| Title | : | Mao II |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0140152741 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780140152746 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 241 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1991 |
| Awards | : | Pulitzer Prize Fiction (1992), PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (1992) |
Mao II Reviews
-
“The cult of Mao was the cult of the book.”
A writer is always said to bring wisdom and knowledge to his readers, to give them guidance, clarity of mind by using stories and instances regardless of truth as exemplars. But can the writer do the opposite and inspire terror, chaos, and bewilderment? It is often said that a writer sacrifices himself for the better fortune of his readers. Writing should be a beloved practice to those who are enamored by words, by language, and sometimes by the ability of playing god and make-believe. That is not always the case. It is easily traceable in literary history that writers have the hardest time concentrating on their works. Indeed it is rather easy to write a few pages when inspiration hits you, but writing and rewriting hundreds even thousands of pages over a grueling stretch isn’t an attractive plight. Writers readily suffer fatigue, languor, creative blocks, and would often put off their work for great lengths of time. But then his suffering is assuaged the minute he publishes his work and people are inspired by what he painfully poured out of himself. But what if instead of inspiration, his horrors take hold of his prose and flow through his readers? What if he instills fear and uneasiness into their minds? And what if the book takes the form of a chimera that terrorizes both creator and receptor? In Christopher Nolan’s Inception he uses dreams to put in ideas into people’s heads. But in Don DeLillo’s Mao II, the obvious truth is revealed, in the real world, writing books take this function.
“What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. That danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous.”
In Mao II, Bill Gray, the world’s most renowned novelist, an aging dinosaur and an illusive sonofabitch firmly believes that he was born too late. He was of the idea that writers used to be the scale of the world’s moral balance and sometimes even the force the drives it off its axis. Books inspired fear, they served as catalysts of change. Most of the visionary books were banned; great writers were often murdered and burned on a stake. People in power didn’t like ideas people were getting from what they read. The Bible inspired great religious frenzy and turned lots of heathens into believers of Jesus Christ. Similar function goes for Islam’s Quran. And these works inspired a great many religious wars. The Greek Philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle’s works inspired an intellectual revolution. The Malleus Maleficarum caused the deaths of thousands of forward thinking women. Mein Kampf was an idea that killed millions of Jews. Marx and Engle’s Manifesto started a movement so hated by the world. Oscar Wilde’s flair caused uproar and probably got him killed. D.H. Lawrence’s vulgarity made him a literary villain. Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables gave the common people the feeling of power. Jose Rizal’s novels inspired the Philippine revolution. Even Nabokov’s Lolita gave rise to such a resounding cry of moral righteousness. But nowadays, definitely post 9-11, terrorists and acts of terror have taken hold over the populace and what was once a mass that was affected by literary ideas now moved to terror’s rhythm of fear and self preservation. The Osama bin Ladens and the Saddam Husseins of the world are now more known than the Garcia-Marquez and the Toni Morrisons. Even modern writers have not escaped the fate of fear. Salman Rusdie’s Satanic Verses shows how terrorism is encroached even to the influencers emeritus. A long time ago people read books and these chiefly inspired how they think, the choices they made. Nowadays people watch and listen to terror-dominated news and their mindset and life-choices are affected by what has happened. Books are now relegated as fantasy and escapism serving as a pastime rather than a critical tool of change, and it is no great wonder the biggest selling books are about vampires and masochistic sex. What was once a public that read and reacted on ideas and concepts now dwelled on reported events. The time of the thinking man is gone; the rule of the fear-addled reactionary homo-sapien is upon us. Is this the post-modern word we live in?
“He is saying terror is the what we use to give our people their place in the world. What used to be achieved through great work, we gain through terror. Terror makes the new future possible. All men, one man. Men live in history as never before. He is saying we make and change the history minute by minute. History is not the book or the human memory. We do history in the morning and change it after lunch.”
“Mao believed in the process of thought reform. It is possible to make by changing the basic nature of the people.”
Mao Zedong, the man who graces the novel’s title was not just a revolutionary leader; he was also a brilliant writer. As a youth he wrote well-regarded poems and several philosophical treatises on the subject of war, democracy and so forth. But what really symbolized Mao, aside from his images, was his Little Red Book that the Chinese people clamored for. Formally called Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, this work was printed and sold by the millions because the populace wanted to learn and adapt the ideas of their leader. I am saying this because although Mao did commit many vile acts of terrorism, what propelled people to notice and revere him was not his actions but the idea he wanted to propagate.
“There is a longing for Mao that will sweep the world… eloquent macho bullshit.”
