r/ProsePorn • u/ragingbull1980 • 8d ago
Libra - Don DeLillo
Six point nine seconds of heat and light. Let’s call a meeting to analyze the blur. Let’s devote our lives to understanding this moment, separating the elements of each crowded second. We will build theories that gleam like jade idols, intriguing systems of assumption, four-faced, graceful. We will follow the bullet trajectories backwards to the lives that occupy the shadows, actual men who moan in their dreams. Elm Street. A woman wonders why she is sitting on the grass, bloodspray all around. Tenth Street. A witness leaves her shoes on the hood of a bleeding policeman’s car. A strangeness, Branch feels, that is almost holy. There is much here that is holy, an aberration in the heartland of the real.
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u/zbreeze3 8d ago
yeah this was the push I needed to read him... i've read around him for so long it's probably time to finish off the post modernists with a bang.
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u/raysofgold 8d ago
Don't know if this will make you more or less inclined to read him, but one interesting nuance to the whole notion of DeLillo as postmodern is that, in essence, he's subtly (at his own admission) much more of a Joycean/Faulknerian/Woolfian modernist that writes about contemporary postmodern life than someone really comparable in tone or technique to a lot of the other big heads. I think he even once referred to himself as 'the last modernist.'
He shares a lot of obsessions and humor with Pynchon (and is friends with him), and there are some subtly self-referential elements to his authorial voice at times (namely the extent to which he often writes about language itself), but formally, I think he's much closer to McCarthy--or really, even Cheever--than someone like Bartheleme or Coover.
Joyce is by far his biggest influence though, none more than stylistically, and this except in the OP doesn't even scratch the surface of how brain-scratching and rhapsodic his prose can be. Highly highly recommend
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u/zbreeze3 8d ago
I should've clarified that i've read him before--but only a short story collection. So i'm familiar with his style, and I could see the Cheever comp but his content and approach seem closer to Gaddis or Pynchon (at least sentence to sentence). At least as far as I read in Angel Esmerelda. I'm not well educated so I don't know who is actually considered a post modernist but all those dudes wrote about similar things around the similar times so I am clumping them together in my head whether they like it or not.
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u/raysofgold 7d ago
Fair enough! You're right that there's a kinship with Gaddis too. And yeah, don't sweat the labels, I just meant what I said almost as more of a disclaimer that he's absolutely phenomenal but very different in some ways than the writers typically bestowed that label (excepting, indeed, the ones with whom he does share some qualities)--in my opinion. Artists tend to be the worst diagnosticians of their own work, so I only appeal to the authority of DD's statement in the sense that it's a rare time a writer was right about their own work, imo.
If you enjoyed Angel Esmeralda though, you'll definitely love his novels. Tbh, that collection doesn't even begin to him justice, especially when it comes to what he does with both prose and narrative rhythm.
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u/FoolishDog 8d ago
His writing is like poetry. Does the rest of the novel have writing like this?