Product Description

It's a stunningly eventful day in the life of Eric Packer, a multi-billionaire who owns a forty-eight-room apartment and a decommissioned nuclear bomber and who has recently married the heiress of a vast European fortune. Sitting in his stretch limousine as it moves across the middle of Manhattan, he finds the city at a virtual standstill because the President is visiting, a rapper's funeral is proceeding through town, and a violent protest is being staged in Times Square by anti-globalist groups. Eric's bodyguards are worried that he is a target and, indeed, he is - although the danger, as it turns out, is not from protesters or political assassins but from an anonymous man who lives in an abandoned building. 'One of America's smartest and most disturbing writers' - "The Times". 'DeLillo shapes a rhetoric for our age' - "Observer".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #199031 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Cosmopolis is Don DeLillo's 13th novel. His reputation as one of the most provocative and innovative of American writers is assured, thanks to such books as Underworld and Americana, but this new outing is as likely to challenge the author's legion of admirers as much as it will exhilarate them--and there's nothing wrong with that.

DeLillo's protagonist this time is a well-heeled American, Eric Packer, who sets out one eventful day for a haircut. Gazing through the windows of his white limousine （and availing himself of its state-of-the-art technology）, this self-made millionaire takes in the spectacle of financiers being murdered, the funeral of a rapper and some violent anti-globalisation protests. As we come to know DeLillo's anti-hero, we realise that Eric Packer is by no means the most ingratiating of individuals. Cheating on his new wife, he specialises in using people in a cynical and exploitative way. And as this self-serving captain of industry takes an ever-more dangerous journey through a bizarrely rendered New York, it's inevitable that comparisons with Tom Wolfe's classic Bonfire of the Vanities will spring to mind. Resemblances of plot aside, however, the book is a very different animal. Wolfe's narrative had the epic spread of a latter-day War and Peace, whereas DeLillo sharpens and condenses his prose in Cosmopolis to produce an altogether more concise novel.

There are two ways to approach Cosmopolis: as a rudely pointed dissection of the American Dream, or as a surreal, symbolic and disturbing road trip. This is not a comforting book, but a bracing and caustic one. --Barry Forshaw

Review
'One of America's smartest and most disturbing writers' The Times; 'DeLillo shapes a rhetoric for our age' Observer

Economist, April 2003
It is Mr DeLillo's stylistic swagger that makes Cosmopolis such a compelling read.

Customer Reviews

DeLillo in Second Gear...
...which is still very good.

Most of the story takes place in a stretch limousine that Eric Packer, the main character, a Master-of-the-Universe, is driven around. He basically goes from one side of downtown Manhattan to another in search of a haircut. The journey is made more arduous than normal by a visit by the president and a public funeral of a rapper. Eric thinks that someone is trying to kill him and employs all manner of different security defences to combat this threat.

This is DeLillo operating well within his talents and is nowhere near as good as White Noise (heartily recommended). However, and as you would expect, it is still relentlessly interesting and offers some things to think about.

Pretty good, but not vintage DeLillo.

Not convinced
I'll keep it simple with and aim this at readers of other DeLillo books. I loved White Noise, enjoyed Libra, was astounded by Underworld and irritated by The Body Artist. I found Cosmopolis unconvincing. The great writing is all there but to little purpose. A minor work by a major writer.

We are speculating into the void !
After the relative, intimate calm of The Body Artist following the storm of Underworld, Don Delillo's 13th novel is again a very unsettling proposition. Eric Packer, the 28-year-old megabillionnaire and stock market gambler may well be a, if not "the", Master of the Universe as he weaves his webs from inside his state-of-the-art limousine-cum-office. Priding himself on always knowing what he wants - and today he wants a haircut - he is a born manipulator who seems to have eliminated all traces of death from his clinical world. His intuition and the belief that economic fluctuations are tied to natural cycles have made him rich, and yet there are some serious unpredictable asymmetries disturbing his world. The yen rises beyond reasonable limits and Eric is worried about his prostate and his lack of sleep.
Slowly driving through a pre-11/9 New York paralysed by the visit of the President, the funeral of his favourite rapper (like a carnival celebrating life through death) and the random acts of destruction of a group of antiglobalists (attacking not only his universe but also his car), Eric slowly unravels. Divesting himself of his bodyguards he returns to the world of his childhood - the old hairdresser knew his father well, unlike Eric - and deliberately meets the man who apparently wants to assassinate him that very day.
Cosmopolis is highly construed and appears artificial at times but DeLillo's language is honed and polished to such a fine degree that the effect is totally mesmerizing and approaches the kind of minimal poetry that Eric Packer appreciates so much.
This novel needs total concentration and should be read in as few sittings as possible for it to unfold its terrible beauty.
Two disparate characters talking about the human condition in a very clever, some would say post-modern way, is vintage Delillo, reminiscent of the conversation between the novelist and the terrorist in Mao II. The same can be said for the masterful juxtaposition of the public and the private spheres and the ever-recurring lone gunman-motiv. DeLillo is deliberately bordering on self-parody here. It is the way he manages to distill deeply human and humane truths from his prose that make him such an important figure.
Although similarities to Joyce, Wolfe and Dante have been noted in relation to Cosmopolis, it is the other great New York writer Paul Auster (to whom this book is dedicated) whose touch we can discern. DeLillo takes an intrinsically Austerian idea, the modern individual stripped of everything he possesses in the material world, reduced to nothing in a ritual of rebirth before he reinvents himself (Moon Palace, The New York Trilogy) and adds his own little variation...
This is a great but disturbing book in the light of the world's and the USA's current situation and a harsh indictment of the life-denying tendencies of capitalism.