This novel of set pieces isn’t as coherent as I’d hoped it to be. It combines hazy, fragmented views on terror, on war, of the lone and of the mass, of writing and shaping and out of the disarray comes a piercing cry out of the rubble that should be heard in the shell-shocked world of today: fear me, fear the writer. DeLillo purposely fills the book with scenes that cause unease and he reminds the reader that an idea is still scarier than an act. That the mass can never be compelled by fear and terror unless it takes root in informed viewpoints that the individual must make on his own, and that when traced, everything comes back to literature. Thus when man realizes his errs, he shall see that terror does not come from explosions and bombs, but from letters and words. -
Mao II—its title coming from one of Andy Warhol's famous portraits of Mao Zedong, opens in Yankee Stadium with a mass wedding of 13,000, and closes with a single wedding taking place in the early hours of the morning in Beirut; with a tank being part of the procession. And what is one of the things most associated with weddings?—photos, of course. Images. In DeLillo's tenth novel the Warhol pictures marry the ideas of image-making and totalitarianism, persuading speculation about how fame is transformed into a death mask, and how a portrait can somehow freeze the mind behind the face. Bill Gray, the reclusive writer who has enough royalties to now exist in obscurity, lives somewhere in upstate New York, with his younger assistant Scott; a kind of alter-ego, who happily attends to all his needs, and helps to maintains the massive Gray archive; including the much rewritten unpublished work. Not too sure whether to publish again, Gray derides to give the world an image instead of a book, and poses for the Swedish photographer Brita, whom Scott ushers to Gray's hideaway with all the caution of visiting an elusive terrorist. And that's kind of the point. Gray has retreated into silence and created a sort of myth status for himself, but only the terrorist has the real power these days—the ability to shape and influence actual events. The writer sees only one other choice besides seclusion—he can, like Andy Warhol, feed our addiction through imagery. Ironically, through terrorism itself, he is soon called into the real world to show support for a writer being held hostage in Lebanon, and after giving a public reading of his work in London, Delillo delves into a murkier plot, which propels Gray to head off to Beirut, via Athens, where he ends up getting a deadly liver ailment due to a hit-and-run, before disappearing in an image of total anonymity. The novel isn't solely about Bill Gray; as Scott, his girlfriend Karen, and literary photographer Brita, get their own segments in the novel too, which gives the novel a wider canvas.
I found this to be quite a dark cautionary piece of storytelling, that moves from one serious idea to the next. But, I did feel it was told with a sense of humor also—a satirical eye, and anyone familiar with some of Delillo's other novels would easily pick up on that. Mao II is filled with set pieces that do show off his great skill for a scene, and with multiple points of view. Also, the dialogue feels so genuine that reader is like a fly on the wall. Overall, he is just a brilliant storyteller. However, for those who like to be pulled emotionally by their fiction, Delillo is seldom an emotional writer when it comes to characters. I wasn't expecting Mao II to be moving in anyway—and it wasn't, really. Despite the PEN/Faulkner Award, I believe this is such an underrated novel. I was so impressed by Mao II that I'm struggling to think of a reason not to give it top marks. I'd say it sits just behind Libra, Underworld and White Noise as his fourth best novel. DeLillo might be past his prime now, but for me, he is still the greatest living American writer out there. -
“The future belongs to crowds.”
If you’ve tried DeLillo and didn’t get on with him this probably isn’t going to change your mind. All the familiar DeLillo hallmarks are present and correct – every character speaking in an identical voice, every character as intelligent and eloquent as the author; dramatic tension is hewn into the sentences rather than the plot; and it’s primarily cerebral in its appeal as opposed to emotionally engaging.
There are five players in Mao II. Bill is a famous reclusive writer. The more he disdains any public persona the more attention he receives – there’s a poignant dramatisation of the Elena Ferrante situation here. You could say he’s held hostage by his reluctance to assimilate himself to the demands of celebrity. He is stalked to his remote hideaway by a fanatical fan, Scott. Scott ingratiates himself and becomes his personal assistant. Scott eventually picks himself up a lover, a waif he finds lost in a local beat up town. Karen is running from a religious cult she joined as a nineteen year old, she is also running from her family. The theme of the individual attempting to flee crowd mentality is reinforced through Karen. Then there’s Brita, a photographer, who is allowed to photograph Bill and taken to his hideaway in the dark, much as a journalist might be escorted to the burrow of a group of insurgents. Lastly there’s the French poet who has been taken hostage by a terrorist group in Lebanon and is kept in a tiny room with a hood over his head. Bill has come to believe the writer has been usurped by the terrorist as the prime forger of world narrative. And that they have achieved this by means of replacing the word with the mass produced image as the collective focus of debate. When Bill flies to London to take part in a reading of the French poet’s work the suggestion is made that he might be able to facilitate the release of the hostage if he meets with the terrorist group.
