Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3320 in Books
• Published on: 1986-10-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 326 pages

Synopsis
Jack Gladney, head of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill, is afraid of death, as is his wife Babette and his colleague Murray who runs a seminar on car crashes. The author exposes our common obsession with mortality, and Jack and Babette's biggest fear - who will die first?

Customer Reviews

Postmodern Classic? what it means to be alive!
I've come to this book from reading the ideas studied in Post-modernism and the novel came recommended along the lines of Paul Auster and Thomas Pynchon.

My experiences with both of these other authors have been negative, for very different reasons. (Auster's inability to write without his vomit inducing smugness and Pynchon purely and simply because of the density of the prose...yes alright...I promise to return to Pynchon in the future...). So that being said, thankfully, I enjoyed this book immensely.

Delillo's phrasing is skilled and astute; he's a writer who constructs prose with economy and flair, with well observed situations and a sharp critique for common everyman foibles.

The flow of the book is always engaging and the characters are constantly funny, quirky and human. The narrative is straight but with the constant use of stream of consciousness thoughts and dialogue it feels like it should be more challenging to read. It isn't.

The plot on retrospect is a touch convoluted but whilst reading it doesn't detract from wanting to know what happens next.

Ideas play a big part of the book (the simulated taking prevalence over the real, the inability to get reliable information in a communication age, the meaning of death...) but it is far from academic, dry or preachy.

This is a beautiful and tender story, well told, imaginative and literary in the truest sense i.e. that it leaves you thinking about what it means to be alive.

Amazingly overated
This was my introduction to Delillo and it was a huge disapointment, leaving me puzzled as to what people find so brilliant about him. The characters are awful cardboard contructs who nobody could ever care about for a moment. The plot is non-existent. I know, I know, it is a brilliant post modern satire on consumerist society and disaster as spectacle and plot is not the point. But you know what, it is not brilliant abd books do actually need plots or at least stories. Pretty much every theme in it had been dealt with by earlier writers so it felt curiously old fashioned for a mid eighties book. The philosophical musings are half baked and hardly insightful.

Oh and the humour, well, it just isnt funny. Didnt make me laugh anyway. I feel a bit bad slamming an author like this. He did his best no doubt and good luck to him but the critical acclaim is just astonishing.

The final thing that people talk about is his writing - the brilliant phrases and glittering sentences. Well, I will have to say the quality of the writing was what made me grind on for a hundred pages in the hope that something might happen or that the characters might somehow become more engaging and less one dimensional. It was pretty good. Not the prose of genius as it is sometimes described but he turns a neat phrase here and there. And to be ultra fair the idea of Hitler Studies was probably pretty clever in 1984 or so.

But really, who wants to read hundreds of pages of this sort of damp attack on consumerism. The praise heaped on it seems to typify what has gone wrong with literary fiction and the criticism of literature.

Worth a read if you are wanting to strike literary poses, if you want a story worth reading don't bother.

Curate's Egg
Some nice ideas and some good lines but it just doesn't seem to hang together. Given its frequent comic pretensions it has the major failing of - well - not being very funny. The characterisation is often annoying and frankly it's extremely put-downable.