualistically killing old men with hammers. Language, alphabets, corporate communications, ruins, a nine year old novelist and violence make up this novel, that (to me) is a great example of a novel where the parts are greater than the whole.

There you are sitting with your handful of friends and acquaintances you managed to scavenge in a foreign country, drinking local wine and talking about the politics of your own country. You experience alienation from your country after being away for so long and still feel foreign where you have currently planted your roots in. Its a weird limbo to be in. Add traveling to the mix, you are living out of suitcases and hotel rooms, dangling conversations in airport bars, flirting while changing lanes and expanding your obsession with random encounters. You notice the decay in conversations with your spouse, the fragility with which you hold yourselves together. The arguments seem like an abstract painting: open to interpretations and discoveries.

Words don't mean a thing, contexts do, she says. The offense is so great that you simply snarl a "fuck you" and slam the bathroom door. Your son sits in his room and writes your friend's biography. The alienation spreads from your country to your family and you find yourself attracted to women who speak foreign tongue and share your love for politics. They talk about your country in a way that makes you uncomfortable with a perspective not really foreign or out of place but is that of a victim. You steer the conversation towards language and culture and let the woman's narration seem like a phantasmagoria.

Death doesn't shake you but the context around it does. Her yell about context and words slam you in the worst way, making you stumble your words. The conversations are chunky and clunky, embarrassing and scaring you in a way you didn't think was possible. You take the next flight back to a country you've been trying call your home and strike up a conversation with a fellow frequent flyer. Death, like context, needs words.

Words change with time. Words change with culture. Over the years, culture permeates the language and changes its flavor. Contexts add color. The names however kind of both mutate and manage to stay the same.

It's Don DeLillo's world and we're just living in it.

Citizens of the globe, expatriates, failed marriages, mismatched unions… The Names begins like a story by John Cheever…

Nothing sticks to us but smoke in our hair and clothes. It is dead time. It never happened until it happens again. Then it never happened.

Everyone becomes a perennial tourist, an inadvertent traveler and life goes on in continuous transition…

This is where I want to be. History. It’s in the air. Events are linking all these countries. What do we talk about over dinner, all of us? Politics basically. That’s what it comes down to. Money and politics. And that’s my job.

But gradually the story turns into a highbrow mystery, sort of The Adventure of the Dancing Men by Arthur Conan Doyle gone postmodernistic…
The mystery based on religion:

Was religion the point or language? Or was it costume? Nuns in white, in black, full habits, somber hoods, flamboyant winglike bonnets. Beggars folded in cloaks, sitting motionless. Radios played, walkie-talkies barked and hissed. The call to prayer was an amplified chant that I could separate from the other sounds only briefly. Then it was part of the tumult and pulse, the single living voice, as though fallen from the sky.

And the cabbalistic investigation based on semiotics:

The alphabet is male and female. If you will know the correct order of letters, you make a world, you make creation. This is why they will hide the order. If you will know the combinations, you make all life and death.

Different people see the same signs and those signs have for them different meaning… This is the nature of signs.

DeLillo's writing is so pretentious. He disregards plot in order to create art, which is a noble effort to make but leaves many readers, including me, wanting more. The rape scene was also extremely distasteful and added nothing to the plot, only establishing the main character as a misogynist asshole. Necessary? No. I've heard that White Noise is better, but after reading The Names, I don't want to read any more of DeLillo's work unless academics compel me (which was the case for this one).

The Names by Don DeLillo is a fascinating but somewhat fuzzy book. Set primarily in Greece, it tells the story of James Axton, an American who develops risk analyses, those odd-sounding reports used by international investors and insurers. When the book was published in 1982, would readers have suspected that Axton worked for the CIA? It was the first thing I thought of.

But Axton's work is only a part of this intricate story about language, alphabets, secrecy, and cultural identity.

See the rest of my review here

Whew, this one – for whatever reason – took me a bit to get through, but not a slog by any means. I never once felt bored by it or dreaded returning to it, but it was a slow burn.

While I will admit THE NAMES did not emerge as my new favorite DeLillo –it may feature him at his observational best. Arguably the defining piece of his “middle period,” THE NAMES follows a group of American Ex-Pats of various backgrounds and their dealings in Europe and the Middle East. Ostensibly, the “plot” is focused with our POV character, James, and his fascination with an enigmatic cult and it’s series of mysterious (and seemingly coded) murders. However, the central plot is merely window dressing that allows us to trace a through line through this group of travelling yuppies. What DeLillo is really interested in – as always – is grabbing these representatives of 20th century American iconography, ideals and politics and placing them all together in a cultural fishbowl. Even the names he chooses seem to be purposely trite and monosyllabic: James, Charles, Ann, George, Frank etc. We are meant to observe these American suits in their most stripped down form and examine the very idea of the “American” as perceived abroad. What is mythmaking verse reality… and how do the Americans actually engage with this understood perception and vice versa? (Europe Hardcover, America paperback)

The Ex-pats are all displaced and rootless people, travelling Eastward to fulfill their own Corporate Espionage version of manifest destiny. You get the impression that they are all waiting for something like a murderous Cult, or a Coup to come along and give their lives real purpose. As these murders start to unfold, and our characters involve themselves in them, we are introduced to another trademark DeLillo motif, and that is: what happens when something *truly* makes no sense, no matter how hard you try? What happens when your brain cant properly contextualize events or find meaning in them? You can either lose yourself trying to organize what ultimately cannot be organized, try to find an answer that will never reveal itself to you, that is not meant for you... or you can accept that some things are not meant to be understood, sometimes specifically by you.

The way DeLillo examines the cult murders in THE NAMES is no different than how he examines the JFK assassination in LIBRA. Owen and James’ insatiable need to understand this Cult and their methods is no different than the American peoples need to make sense of the unthinkable after November 22 1963. Additionally, I think you can use the Cult as a stand in for the American need to assimilate that which it does not understand. both domestically, and especially abroad


Ultimately, THE NAMES is a great character study – both personally and culturally. In conversation with MAO II and LIBRA thematically. And like those two is equally prescient. Will sit with you for a while

I think still my favorite DeLillo on a re-read, or at least in the very uppermost of his output: part high-concept globe-trotting thriller, part commentary on how Americans behave and are seen abroad, part commentary on American imperialism, part collection of character sketches and impressions of far-flung foreign locales with prose-poetry-like descriptions of landscapes and architecture, part treatise on the meaning and utility to different people of languages and symbols of languages... that's quite a lot of parts, and only a writer as good as DeLillo could hope to have it all hang together as well as it does, and even in his hands it comes dangerously, excitingly close to falling apart and coming undone. Ultimately there aren't many concrete answers, and we're along for the ride as several of the characters try to read meaning into both disorder and patterns that seem to exist only to cruelly mock the attempts at finding meaning.

“His pain was radiant, almost otherworldly. He seemed to be in touch with grief, as if it were a layer of being he’d learned how to tap.” page 24

“We know we will die. This is our saving grace, in a sense. No animal knows this but us. It is one of the things that sets us apart. It is our special sadness, this knowledge, and therefore a richness, a sanctification. The final denial of our base reality, in this schematic is to produce a death. Here is the stark drama of our separateness. A needless death, a death by system, by machine-intellect.” pages 169-170

“Air travel reminds us who we are. It’s the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other.” page 243

NOT GOOD! i read it out of obligation bc it's don delillo but dang, it was boring. even though it was interesting (international finance, murder cult, fascination with labels, all hot topics for moi) it was so flippin boring. sorry don.