Don DeLillo

A Novel

The Body Artist

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. 

 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.

Alex Noble

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.

a novel

The  body artist

Emily Morgan

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."

Ryan Hagerty

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.

From the award-winning, bestselling author of "White Noise" and "Underworld" comes a spare, seductive, novel about marriage, loneliness, and the nature of creativity. Widow Lauren Hardke encounters a strange man possessed of knowledge of her life, and accompanies him on an extraordinary exploration of time, love, and human perception. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Daryl Houston

Kutalp (Kutalp)

A stunning novel by the bestselling National Book Award–winning author of White Noise and Underworld. Since the publication of his first novel Americana, Don DeLillo has lived in the skin of our times. He has found a voice for the forgotten souls who haunt the fringes of our culture and for its larger-than-life, real-life figures. His language is defiantly, radiantly American. In The Body Artist his spare, seductive twelfth novel, he inhabits the muted world of Lauren Hartke, an artist whose work defies the limits of the body. Lauren is living on a lonely coast, in a rambling rented house, where she encounters a strange, ageless man, a man with uncanny knowledge of her own life. Together they begin a journey into the wilderness of time, love and human perception. The Body Artist is a haunting, beautiful and profoundly moving novel from one of the finest writers of our time.

Steph

The Body Artist begins with normality: breakfast between a married couple, Lauren and Rey, in their ramshackle rented house on the New England coast. Recording their delicate, intimate, half-complete thoughts and words, Don DeLillo proves himself a stunningly unsentimental observer of our idiosyncratic relationships. But after breakfast, Rey makes a decision that leaves Lauren utterly alone, or seems to. As Lauren, the body artist of the title, becomes strangely detached from herself and the temporal world, the novel becomes an exploration of a highly abnormal grieving process; a fascinating exposé of 'who we are when we are not rehearsing who we are'; and a rarefied study of trauma and creativity, absence and presence, isolation and communion.

The Body Artist A Novel

Reviews