As usual with DeLillo’s books, Mao II was ahead of its time. This was written in 1990 when barely anyone had heard of Osama Bin Laden. Also, as is usually the case, DeLillo’s sentence writing achieves a more thrilling transcendence than any other living writer I know. I don’t think any novelist has made me think about and understand our modern world to the extent DeLillo has. He writes about the present as if with the eerie razor sharp lucidity of hindsight. What happens in his novels on a small scale invariably starts happening in the real world on a large scale years later.
-
"The secret of me is that I'm only half here..."
Andy Warhol says this & perhaps because I'm a such a nonfan of his I was a super nonfan of this.
The novel infuses you with images and DeLillo attempts to do something wholly Warholesque with his own brand of literature. More discerning minds can tell me what that something is, and/or what specific effect it produces. The novel is also about: the indifference of society personified by crowds, the act of writing as a doppelganger for terrorism, and about "messianic returns" to humanity. The ego of the writer is totally implanted here, and though super PRETENTIOUS, I guess I did fall in love with DeLillo's comment on new lit versus old: before, everything new was explored and challenged while the newer years carry less original ideas so the modern writer uses news of the apocalypse for inspiration. (Yup, true.)
DeLillo has his motifs. The limousine (from "Cosmopolis") is employed once again in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo. His affinity for using only first names for all characters is damn whimsical. Mass hysteria stands in for individual paranoia and fear and the monster never EVER shows his actual face in a work by DeLillo.
Plot? thin threads but mostly about a writer and his assistants and how he is kind of a puppet (like the heroes (?) from the aforementioned "Cosmopolis" & the professor of "White Noise") but tries to redeem his terrorist acts of creating on the page by saving another lost writer. Very strange. There must be some poetry in the fact of that one missing writer is found & nudged into reading publicly the work of a fellow displaced writer.
Here, nothing stays long enough to make sense.
Is that "Warhol"? -
The Novelist as Substitute Terrorist (Or the other way round?)
I have a great deal of sympathy for DeLillo's protagonist, Bill Gray, alias Willard Skansey Jr. He has my fear of being over the hill. He, like me, talks to relative strangers more intimately than is warranted. I share his doubt that any of my accomplishments have even personal importance. And I really would prefer to spend my remaining days being ignored by the world.
On the other hand, Bill puts me off viscerally. His clipped conversational banter packed with urbane wit, his hapless set-up of his own professional and existential demise, his absence of credible motives for any actions he takes, his weird idea that the rise of terrorism has reduced the moral power of writers of fiction, and his compulsion to do something about that - all of it is alien and contrived. I'm left cold and unmoved in any direction.
There are many captivating phrases. This is DeLillo after all. But some appear to be nonsense: "We understand how reality is invented. A person sits in a room and thinks a thought and it bleeds out into the world. Every thought is permitted. And there's no longer a spatial distinction between thinking and acting." Is this a philosophy? A new understanding of the world? Or just a novelist's novelistic hubris?
Other of DeLillo's quips read like they came from Pseuds Corner in Private Eye Magazine: "... when the Old God leaves the world, what happens to all the unexpended faith?... When the Old God goes, they pray to flies and bottle tops." He also very much likes to bite the hand that feeds him, particularly that of publishers: "The secret force that drives the industry is the compulsion to make writers harmless." Indeed, that threat of the powerful writer must keep them up at night at Penguin.
The narrator's snobbishness is obvious:"They are a nation, he supposes, founded on the principle of easy belief. A unit fuelled by credulousness. They speak half a language, a set of ready-made terms and empty repetitions. All things, the sum of the knowable, everything true, it all comes down to a few simple formulas copied and memorised and passed on ... This is what people have wanted since consciousness became corrupt."
Who is it, does one suppose, DeLillo is addressing? Not his readers surely. More likely the unread masses, at least those not having read DeLillo, including all those dead folk born after corruption but before the DeLillian Enlightenment .
And of course, authors don't fair much better. "If you've got the language of being smart, you'll never catch a cold or get a parking ticker or die," says his sarcastic protagonist who has a houseful of notes, drafts, proofs, corrections, and emendations of a book he refuses to finish for no clear reason. He's a lush, a lech, and an absent father who sleeps with his assistant's wacky Moonie girlfriend and thinks that having his photograph taken is equivalent to a notice of impending death. His apparent intention is to allow Lebanese terrorists to 'trade-up' on their literary captive Swiss poet by sacrificing himself. His life, as they say, is complicated. Mostly because his egotism appears unbounded.
