Don DeLillo

A 1950s teenage hood from New York is transformed by the Jesuits into a respectable man, managing hazardous waste. A portrait of the decade from the viewpoint of the garbage industry.

Underworld

heleen de boever

Jens Madsen

A great novel, not just because it is a veritable brick. Before reading it, I was amused by another review commenting that "she did not know what the book was about, since she was only 600 pages into it". Now I know the feeling, but what an enjoyable one it was. 

The convoluted, mostly chronologically reversed, storylines of Underworld work so well because "Life is lived forwards but only understood in reverse" as Kierkegaard put it. The interwoven stories in many ways reminded me of Shortcuts, the Robert Altman movie. One has to stay alert in order to separate and link the cast of characters.

In some ways it is fortunate that this epos of American Life in the second half of the 20th century (cold war) was written pre 9/11. The decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union was a very particular period where the consensus was that we were entering a long period of global peace and understanding. It made the retrospective view of the 20th century different then from today. In my opinion this sifts through the cracks of this book.

Daryl Houston

I read maybe half of Underworld nearly a decade ago and put it aside (I forget why). I've read the opening scene a few times since, and it's one of my favorite pieces of writing, so it's weird that I put the whole book aside. Maybe parts of it began to lag for me back then. I've meant ever since to pick the book back up, and I'm glad I did.

My main complaint with DeLillo's other work has been that although his writing is very fine (really, really admirable), the construction of his stories tends to leave me puzzled. Cosmopolis feels at times hackish, Mao II sort of goes off the rails, and Falling Man is just bad. But here DeLillo writes a very big thing composed of a couple of big stories that intersect in ways I find believable and appealing.

This is a book about finding lost things, getting back to origins, trying to grok complexity, grappling with betrayal, baseball, garbage, infidelity, war, and peace. It's lovely at the sentence level, and though at times it feels as if DeLillo might have left a story behind or made a misstep, I think he winds up getting it mostly right. It's worth a read and a reread.

Underworld

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