Word: oswald
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
LIBRA is the story of Lee Harvey Oswald. Don DeLillo's fascination with American paranoia has carried him, almost inevitably, to the assassination of John F. Kennedy...
DeLillo reconstructs an Oswald and a series of events from the 26 volumes of the Warren Report. Because this is fiction, the outlines of Oswald and of the events are clear. Everything in the novel has a hard factual edge. Everything sounds reported, even what must be pure speculation. When the characters descend into dialect or private associations, DeLillo often lets his narrative voice accompany them, but this is not a relaxation of his distant, researched style. The diction or the sentence structure may change, but the tone never slips; DeLillo remains detached...
...tide of speculation that widens with the years." Unfortunately, this argument wants things both ways; a book can hardly be "only itself, apart and complete" and at the same time offer "a way of thinking" about historical figures and events. When DeLillo opens his novel with the young Oswald riding a subway, it is not as though he were creating a character from scratch; he obviously assumes that readers already have some idea who Oswald was and what he would become...
Needless to say, things grow far, far more complicated than this, and DeLillo develops his intricate plot with cinematic bravura. There are flashes back and forward in time, and jump cuts between the conspirators and Oswald, who is growing up to become exactly the kind of person the CIA renegades had planned to invent: a malcontent and misfit with a known fondness for Castro and guns. Slowly, dimly, Oswald begins to realize that he is being watched, people have designs on his destiny. Someone who knows what is cooking spells it out for him: "You're a quirk of history...
...real person, now dead, familiar to conspiracy buffs. "Something we don't know about. There's more to it. There's always more to it." A CIA operative ponders, "We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen." Even Oswald waxes philosophical: "He thought the only end to isolation was to reach the point where he was no longer separated from the true struggles that went on around him. The name we give this point is history...