- Paperback: 456 pages
- Publisher: Penguin UK; New edition edition (Dec 1 1998)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0140127119
- ISBN-13: 978-0140127119
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 13 x 3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 340 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #348,814 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
DeLillo's ninth novel takes its title from Lee Harvey Oswald's zodiac sign, the sign of "balance." And, as in all his fiction ( Running Dog , The Names , White Noise ), DeLillo's perfectly realized aim is to balance plot, theme and structure so that the novel he builds around Oswald (an unlikely and disturbingly sympathetic protagonist) provokes the reader with its clever use of history, its dramatic pacing and its immaculate and detailed construction. The plot of the novel is history itselfand history, here, is a system of plots and conspiracies: the U.S. government has plotted to invade Cuba, and there are CIA agents who want retribution against President Kennedy for his halfhearted support of the Bay of Pigs operation; there are Cubans plotting revenge on JFK for the same reason and for, they fear, his plot to forge a rapprochement with Castro; there is a lone gunman, Oswald, who is conspired upon by history and circumstance, and who himself plots against the status quo. The novel bears dissection on many levels, but is, taken whole, a seamless, brilliant work of compelling fiction. What makes Libra so unsettling is DeLillo's ability to integrate literary criticism into the narrative, commenting throughout on the nature and conventions of fiction itself without disturbing the flow of his story. The characters are storytellers: CIA agents and Cuban immigrants retell old plots in their minds and write fantasy plots to keep themselves alive; Nicholas Branch, also of the CIA, has spent 15 years writing an in-house history of the assassination that will never uncover its deepest secrets and that in any case no one will read; Oswald, defecting to the Soviet Union, hopes to write short stories of contemporary American lifedyslexic, he is aware of words as pictures of themselves not simply as name tags for the material world. DeLillo interweaves fact and fiction as he draws us inexorably toward Dallas, November 22. The real people (Jack Ruby, Oswald, his mother and Russian wife) are retrieved from history and made human, their stories involving and absorbing; the imagined characters are placed into history as DeLillo imagines it to have come to pass. By subtly juxtaposing the blinding intensity of DeLillo's own crystal-clear, composite version of events against the blurred reality of the Zapruder film and other artifacts of the actual assassination, Libra ultimately becomes a comment on the entire body of DeLillo's work: Why do we understand fiction to reflect truth? Why do we trust a novelist to tell us the whole story? And what is the truth that fiction reveals? 50,000 first printing; $50,000 ad/promo; BOMC main selection; QPBC selection; first serial to Esquire.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone in assassinating President John F. Kennedy? In his ninth novel, American Book Award winner DeLillo (for White Noise , LJ 2/1/85) addresses this question, skillfully weaving together fact and fiction to create an engrossing tale. It is a measure of his success that while reading, one must keep reminding oneself that this is, indeed, a novel making "no claim to literal truth." DeLillo's vision is not of a single, perfectly working scheme but rather of "a rambling affair that succeeded in short term mainly due to chance." The cast, both real and fictional, ranges from scheming CIA agents to Mafia dons, but what haunts the reader most is the image of Oswald as a confused young man searching for an identity and accidentally caught up in something bigger than himself. Sure to be a best seller. David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most helpful customer reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
better history than a work of fiction,
By A Customer
This review is from: Libra (Paperback)
This is an impressive book in that it is able to string many different elements of Kennedy Conspiracy theories into a coherant plausible scenario. In terms of the historical grasp of the period the author succeeds. However the writing style is cumbersome by employing a non traditional narrative style of free association by some of the characters. The book is weak on suspense suprisingly so for a conspiracy book. The character development is fairly week outside of Oswald. Also the charcter of Nicholas Branch who was writing a secret history for the CIA should have been expanded.The book is poorly edited even accounting for the unorthodox narrative style. There are grammatical errors and punctuational errors in the manuscript that make it somewhat difficult to read. I give it 5 stars for being a historical novel and 1 star for the writing style.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful "idea" novel,
By Craig Clarke "Somebody Dies" (New England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Libra (Paperback)
Libra is a fictional "biography" of Lee Harvey Oswald following his life and the plans that were underway during the seven months before the Kennedy assassination to make him the scapegoat. DeLillo, of course, takes liberties with the facts but he has produced a real page-turner and made Oswald into an entirely sympathetic character who may not have had the purest of motives but was not the one who fired the fatal shot. Interestingly, DeLillo attributes an inordinate amount of luck to the fact that the motorcade appeared when and where it did. Several coincidences occurred to make the assassination possible, totally out of the control of those planning it. And yet it still worked. The most fun part of reading it was noticing the ideas presented in the film JFK (filmed three years after Libra was published) appear in this book, making it a familiar territory. David Ferrie, in particular, is a major character and Guy Bannister appears often, also, as does Jack Ruby. De Lillo has obviously done his research. Having just seen JFK again, I picked this up as sort of a "companion" novel and it worked well in that capacity. I felt that the movie did not really touch on so much of Oswald's life and that Libra filled in those gaps well. DeLillo's sense of time and place are commendable and I think this was probably a good training ground for his epic Underworld, which has sat on my bookshelf, collecting dust for many years and which I will most likely now pick up and read.
5.0 out of 5 stars
History, Conspiracy and Men in Small Rooms,
By mrgrieves08 (tucson) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Libra (Paperback)
On the surface Libra is a novel about the history of the assassination of President John Kennedy and an insightful narrative about the man who is said to have pulled the trigger: Lee Harvey Oswald. But as with all such histories, the seemingly clear surfaces merely reflects the latest scriblings on what is really a deeply inscribed palimpist of human chronicle. Based on years of painstaking research and written from the perspective of a CIA historian assigned to produce a complete and secret history of the event, Don Delillo presents an intimate look at the man who has since become the symbol for America's shattered dreams and the subject of countless conspiracy theory scenarios. In so doing Delillo produces an image of Oswald that attempts to transcend the simplistic tropes to which he has been so often cast and, instead, represent Oswald as he really was: a lonely, impressionable, self-contradictory young man with a identity fractured by modernity.In Libra, Oswald is not only the small meek looking man gunned down by Jack Ruby as a stunned nation was instantaneously transformed into subjects of the media panopticon, but also a dedicated Marxist, a US Marine, a husband, father and son. Thus, he gets what most assassins do not: a human face, if not a multitude of them. As the story progresses, Oswald's multiplicitous character is transformed and molded from "mere pocket litter", a "cardboard cutout" into a ready-made villain of a fading American ideal. How this transformation is accomplished, rather than the result of Oswald's actions, is really what Delillo is trying to fide an answer for. Whether or not he succeeds in discovering this depends upon the value that is given to history in modern society, and the implicit logic that this type of epistemological inquiry anticipates. In Libra history is not simply an objective accounting of human accomplishment and action, but something constructed by men in small rooms. Libra is about understanding the influence of the apathetic forces of chance, randomness and cosmic disorder, which are then transformed into simplistic narratives that allow us all to sleep at night. Libra is a book for anyone who wonders about the substance of American history and the ways in which this substance is created. It is a novel that throws into question many of our most cherished truths, one that requires the re-examination of the notions of human agency, identity, fate and ultimate nature of our postmodern reality. A great novel that offers many insightful answers as well as being a highly readable and engaging work of contemporary American fiction.
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