- Hardcover: 832 pages
- Publisher: Scribner (Oct 3 1997)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0684842696
- ISBN-13: 978-0684842691
- Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 16.5 x 5.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 1.3 Kg
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (288 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #499,401 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
While Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the cold war and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying. Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter--the "shot heard around the world"--and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand.
"It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball, and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria.
Through fragments and interlaced stories--including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others--DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled.
From Library Journal
On October 3, 1951, there occurred two "shots heard round the world"?Bobby Thomson's last-minute homer, which sent the N.Y. Giants into the World Series, and a Soviet atomic bomb test. The fallout from these two events provides the nexus for this sagalike rumination on the last 50 years of American cultural history. DeLillo's opening depiction of the scene at the N.Y. Polo Grounds that day is masterly. Unfortunately, sustaining the initial brilliance proves difficult. There are some marvelously drawn characters?Sister Edgar, a vision-seeking nun of the old school; Ismael, a ghetto-based graffiti artist and budding capitalist; J. Edgar Hoover?and thought-provoking ideas, e.g., waste as the cornerstone of civilization and the power of remembered images lurking just beneath the surface of our minds. But somehow the various parts of the story seem more satisfying than the whole. DeLillo is one of our most gifted contemporary authors whose works belong in all academic and public libraries, yet one suspects that his truly "great" novel is yet to come.
-?David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
-?David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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First Sentence
I was driving a Lexus through a rustling wind. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt
I was driving a Lexus through a rustling wind. Read the first page
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must read for any aspirational author,
By Anthony Gray (England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Underworld: A Novel (Paperback)
I first read Underworld four years ago and it's one of the few books I've read that had a major impact on me. It was also the first book by DeLillo I read and as soon as I finished it I went straight out and bought everything else he'd ever written, something I've only done with one other author, Joseph Heller.The similarity between these two authors is that they both showed me just how great the modern novel can be. Despite what may be written elsewhere DeLillo's writing is anything but untruthful or affected. He does his best not to criticise or judge but to simply show a warts and all snapshot of the different ways it is possible for people to think in the world we live in today. Underworld is a beautiful book, funny and wistful, it's not the easiest book in the world to read but every sentence is rewarding. Once you've finished it I'm sure you'll do the same as I did and buy the rest of work.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
I don't usually read fiction, but this book ...,
By A Customer
This review is from: Underworld: A Novel (Paperback)
Absolutely beautiful! I usually do not read fiction but this book has captured my heart from its first chapter. Beautifully written, easily readable, touching. Although the action might not be captivating, Don Dellilo's words are. The way he paints characters, feelings and situations is unmatched. I would leave a quote from the book but there are too many worth mentioning.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Uncontestable Classic,
By
This review is from: Underworld: A Novel (Paperback)
This is easily one of the most remarkable novels in all of modern American letters. Granted, it dwells in that rarified and charicteristically self-selecting family of novels such as "Gravity's Rainbow," "Under the Volcano," "Moby Dick," The Sound an the Fury" or, even, "Absalom, Absalom,"etc., etc.The thing about this book that gets me-and it shares this with all of the above- is how it resonates in the soul, man! This book- lumbering, frustrating, maddening thing that it is- ultimately folds you into it; you, as the reader hauling all his or her own correspondences and shared history-become complicit in all the smallness and grandeur of the later 20th century DeLillo evokes. And, ultimately, this book changes the way you think, and the way you see things.
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