Libra

by Don DeLillo

Book Overview

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 unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670823171
• ISBN13: 9780670823178
• Release Date: August 1988
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Length: 456 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.

Customer Reviews

History, Conspiracy and Men in Small Rooms

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.

Constructing History

DeLillo's Libra is a fascinating read, not only because its topic is one of America's most traumatizing events in recent history--not the assassination of president Kennedy is the point of interest in the book--but the question: What made this event so terrifying, why had it such an impact?In answering this question DeLillo leaves out the obvious reasons: JFK's popularity and people's hopes connected with his politics. Instead, he puts the focus on a more profound problem: With the assassination of JFK the American people were woken up from their dream of security and regularity. A conclusive explanation of the how and why of the event could have put them back to sleep. Such an explanation is not available though. It is just not the way history works, and DeLillo skillfully shows exactly that in his book. He depicts a conspiracy that gets out of hand and Oswald as a manipulated and constructed individual.Presenting his version of the events, DeLillo at the same time questions its validity. Reading his novel we become aware of the impossibility of drawing the right conclusions of the mass of hard facts and vague hints--the infinite possibilities of what can be held for the truth. Therefore, any historical account can only be a possible version of the real. In so far, DeLillo's Libra places itself somewhere between fiction and history.Libra is a novel that deserves every attention.

The Scales preside over a trauma center of American mythos

The so-called "secret diaries" of Lee Harvey Oswald show him to be a half-educated man struggling with some of the most profound political problems of his era. DeLillo himself was early on inspired by recordings of Oswald's radio appearances, where he defended his faux-Marxist fantasies to a no-doubt baffled Texan audience, achieving a powerful oratorial performance, especially in light of his age (23) and educational background (dyslexic high-school dropout, followed by a Marine tour-of-duty in the Pacific). Throughout LIBRA the shadowy palimpsest of Oswald is granted a complex human dignity far beyond the usual dismissals as a sociopathic, alienated loser. He is presented as both victim and victimizer, a brutal hypocrite and charlatan (let's not forget the actual assassination), but also a dejected idealist who was trashed, bastardized, and buried alive by the American mass socius of the 50s and 60s. DeLillo's working title was *An American Murder*, but he changed it to LIBRA (Oswald's sign in the zodiac) to indicate the arbitrary scales of justice presiding over a personality seemingly made of pure contradiction. A Marxist who joined the Marines as soon as he came of age only to defect to Russia and then repent two years later? Indeed, Oswald's scatterbrain identity-confusion has made him a dingy, well-worn avatar in the annals of our postmodern geek show. Most startlingly, DeLillo's genius is able to evoke the now-familiar media-consciousness expressed by Oswald in his writings and behavior, arguing that Oswald *knew* how he would be perceived by the public, that in the depths of his isolation the Panopticon of the televisual was at work dramatizing his every move, tasting every dreg of his perplexed and cryptozoic existence, securing for him a perverse nook in our collective nerve and trauma centers, a world-historical Sin against the future. This novel comes with my highest recommendations.

Meet Huck Finn's evil twin

Though rambling and at times aimless, though missing the technical virtuosity of "Libra" and the sodden comic dread of "White Noise", Americana remains my favorite book by Don Delillo. The novel is a retelling of Huck Finn, in the persona of an all-around Golden Boy and very dead soul named David Bell. Bell, like Huck, lights out for the territory, but instead of a burlesque and edenic frontier, he finds a graveyard of flickering images, of a country at the end of its reel, spinning, flailing, disintegrating, full of phantoms. Twain's daguerotype of a giggling boy's swampy adventures is re-rendered by Delillo as a faithless young man's journey through an empty celluloid desert. Super-good.

Delillo writes books that make me laugh outloud, to tears.

It has been a long time, but it was the first book i picked up by this extraordinary author, and in the three days that followed, i took vacation time to finish everything he wrote to that point, like some spooky, outragious, but all-too-real charater he creates. I stayed up all night with Americana, rereading, like a dog in front of a television, looking for a sign, trying to figure out how he does it; punctuation, usage, phrases just the way you hear them, the way you think thoughts. Boo! ....Now i wait for his next book like somereligious nut looking for a sign. ....The way it was for"White Noise," coming back from the book store on a Cambridge bus, laughing out loud like a refugee from McClean Hospital two doses short of a good day. Well insured upper-middle americans dropping their designer children off at the College on the Hill. (I can't belive i paid all that tuition). ....If you live in nyc, please read about Bucky Wonderlick, the rock star who I believe still lives on "Great Jones Street" trying to get it up for his next recovery/comback, the character who opened my eyes to the bankruptcy of modern Rock n Roll, and the a-holes that Jim Morrision et. al. were. And the death of his girlfriend, the saddest thing i ever read. ...."Libra," and i quote: "seven seconds of light and heat that broke the back of the American Century," extraordinary, and true like Occam's (sp?) razor. Kennedy's fate for what it was, the begining of the end, like Tattoos and noserings. ......Read them all....Bring tissues. ...If you put a monkey and a typewriter together for 4 billion years, it would not come to this, not even close. It must be aliens in his head! This stuff is the good S__t!