About this title: In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When 'history' presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780670823178ISBN:0670823171
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 448 p. read more
Binding: Unknown Binding
Publisher: Penguin Books
Date Published: 1989
ISBN-13:9780451822109ISBN:0451822102
Description: Good. Spine is well creased. Covers show wear at the edges and corners. Good average reading copy. Binding is Mass Market Paperback. Pages tanning. Used books may have price stickers. Most orders ship on the next business day. read more
Binding: Unknown Binding
Publisher: Penguin Books
Date Published: 1989
ISBN-13:9780451822109ISBN:0451822102
Description: Good. Spine is well creased. Covers show wear at the edges and corners. Good Grade C average reading copy. Binding is Mass Market Paperback. Pages tanning. Used books may have price stickers. Most orders ship on the next business day. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Viking
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780670823178ISBN:0670823171
Description: Like New. {LIKE NEW} Hardback with Dust Jacket. New book. Unread. 3 inch clean cut across front of dust jacket. Remainder mark on bottom of page edges. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Books
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780670823178ISBN:0670823171
Description: Good in good dust jacket. Signed by previous owner. Book in good condition. Minor Underlining. Same day shipping. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 448 p. Audience: General/trade. Topics Assassination; Biographical fiction; Fiction; General; Reader's Catalog; United States read more
Description: Very Good. 0670823171 Paperback. Name/Inscriptoin on inside presentation page, very minor shelfwear, otherwise, Binding, Cover/Title, and Pages in excellent condition. Thanks for your business! read more
Edition: 2 nd Printing
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking Press, New York, New York, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780670823178ISBN:0670823171
Description: Very Good in Very Good jacket. -----Serving the NW Chicago suburbs since 1975----- read more
"While not as awe-inspiring as Underworld, I'd have to say Libra comes pretty close. The opening paragraph provides a suitable representation of the novel itself: "The train smashed through the dark. People stood on local platforms staring nowhere, a look they'd been practicing for years. He kind of wondered, speeding past, who they really were. His body fluttered in the fastest stretches. They went so fast sometimes he thought they were on the edge of no-control." A train barreling down the tracks.
Also worth mentioning--this book is about itself. As much as DeLillo writes about the creation of an assassin (and he definitely is "created"), DeLillo writes about the creation of the novel.
Here are the notes I wrote to myself on page 1:
*AUTHORSHIP*
coincidence? convergence
loneliness
truth, power, control
assignation of meaning HISTORY - written or experienced?
Books, the struggle with the written word, "A word is a magic wish" (p. 414).
p. 394- "They were here to be an event, a consciousness, to astonish the old creedbound fears."
p. 414- "People were lonely for news."
All in all, an amazing novel on a subject in which I previously had no tremendous interest."
"Bizarre. I enjoyed it. A self-conscious attempt to get a handle on one of the most significant events of the last 50 years (JFK assassination), and it's antagonist. I had to reread bits as I went along, and sometimes just said "huh?". DeLillo is clearly very smart, but I suspect he may have been told that once too often. There can be a kind of a "smart-assed", "know-it-all" ambiance at times, but I don't want to make too much of it. It's a very good book. I would recommend it. You probably just have to be smarter than me (not a hard task) to really understand it."
"I like the idea of _Libra_ as well as the insights Delillo has to offer more than I liked the experience of reading the book itself. It's not that it wasn't a good read - his prose in this one has a nice snappy quality. But to me the problem was what Delillo himself says about the JFK assassination through this book: it was and is one of the most over-determined events of the past century. Perhaps Delillo was fighting a losing battle as soon as he decided to write an "imagined" account of Lee Harvey Oswald's life leading up to the assassination - even in 1988, I would think Delillo had been up against too much history, too many other fictional portrayals, too much everything. So _Libra_ comes off as a bit of a lame duck. And maybe there's a kind of beauty in that: Delillo gives us his take on a large, dense and unwieldy cultural/historical text which - big surprise - remains fundamentally unreadable and unknowable."
"If you're interested in the Kennedy assassination, or conspiracy theory in general, Don DeLillo's Libra is a text that will satisfy your fiction and non-fiction desires. Libra takes the story from a different perspective, beginning with Oswald as a kid riding the subway for thrills. What takes place after involves a cast of characters ranging from Oswald's assassin Jack Ruby to an underground radio DJ named Weird Beard. What makes this book particularly unique is the angle it takes on the Kennedy assassination - what if Oswald was simply a pawn for an inside government job? Not only does DeLillo cast light on this possibility, but he also uses the text as a social commentary on the subjectivity of history and the media's role in it. This is definitely one you will want to pick up if you're a conspiracy enthusiast, but still reads as clear, yet complex fiction if you're not."
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