Pretty weird book imho!!

tries to be literary trash. succeeds at neither.

This was on Gary Wyshinski's list of MUST hockey reads for summer but after tracking it down from a book seller in France I have to say that it was a huge disappointment. It was more about how to have sex with weird men then it was about hockey.

Cleo Birdwell is a pseudonym for John DeLilo and he has no clue how a woman really thinks. He thinks he does, but it's painfully obvious during the long stretches in this book that he doesn't. When all he can come up with "I want to play hockey, just play hockey" as Cleo's hark to the rink amidst her constant sexual gymnastics, then you can be assured that he thinks like a man.

It was slightly entertaining, but otherwise it was pretty empty.

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nhl-puc...

Voor de verandering een boek van matige kwaliteit gelezen. Als je hiervan een film zou maken, wordt het je reinste porno. De hoofdpersoon Cleo kan geen enkele man weerstaan en duikt met allen het bed in. Typisch geschreven door een man. Geen vrouwelijke auteur zou dit bedenken.
Geen karakteronwikkeling. Wel een hele serie van mannelijke onzekerheden en trauma’s zien we in dit verhaal voorbij trekken.
De achtergrond is de eerste vrouwelijke speler in de NHL. Hier zou je toch een véél betere roman over kunnen schrijven.

Howlingly, fall off your chair funny; beautiful sentences; postmodern riffs on advertising culture, second wave feminism, professional sports, and globalization... despite the name on the cover this novel is pure Delillo and highly worth seeking out. David Foster Wallace even lifted a minor character from this book for Infinite Jest. Unfortunately all the recent attention has driven copies from the modest price of $16.00 I paid a year and a half ago to $70.00 and up, which is too bad since it was a best seller and there are plenty of copies around (mine is ex-library and has DISCARD indignantly stamped on the fly-leaf and the title page).

This was clearly DeLillo's guilty pleasure book. That's fine except that the guilt was well earned. It's just not a very good book. Yes, there are a few funny moments of social satire and a few characteristic metafictive reflections; however, they're just too few and far between. My biggest disappointment was that he didn't do more to mimic and/or play with the "fake memoir" form. After the first few pages, there was barely a mention of it being a memoir (or of it acting like a memoir). Really, a few pages in, it simply began to read like a standard first-person novel. The memoir ruse was all but gone as I read further into the book. Furthermore, there's much to be said (too much to get into here) about how masculinist the supposed female viewpoint here tends to be. All in all, I suppose I understand why DeLillo has yet to claim Cleo Birdwell. Apparently, he was writing this at the same time as White Noise, and it's clear that he made the right call as to which book to put his name on.

Strange how Don DeLillo's distanced himself from Amazons, which, with its deadpan asides, repetitions, absurd interactions, and set pieces, uniquely foregrounds his comic approach. It sits well against his other sports novel, End Zone; and the "Kramer box" anticipates the Convergence capsules in Zero K.

I wish all of Delillo's books were this accessible, fun, and downright silly. The writing craft throughout the book is evident, and it seems clear from the outset that this manuscript is a practice dojo for a writer just wanting to work some things out. If you go in expecting a complete, and perhaps usually somewhat pretentious piece of Delillo-ness, it's not for you. But if you forego the sterling standards and just let the writing be the fun, this book can't miss. The story is really only partly about hockey, and as a 20 year player from Minnesota, I loved the hockey trimmings on the much larger human tree here. This is one of my favorite books period.

Actually a novel by Don Delillo. Trashy and fun, lots of soft core loving, but still probably only for serious fans and/or collectors.

Whew, doggy, did Delillo get his rocks off with this one. Almost a religious purge of a novel, it contains all of Delillo's goofiest, horniest, most farcical intentions in one package. Cleo Birdwell is a fascinating (if not the least problematic) creation, a representation of the dual sexual and feminist revolutions taking place over the decade-and-a-half leading up to Amazons' publication, all imprinted onto the most incongruous of the major sports, hockey. I wish this was a bit more "in publication," as it's something that has to be read to be believed, but it also makes sense that it has been largely lost to time.

