2007 books

[peteryoung]

8) Don DeLillo, The Body Artist, 2001
Lauren Hartke is a performance artist whose film director husband dies unexpectedly in the company of his first wife. Then at the New England summer house they were renting, a mentally disturbed man appears who has little ability with language but who is somehow channeling her late husband. What is she to make of this? DeLillo extracts extraordinary depth from this simple situation, his post-modern style seeming well-suited to a novel replete with half-finished thoughts and sentences, casual grammatical slips and odd rhythms of speech, culminating in a language that blurs the edges between Hartke and the unknown man. It's haunting and clever, and DeLillo makes creative use of the in-built flexibility of English that, while being entirely self-conscious, seems to be the right technique to portray a woman who is detached and remote from herself. Recommended as a rather challenging read.

Comments

[denardo.livejournal.com]

I just read this last week and loved it. The texture of the language reminded me of Marguerite Duras's The Malady of Death and, less closely, E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News. I love reading things with this kind of tone, and am looking for more.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

I confess to being a little daunted by the size and scope of some of DeLillo's other books, but this was a good place to start.

[scribeoflight.livejournal.com]

I love this novella. I'd forgotten about it, in the sense that I don't usually recommend it to people, which is a pity - I'd have recommended it to dozens of people.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's not the sort of book you recommend to everyone.

[scribeoflight.livejournal.com]

No, that is true... But I often recommend books solely on the basis of the quality of the writing, forgetting entirely that the content might not be particularly... suitable to the recommendee.

Anyway, not Firefox is telling me "recommendee" does not exist, I will go.

(How are you, by the way? Recovered?)

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

Yes thanks. On my way to Bangkok and Sydney this evening. With camera, of course... love your stuff on flickr.

[scribeoflight.livejournal.com]

Cheers. I'm glad your flying again - I want to see more skies and hotels and whatever else it is you feel the urge to photograph.

If you're ever coming through Beijing (unlikely, I know), and have chance to detour, come and see me.