|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Frequently Bought Together
Product Details
|
Product Description
From Amazon
What follows is one of the strangest ghost stories since The Turn of the Screw. Returning to their summer rental after Rey's funeral, Lauren discovers a strange stowaway living in a spare room: an inarticulate young man, perhaps retarded, who may have been there for weeks. His very presence is hard for her to pin down: "There was something elusive in his aspect, moment to moment, a thinning of physical address." Yet soon this mysterious figure begins to speak in Rey's voice, and her own, playing back entire conversations from the days preceding the suicide. Has Lauren's husband been reincarnated? Or is the man simply an eavesdropping idiot savant, reproducing sentences he'd heard earlier from his concealment?
DeLillo refuses any definitive answer. Instead he lets Lauren steep in her grief and growing puzzlement, and speculates in his own voice about this apparent intersection of past and present, life and death. At times his rhetoric gets away from him, an odd thing for such a superbly controlled writer. "How could such a surplus of vulnerability find itself alone in the world?" he asks, sounding as though he's discussing a sick puppy. Still, when DeLillo reigns in the abstractions and bears down, the results are heartbreaking.
At this stage of his career, a thin book is an adventure for DeLillo. So is his willingness to risk sentimentality, to immerse us in personal rather than national traumas. For all its flaws, then, The Body Artist is a real, raw accomplishment, and a reminder that bigger, even for so capacious an imagination as DeLillo's, isn't always better. --James Marcus --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Living Still Life,
By Reader and Writer "Chris" (Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Body Artist (Paperback)
The main character wants this and in a sense she strives for it. Let me explain. Lauren's husband, a relatively known film director dies. She struggles with her grief in a rented house where a man appears. He may be an escaped patient from a mental ward. Yet he seems to quote words that she or her dead husband said. This captivates her. She allows him to stay, at first as a link to her deceased love, and then as a gateway to her past. She tape records him and asks, would we recognize ourself if what we said in the past was presented to us. This is what she sees the man as doing.The book begins in a very Pinteresque manner, a couple delineating the items of their lives, this is hers, this is his, as they fix breakfast. The blurb calls this opening a tour de force of eighteen pages. I disagree. It's not Pinter and it gets tedious in the way that parts of Travels in Scriptorium by Auster get tedious. We want a stronger story. This comes when book shifts to Lauren after her husband's death. The elements of Lauren's life become her performance art. If you know art, like I do, you will see vague references to many artists who used their bodies as art. DeLillo makes a couple mistakes, he forgets or doesn't know Orlan, one of the major body artists around today, and he says that Bob Flanagan drives "nails" through a part of his anatomy better off not mentioned here -- but it was only one nail. But DeLillo is a writer and so we let that go in passing. Lauren's work takes the elements we've witnessed so far; she internalizes and presents to her audience, as we learn as she is interviewed over lunch. Her memories are dead pictures, but they are living moments. What makes the book absolutely amazing is the quality of the writing. Once DeLillo gets into his stride we see him taking giant steps similar to what Beethoven did in the late string quartets. They are resonant, perceptive, absolutely beautiful in their small segments. It's called a novel but this is really more of a long short story or a novella, both in length, about 30K words and in its tone. DeLillo skips breadth but doesn't back off the verbal fireworks. There are small images, one line images that I just can't seem to shake off. This is train of thought combined with the deadly edge of a honed blade. How does one combine those two ideas, exactly the way DeLillo did it here. As I said, it's not a novel, don't read it for that and don't expect a soul searching catharsis. Read it like you are listening to chamber music and enjoy the moments.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Quick read,
By
This review is from: The Body Artist: A Novel (Paperback)
I really loved the premise. I was fascinated about it. I think it would make a wonderful movie or play. It was a quick read and held my attention. I really would like to see the whole premise even taken farther. I was a bit dissapointed that we didn't focus on "Mr. Tuttle" more - I could've read about him even more.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A HAUNTING NOVELLA ABOUT THE SHATTERING EFFECTS OF DEATH,
By
This review is from: The Body Artist: A Novel (Paperback)
This is not an easy novel, and don't let its length (a mere 124 pages) let you think otherwise. The plot is anything but usual. After a young artist's husband commits suicide, she resumes her life only to one day discover a strange person sitting on a bed in an unused room, an otherworldly man-child who speaks in cryptic utterances that lack context and syntax. She assumes that he suffers from autism and plans to notify authorities; but changes her mind after hearing him repeat, word for word, a conversation she had with her husband on the day of his death. Wow. Who is this quaint stranger -- unwilling time traveler? Is our protagonist no more than a desperate woman whose grief and isolation have made her delusional? At first I was somewhat frustrated by these questions, but found myself haunted by the layered meanings. When it was not the prose that had me thinking, I was smitten with DeLillo's fascinatingly poetic writing style. He weaves such a riveting tapestry of words to delve into the emotional minutiae of his characters that he not only captivates our sympathetic attention he has us thinking like we were the ones he was talking about. I highly recommend this effortlessly engrossing tale if you have a taste for offbeat but thought-provoking literature.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Want to see more reviews on this item?
|
Most recent customer reviews |
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
|
