Name: The Names
Rating: 3.916666666666667 (12 reviews)
ISBN: 9780679722953

Don DeLillo

The Names

Chris Dailey

Confounding and cryptic novel that challenges the reader, though it ultimately triumphs through its prose, dialogue and character studies. Set primarily in Athens during the 80's, the story follows a political risk analyst along with his family and ex-pat friends throughout the Cycladic Islands and Middle East through mainly banal actions until a mysterious and murderous cult emerges. Focusing on place and language, themes of narrative, myth, and wandering emerge alongside family, divorce, parenthood and belonging. While a slog in some parts, it ultimately shines and its finest moments are the small ones with absurd features and characters.

Set against the backdrop of a lush and exotic Greece, The Names is considered the book which began to drive "sharply upward the size of his readership" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Among the cast of DeLillo's bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator's estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses. A thriller, a mystery, and still a moving examination of family, loss, and the amorphous and magical potential of language itself, The Names stands with any of DeLillo's more recent and highly acclaimed works. "The Names not only accurately reflects a portion of our contemporary world but, more importantly, creates an original world of its own."--Chicago Sun-Times "DeLillo sifts experience through simultaneous grids of science and poetry, analysis and clear sight, to make a high-wire prose that is voluptuously stark."--Village Voice Literary Supplement "DeLillo verbally examines every state of consciousness from eroticism to tourism, from the idea of America as conceived by the rest of the world to the idea of the rest of the world as conceived by America, from mysticism to fanaticism."--New York Times

I was enjoying the book, but unfortunately my copy jumped from page 88 to page 201! Unreadable from that point onwards. I'll have to get a different copy...

The Names

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