Nicely paced and pretty exhaustive -- the research is well-done. I've been obsessed with this story for years since a few tendrils of the story cast aNicely paced and pretty exhaustive -- the research is well-done. I've been obsessed with this story for years since a few tendrils of the story cast a shadow on my own life: my aunt and uncle were friends and business partners with both of the bomb victims, and as fate would have it, my family was living with my aunt and uncle during the bombings as we prepared to move to Arkansas. News helicopters and bomb squads were sent to our home. I was a mere 2.5 years old so I don't have a firsthand memory of it myself. Mark Hofmann was a twisted genius and the whole story is mind-boggling. ...more
I love DeLillo, but I wasn’t blown away by this novel. I was intrigued with how it started out, and loved it on the sentence level, but it ultimately I love DeLillo, but I wasn’t blown away by this novel. I was intrigued with how it started out, and loved it on the sentence level, but it ultimately fell flat. Here are some the sentences that jumped out to me, that gave me the hope that the narrative would sustain me:
“The future belongs to crowds." "In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too. The writer who won't show his face is encroaching on holy turf." "[A] curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape & influence." "News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative.” "The withheld work of art is the only eloquence left." "Think of the future and see how depressed you get. All the news is bad." "Does writing come out of bitterness and rage or does it produce bitterness and rage?" "It's confusing when they kill the innocent. But this is precisely the language of being noticed, the only language the West understands." "It's the novelist who understands the secret life, the rage that underlies all obscurity and neglect." "He'd sit aboard a ghostly flight with six or seven tense Beirutis, refugees in reverse, going home to terror on every level." "He is saying as long as there is a Western presence it is a threat to self-respect, to identity."
I do think that the current political climate perhaps led to my mixed feelings about it -- it’s hard to read a book these days which touches on terrorism if the book was written prior to 9-11 (this was a decade earlier). A sentence from chapter 10 illustrates well my thoughts: "Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror." It’s hard for this story to absorb my terror (and especially the terror of my friends who are among the targeted and marginalized communities) when the actual horrors of today play out day-by-day, in ways that shock me more than the novel. When the Trump administration makes a DeLillo novel seem, well, not so much hopeful as much as a preferable reality, you know we are in a bad place indeed. ...more
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