As the lengthy subtitle suggests, Amazons is the 1980 memoir of one, Cleo Birdwell, the first woman to play hockey in the NHL. Covering the span of only part of a single season, Birdwell expands on her many sexual liaisons with men within the ambit of the New York Rangers Hockey Organization, including the team president, coach, former players, reporters, and agents. Given Birdwell’s glass ceiling–breaking position in sports history, surprisingly little about sports appears in these pages, to the point where you get the sense that Birdwell was just totally bored of discussing hockey by time of the writing. Here, then, the few descriptions of games that exist in the book sit dead on the page, leaving the reader wanting a lot more detail that is never to come. Floating in the background of this memoir is the vogue popularity of obscure author, Wadi Assad, whose “pseudo profound” works are the talk of the league, coming up again and again in Birdwell’s conversations with her teammates and partners (he also provides the memoir’s epigraph). The book’s tension – as thin on the ground as descriptions of her games – is the well-being of Shaver Stevens, the former player who was forced into retirement after his diagnosis of Jumping Frenchmen disease, a rare neurological disorder that manifests in the sufferers’ elaborate tics, who is put into a medically induced coma for five months by a doctor on the fringes of the medical sciences. By memoir’s end the Rangers are out of the playoffs, Stevens is still in his coma, and Birdwell is considering whether she wants to start a life with him after he wakes up (if he wakes up (and assuming the coma helps)). The book ends with Birdwell in a reverie about her future with Stevens after having a conversation with her agent, Floss Penrose, about writing a memoir, which we’re led to believe is what we’re holding in our hands.

But then of course none of that is really true, since it’s about the worst-kept secret in publishing history that “Cleo Birdwell” is really Don DeLillo (with Sue Buck, it should be noted) and that this is really a novel posturing as a memoir. Naturally, this changes the way the work is received, adding, if nothing else, a narrative layer between reader and text while simultaneously pretending to do the opposite. What you’ve got here is a novel by DeLillo (and Buck) that attempts to tell some cultural truth from behind the veil of fiction, posing as a memoir by Birdwell that attempts to tell some cultural truth by removing the veil of fiction. This is the kind of narrative game that scratches a very hard-to-reach itch in the recesses of my brain—it’s a beautiful reduction of the postmodern paradox: by being more explicit about the artificial fabrication of fiction, novels become less real; by trying to reduce the narrative distance between author and text, that distance increases. So even though much of what you’re reading from page to page is prurient and base, this is an intellectual exercise from beginning to end.

And so probably because of the narrative layering and the I’m-never-really-saying-what-I-mean nature of postmodern fiction, getting to the bottom of what this is about is tough. The cultural commentary being made, though, seems to build out of the anxiety felt by the ever-fragile patriarchy at the prospect of women’s role in society expanding into positions traditionally held by men (e.g., NHL-level hockey). Here, Cleo has to endure the hyper-sexualization of her body along with concerns about her ability to compete in a world of men, while at the same time being forced to carry the figurative weight of the emotional labor men freely (and unknowingly (and constantly)) heap onto her. Cleo in effect becomes the vessel (an icky metaphor) for these men’s problems, and so has to listen to the Rangers’ president reveal his intimacy issues, and her coach pummel her with French (because it makes him feel less lonely to speak in his mother tongue (and because, as a woman, she’ll understand this emotional need)), and her agent’s deputy talk about his mother (who she’s later prevailed upon to meet). Birdwell’s recurring line – “I just want to play hockey” – lands, by the end of the book, a bit more poignantly than it did at the start.

If you’re a DeLillo completist and have a few extra dollars lying around, then this is definitely worth your time, but at the end of the whole everything this book aims for laughs and isn’t funny (at least, not anymore).

Don Delillo is the real author of this fictional memoir of a female goalie in the NHL. Cleo Birdwell is a pseudonym. My own feeling is that Delillo is at his best when he's just having fun and being funny, both of which he's doing here. None of the pretense of say, Underworld or The Names, where he's trying too hard. Some of it may be a little too silly, but it's still a fun ride. Also, some of the best/funniest sex scenes in literature. I just regret that I lost my copy. Damn.