Reviews
There’s a documentary about DeLillo in which he (paraphrasing another author) decries fiction ‘about characters studying the rainfall on the windowpane while pondering an ex-lover’ (something to that effect — just a way of decrying apolitical fiction). The interview predates this novella, but, as to why he’d go on to use what is essentially that exact premise ten years later, despite the interview, I was skeptical at page one….. Wound up reading the whole thing in one sitting and feeling like I’d just been floated down the most beautiful prose-stream of all time. Stabbed with self awareness. Half-complete thoughts. Inattentional blindness. Phantom sensations. A fictional filmography. The Answer is hidden, and (not but) it will stay in plain sight, lobotomized. Answering machines. Hearing ghosts. Hearing your ghost. Chores. Fruit. Rote newspapers. Rote radios. Rote livecasts. Spasms. Narration no better at managing grief or daily routines than the body artist herself. An intruder too surreal to be worth reporting to authorities.…. l don’t know where in DeLillo’s life this came from, but it made me feel like I crossed over.
I think this book would have to be my favourite of 2018. It certainly joins The Waves by Virginia Woolf as one of my favourites of all time. The entire process of reading it felt like remembering the fine details of a very hazy dream – distant, yet familiar. From the opening lines I felt as though DeLillo captured something about my experience of the world that I had never seen articulated before. "Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running lustre on the bay. You know most surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness." The novella starts off with a lucid description of a couple as they go about their monotonous morning rituals, and quickly turns into a raw, poetic meditation on memory, trauma and time. There are rare occasions in one's life when you feel as though the entire history of the world was sequenced specifically so that a book could be read by you at a certain point in time. The Body Artist was that book for me in 2018. "You stand at the table shuffling papers and you drop something. Only you don't know it. It takes a second or two before you know it and even then you know it only as a formless distortion of the teeming space around your body. But once you know you've dropped something, you hear it hit the floor, belatedly. The sound makes its way through an immense web of distances. You hear the thing fall and know what it is at the same time, more or less, and it's a paperclip. You know this from the sound it makes when it hits the floor and from the retrieved memory of the drop itself, the thing falling from your hand or slipping off the edge of the page to which it was clipped. It slipped off the edge of the page. Now that you know how you dropped it, you remember how it happened, or half remember, or sort of see it maybe, or something else. The paperclip hits the floor with an end-to-end bounce, faint and weightless, a sound for which there is no imitative word, the sound of a paperclip falling, but when you bend to pick it up, it isn't there."
This book creeped me out. I can't get into the head of the main character and her intentions didn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. There are fundamental issues with the plot. However, the writing was undoubtedly beautiful. I just wish that the story itself was less...creepy feeling.
The loveliest thing I've read in months.