References to Mao, Arafat, and Khomeini abound. I can't understand why. Are these the terrorists who have undermined the importance of Western fiction? If they have, does this imply that authors are compelled to involve themselves in terrorist liaisons and media-manipulation? "Great leaders regenerate their power by dropping out of sight and then staging messianic returns," notes one of the characters. And? Are great novelists included as great leaders? Someone involved with this novel apparently thinks such a pretentious conceit has merit. Good luck with that. -
Sotto gli occhi di tutti
“Da qualche tempo ormai ho l'impressione che i romanzieri e i terroristi stiano giocando una partita che si conclude zero a zero. Quello che guadagnano i terroristi, lo perdono i romanzieri. Il potere dei terroristi di influenzare la coscienza di massa è la misura del nostro declino in quanto forgiatori della sensibilità e del pensiero. Il pericolo che essi rappresentano è pari alla nostra incapacità di essere pericolosi. […] Beckett è l'ultimo scrittore che abbia forgiato il nostro modo di pensare e di vedere. Dopo di lui, le opere principali comportano esplosioni a mezz'aria e crolli di edifici. Questa è la nuova narrativa tragica. […] Il loro modo di vivere nell'ombra, di vivere volontariamente con la morte. Il loro modo di odiare molte delle cose che odiate anche voi. La disciplina e l'astuzia. La coerenza delle loro vite. Il loro modo di provocare l'ammirazione, se la provocano. In società ridotte allo sperpero e alla sovrabbondanza, il terrore è l'unica azione significativa. C'è troppo di tutto, ci sono più cose e messaggi e significati di quanti ne possiamo usare in diecimila vite. Inerzia e isteria. E' possibile la storia? C'è qualche persona seria? Chi dobbiamo prendere sul serio? Solo il credente letale, la persona che uccide e muore per la fede. Tutto il resto viene assorbito. L'artista viene assorbito. Il pazzo per strada viene assorbito, trasformato e incorporato. Gli dài un dollaro, lo metti in uno spot televisivo. Solo il terrorista resta fuori. La cultura non ha ancora trovato il modo di assimilarlo. E' sconcertante quando uccidono l'innocente. Ma questo è precisamente il linguaggio per essere notati, l'unico linguaggio che l'Occidente comprenda. […] E' il romanziere che capisce la vita segreta, la rabbia che cova sotto ogni oscurità e negligenza. Voi siete dei mezzi assassini, quasi tutti voi”.
Don De Lillo è uno scrittore emozionale e intermittente; ma con una coscienza razionale inattaccabile. Non si accontenta mai di raggiungere narratività e stile. E' interessato a indagare i grandi temi umani: volontà, memoria, coscienza, libero arbitrio (capacità di distinguere tra bene e male, empatia, intelligenza emotiva). Mi pare che questo pensiero critico di una studiosa del NY Times sia ben rappresentativo del lavoro di De Lillo del 1991, con la sua prosa concettuale e performativa: “Ma lo scrittore è ancora pericoloso per il suo impegno nell'estendere la coscienza. Un romanziere crea un personaggio per rivelare qualcosa di ignoto, per aumentare il flusso di senso nel mondo. E' il sistema della letteratura di rispondere al potere e allontanare la paura, modulando nuove frequenze per la consapevolezza e le possibilità umane”. Due immagini sono state all’origine di Mao II, con le sue storie molteplici, intrecciate: il ritratto rubato di Salinger, apparso sul New York Post; e la fotografia che ritraeva il matrimonio collettivo della setta messianica e apocalittica del reverendo Moon. Questo libro, ambientato tra New York e Beirut, riesce in qualcosa di molto difficile: esprimere un discorso complesso e coinvolgente sul senso del dolore collettivo, sulla distruttività agita dalle masse, sulla specie umana contenitore della “nostra parte lunare che sogna un suolo devastato”. Riflette sui tentativi artistici e politici di eliminare il sé attraverso la sua riproduzione iconica, di creare un immaginario culturale come residuo antropologico di esperienza, un fossile vitale che si prolunghi oltre la mortalità. Percepisce l'essenza del male, come altri grandi scrittori novecenteschi hanno fatto: il male non ha a che fare tanto con oscure pulsioni di morte, ma con la volontà di sopravvivere a oltranza, con la insensata negazione della mortalità. Questo racconto è focalizzato sul nostro essere massa: seguaci, persone in lutto, spettatori, senzatetto, dimostranti, voci; collettività transitorie ferite e orgogliose, minacciate o pericolose, dimenticate o illuminate. Ritratte e rappresentate in fotografie che catturano il rischio, il corpo, la strada, l'istante, la nullità, il confine. Mao, Khomeini, il reverendo Moon, Tien an men, la folla in uno stadio, intrappolata o esaltata, lo scrittore recluso e disperato, l'ostaggio. De Lillo segnala così il doppio legame che si crea nell'esporre soggetti e oggetti, agenti e partecipanti, emittenti e destinatari alla violenza del discorso mass-mediatico. Amore e morte si sposano, inizio e fine si confondono, e caos e ragione non sono più in conflitto, ma prigionieri del medesimo impulso, dello stesso orrore, di un programma fuori controllo. Lo scrittore Bill Gray non riesce a resistere alla fermezza del valore conoscitivo, non può arretrare di fronte alla razionalità di mettersi in gioco, e in questo modo si condanna ad una fine biologica inaccessibile e silenziosa. Vive la solitudine come ossessione e non vuole più esporsi al giudizio di sé come restituito dagli altri. Quando crede che il mondo sia suo, ecco che questo lo schiaccia, soffoca il suo grido democratico. La sua vita sprofonda in se stessa tornando allo smarrimento del primo dolore. Tra resoconti, profezie e avvertimenti, non volendo provare ciò che prova la gente, realizza in un destino di estinzione la sua cosmologia del dolore.
"Questo romanzo è un gioiello. DeLillo ci conduce in un viaggio sconvolgente intorno alle versioni ufficiali della nostra storia quotidiana, a tutte quelle facili rassicurazioni su chi è chi. E lo fa con un occhio tanto attento e una voce cosí espressiva e diretta da non somigliare a nessun'altra". Thomas Pynchon -
Mao II is a bleak novel about a world where the moral consciousness of the people are controlled by terrorists and messiahs rather than writers. The writers are in state of retreat because their freedom of speech and expression has narrowed. Their space is now occupied by terrorists. Delillo writes: "What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous."
Bill Gray, a reclusive writer is approached by a former colleague to negotiate the release of a poet held hostage by a relatively unknown Maoist group in Beirut. Before this, Bill is photographed by a famous photographer - Brita (who specializes in photographing writers across the world) with whom he starts a dialog about the role of the writer in forming and raising the moral consciousness of the people. A character called Karen has escaped from a Christian cult under which she was mass married. The book starts off with her marriage at a mass wedding. Delillo uses the mass wedding and Ayotollah Khomeni's funeral to emphasize his idea that the future belongs to crowds. The book ends on a bleak note with Brita being asked to photograph upcoming terrorists instead of writers.
I liked a lot of Delillo's ideas in the novel. But Mao II is a very tough book to get through. It is almost as if Delillo wants to keep the reader at a distance. I am glad i read it, though. -
This is the only book I've ever read that I wanted to start reading again immediately after finishing it. I have read his description of two people watching the funeral of the Ayatollah Khomeini a dozen times. I wish I could have written that. The description of the mass wedding at the start of the book is also remarkable.
-
Another of the second tier of DeLillo's books, this one talks of writer's block and of the crazy marriage cult of Kim Jo Pak's Unification cult. Bizarre and full of action, it is well-written and a page-turner. It is however one to read after the masterpiece of Underworld.
-
I have an up and down relationship with Don DeLillo’s novels. I have enjoyed some of them thoroughly (Underworld and Libra) and others not so much. Similarly, I find my appreciation of DeLillo's writing vacillates quite a bit even as I read a particular novel. There were times in Mao II where I was thoroughly enjoying the reading experience; other times I felt like I was plodding uphill. I am always impressed, although certainly at times depressed, by DeLillo’s depiction of our world. He, more than any other writer I have come across, can provide a vivid picture of today while accurately foretelling what is to come. His images seem to span time in a way that does not feel dated even after 20 to 30 years.
In Mao II it is the author of fiction versus the terrorist. The writer of fiction’s role to define or at least clarify our culture has been usurped by the terrorist. Bill Gray, one of the most respected authors of his time, even though he had only published two novels, has spent many years hiding from his readers, hiding from the media. He writes every day on his third novel but is unable to produce work that he is confident about publishing or that his assistant, Scott, even supports publishing. Scott organizes Bill’s life, his writing and what interaction Bill has with the outside world. Scott effectively collects and classifies information, but for what purpose? Bill eventually runs from his work and secluded life. He runs toward the terrorists. In the process his writing returns to its former vibrancy.
Even as I have struggled at times through a DeLillo novel, I feel I gain insight and greater understanding of my world. That is one of the reasons I read, and DeLillo fills that particular need as well as any author I have encountered. -
Consuming Images
Don Delillo’s 1991 novel (his 10th) isn't just about the individual versus the crowd, but about the written word against the picture or the image.
Fiction is the preserve of the writer, while television (and now social media) is the vehicle of the mass media. Early in the novel, DeLillo’s character, Karen, observes:
“It was interesting how you could make up the news as you went along by sticking to picture only.” (32)
We've got used to consuming images, whether with or without words. Words are the product of thinking, and require thinking in order to consume and absorb them. For DeLillo's characters, images are for the unthinking masses, who will ingest any image force-fed to them by the media. Images are for the undiscriminating. After a while, "they are reduced to blur and glut":
“The streets run with images. They cover walls and clothing - pictures of martyrs, clerics, fighting men, holidays in Tahiti.” (229)
“In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too.” (37)
“The more banal, the more commonplace, the more predictable, the triter, the staler, the dumber, the better.” (111)
“Let's destroy the mind that makes words and sentences.” (161)
The writer, the individual, the individual writer, is, apparently, the enemy of ordinary people. The masses have him (or her) in their sights. (S)he is a threatened species.
Remoteness from the Masses, Retreat from the Crowd
The proper role of the writer, or at least DeLillo's author Bill Gray, is to remain remote from the masses and the mass media. The pain of writing enhances the separation of the writer from the masses:
“I have my own cosmology of pain. Leave me alone with it.” (45)
“I exaggerate the pain of writing, the pain of solitude, the failure, the rage, the confusion, the helplessness, the fear, the humiliation.” (37)
“Only writing could soak up his loneliness and pain. Written words could tell him who he was.” (204)
“Everything we do that isn't directly centred on work revolves around concealment, seclusion, ways of evasion.” (45)
Bill Gray chooses loneliness and remoteness from other people. Withdrawal. Seclusion. Evasion. Escape. Recoil. Flight. Refuge. Retreat from the crowd. "Silence, exile and cunning."
Terrorist News and Raids on Human Consciousness
Writers are no longer as influential on people as they once might have been (at least in Bill's opinion):
“Do you know why I believe in the novel? It's a democratic shout...The spray of talent, the spray of ideas.” (159)
“Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen [i.e., terrorists] have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness...Because we're giving way to terror, to news of terror, to tape recorders and cameras, to radios, to bombs stashed in radios. News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative.” (41-42)
“What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous.”
“Who do we take seriously? Only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith...Only the terrorist stands outside. The culture hasn't figured out how to assimilate him. It's confusing when they kill the innocent. But this is precisely the language of being noticed, the only language the West understands.” (157)
“The novelists feed our search for meaning. Quoting Bill. It was a great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don't need the novel. Quoting Bill. We don't even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings.” (72)
“A writer creates a character as a way to reveal consciousness, increase the flow of meaning. This is how we reply to power and beat back our fear. By extending the pitch of consciousness and human possibility.” (200)
Writers can no longer influence those for whom words are meaningless or secondary.
Delirious Crowds and Lethal Believers
Like the cult members (in the (fictional) mass wedding in Yankee Stadium in the prologue - It was actually modelled on a wedding in Seoul), the masses end up “programmed, brainwashed, indoctrinated" by the mass media.
"The future belongs to crowds." (16)
“This is what you fear, that history is passing into the hands of the crowd.” (162)
“Delirious crowds swirling beneath enormous photographs of holy men.” (174)
Ironically, Delillo's descriptions of the crowd scenes, some juxtaposed with more private scenes (the mass wedding, the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini, and the Beiruti wedding that ends the novel), are beautully worded portrayals of scenes that could perhaps have been adequately captured by the images themselves (alone).
Into the Glow
Reality has been superseded by the artifice of the media:
“Nature has given way to aura...All the material in every life is channelled into the glow.” (44)
The writer is more concerned with the truth than the glow (of televisi9n):
“On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language...There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.” (48)
Bill Gray doubts whether anybody values this swing or integrity or moral force anymore.
Andy Warhol's Fused Images
Paradoxically, the writer's will to live combats the tendency of all plots to move deathwards, which direction is shared by terrorism.
It's no coincidence that, after 23 years, Bill Gray can't finish (or hasn’t finished) his last novel. To finish it would be a premonition of his own death.
In the first chapter, Scott (Bill's personal assistant) visits an exhibition of Andy Warhol silkscreen prints, where he views a work called “Crowd" and several editions of “Mao", a print of one of which (“Mao II”) he buys for Karen, an ex-Moonie who attended the mass wedding, with whom he lives in Bill's home. It's significant within the structure of the novel that people know Mao Zedong, more as a result of consuming images of him than by ever having seen him in person (or even on TV) or in context, and thought about what he and his work means/signifies.
At another Warhol exhibition, the portrait photographer, Brita Nilsson (who has been engaged to photograph Bill for posterity, i.e., after his death), detected in Warhol's work “a maximum statement about the dissolvability of the artist and the exaltation of the public figure, about how it's possible to fuse images.” (134) Warhol’s silk screen on canvas painting of Mikhail Gorbachev was “reprocessed through painted chains of being, peering out over the crowd from a pair of burnished Russian eyes.” (135)
Trudging, Totally Calm in the Long Lens
The individual has become secondary to the crowd, the mass(es), the swarm, the flock, the following. Scott says:
“Crowds...People trudging along wide streets, pushing carts or riding bikes, crowd after crowd in the long lens of the camera so they seem even closer together than they really are, totally jam packed, and I think of how they merge with the future, how the future makes room for the nonachiever, the nonaggressor, the trudged, the nonindividual. Totally calm in the long lens, crowd on top of crowd, pedalling, trudging, faceless, sort of surviving nicely.” (70)
“Bill doesn't understand how people need to blend in, lose themselves in something larger. The point of mass marriage is to show that we have to survive as a community instead of individuals trying to master every complex force. Mass interracial marriage.” (89)
Bill doesn't want to blend in, he wants to stand out, on the outside, even if he still wants to have influence.
SOUNDTRACK: -
What is the role of fiction writers in world peace? This might as well be the aching question that this book tried to answer. Or offered to answer. That, for me, is what made this book different from other books about novelists as the main protagonist. That, for me, is the reason why I really like this book.
This is my 3rd Don DeLillo and he is still to disappoint. This does not have the in-your-face sadness of his
Falling Man (3 days) because it is not about 9/11 but this is not as artsy as the book that made me automatically buy a book whenever I see his name on the cover,
The Body Artist (4 stars). There is no turning back. I will have to read all those 6 other DeLillo books that I have in my tbr shelf.
The story revolves around Bill Gray who is like Salinger, recluse and elusive. One day, he lets himself be photographed (like Salinger) it made him popular until he becomes involved as a spokesperson for a Swiss writer being held hostage in Beirut.
For me, my take on the story is this: novelists create dreams and this make them like "gods." Even if their works are not real, there are truths in them. Truths that are universal and timeless. That's why authors like Salinger or DeLillo (although he is not recluse really) are being read. With this impact on readers, they share a part in achieving something positive in this world. Because they speak to the hearts and minds of people, they are, in a way, maybe indirectly, responsible to common good like world peace.
This is a great book. My only small complaint is that DeLillo is fond of non-linear narration with frequent shifts on settings, time and characters. Had I not read "Falling Man" first I would not have enjoyed this as much as I did.
Thought provoking book. Intriguing characters especially Brita who is the photographer focusing on writers. She does not photograph other people except writers. What a novel idea.
I made a good decision welcoming 2015 with this book. -
Αλλο ενα απολαυστικο μυθιστορημα του Ντελιλο. Πραγματικα σοκαριστικο το ποσο to the point ειναι οσον αφορα στις εξελιξεις της κοινωνιας μας(γραφτηκε το 1991). Θιγει λιγο πολυ ολα τα θεματα που εμφανιζονται σε ολα τα μυθιστορηματα του συγγραφεα που εχω διαβασει, με κυριοτερο την τρομολαγνια που επικρατει και την ελειψη κριτικης σκεψης απο τον καθημερινο ανθρωπο .τα πληθη χειραγωγουνται πια απο ψευδο-ηγετες που τους καθοριζουν τη ζωη με οπλο τον τρομο, ενω τα "μεγαλα μυαλα" της κοινωνιας που δινουν τροφη για σκεψη αναγκαζονται πια να ζουν σε απομονωση ή να υποβαλλονται σε ακομη χειροτερη μοιρα. Μου αρεσε πολυ αν και δεν το θεωρω το καλυτερο εργο του Ντελιλο, ομως για αλλη μια φορα γινεται σαφες ποσο ιδιοφυης ειναι .
3.5 αστερια -
I'd describe Mao II as an intellectual novel. Brimming with astute observations about modern life. And gorgeously written.
It begins with a mass cult wedding in a stadium. A troubled young girl called Karen is marrying a Korean man who knows about eight words of English. Her groom was chosen by Master, the head of the endtime cult.
Karen will soon end up as part of the sequestered household of a famous reclusive writer and his secretary.
The novel studies the ways we form into groups to achieve or reaffirm or change identity. (Eventually, we will encounter a terrorist group.) It's an incredibly prescient and prophetic novel. It's almost eerie how prevalent is the image of the Twin Towers in this book which deals with terrorism. It was written in 1991. -
Video review
DeLillo's signature mixture of splendid prose and jazzy broodings on contemporary life make it a priceless experience even when the pace slows down painfully. There's also some great humor here, and explosions. Would be an excellent introduction to his fiction if White Noise and Libra weren't somewhat fuller experiences. -
As with Underworld, the opening prologue—based upon an actual occurrence—of the mass-wedding of young and youngish couples of the Unification Church, held in Yankee Stadium and performed by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, is one of the strongest points of the book. DeLillo excels at such portraits set to the page, crisply and potently capturing the atmosphere of this bizarre and fascinating spectacle, with its ordered ranks of veils and ties, the regimented structure and candle-row colors that delineated the transformation of an intimate ceremony of personal commitment into a crowded and raucous affirmation of cultish charisma. After such a starkly adrenal opening, DeLillo then blurs and abrades with his initial meet-and-greet between reclusive author Bill Gray and Brita, a journalist who is bound and bent upon photographing every living major writer—and continuing through to the confusing ending in Beirut, which sees Brita apparently about to compound Bill's failure to spring a versifying hostage held by Lebanese terrorists. This is primarily a series of mobile and difficult dialogues—delivered by characters who all sound like Don DeLillo—centering upon the state of art, fiction, photography, and mass-phenomena in this, our modern age, when terrorism was on the verge of becoming the Next Big Thing—compared to fictional portraits or visual representations, a far more potent and pyrotechnic means of effecting changes in societies, of steering political discourse, of grabbing the world's attention and focussing it upon problems that were previously ignored. Where are we at when the authorial pen has been displaced in immediacy and influence by the kalashnikov and high-explosives? When murderous theatre proves the ablest way to advance one's political agenda, to broadcast in—and capture—the medium of the real?
Mao II was my introduction to Don DeLillo, read many, many years ago. I enjoyed it even while feeling it cooly kept me at a distance—its text, to me, a murky river whose current moved quickly and revealed little upon the first glance. I would actually like to return to this someday, especially in this new millennium featuring the Global War on Terror and that most horrific and course-changing of days: September 11th, 2001. I was impressed with the style and trappings of Mao II the first time around, while never believing I had fully grasped what DeLillo wished to get across—perhaps a second journey would leave me more appreciative of the author's prescience in gauging the future potentiality for Terror. -
It's hard to believe this novel was written pre 9/11. Dandy Don's assessment of the role of terror in our society is almost prophetic. Catastrophe, he observes, is the only thing capable of penetrating our distracted consciousness.
"In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act. There's too much everything, more things and messages and meanings than we can use in ten thousand lifetimes. Inertia-hysteria."
Delillo also focuses on the rise of crowds and our need to fit in: to find something bigger than ourselves that gives meaning to our lives. It is a prominent theme that he touches on steadily throughout the novel. "The future belongs to crowds." Meanwhile, our central character spends his time doing everything he can to avoid crowds. A nice bit of irony there.
I liked how Delillo brings these two themes together in the final chapter.
Other than the chapter dedicated to Karen's ramblings in the park, the plot is entertaining. So not only do we have interesting thematic discources, but we have a fun read as well. Not quite 'Libra' great but certainly another excellent work from Delillo. -
This was my third time through this book and I read it this time as part of my ongoing Delillo re-readathon where I am reading all his books in publication order. I wrote a fair amount last time I read it (almost exactly 3 years ago - see below). So, just a quote from the NY Times to add:
"If terrorists have seized control of the world narrative, if they have captured the historical imagination, have they become, in effect, the world's new novelists? For sheer influence over the human mind, have they displaced a precariously placed literature? Are writers -- lacking some greater if lethal faith -- the new hostages? "Is history possible? Is anyone serious?" These are some of the questions posed by "Mao II," the latest novel by Don DeLillo, who has already proved with such books as "Players," "White Noise" and "Libra" that no one can match his ability to let America, the bad dream of it, speak through his pen."
(Obviously this was written some time ago and Mao II is no longer "the latest novel by Don Delillo").
---------------
ORIGINAL REVIEW
---------------
This novel is just about ideal for me as its themes combine photography (and the power of the image) with writing (and the role of the novelist). About 90% of my time is spent either taking photographs or reading.
The title of the book is derived from Andy Warhol's famous portrait of Mao Zedong, but the power of the image, especially of a portrait, is a dominant part of the story and it isn’t just Mao II that is discussed. Alongside images and novelists, the book also explores terrorism and crowds. There are probably other themes you could pull out, but those seem to be the main ones.
Bill Gray is a reclusive writer with two significant novels under his belt. For reasons that are explored through the course of the book, he has never finished his next book: he has withdrawn and hidden himself away (think Thomas Pynchon without the output, or even, to a lesser extent, Delillo himself). He allows a photographer to come to him to capture his portrait, partly driven by the realisation that his seclusion has become a kind of captivity. He is looking for a way to escape. As events pan out, he visits New York and finds himself agreeing to travel to London to give a poetry reading on behalf of a writer held captive in Beirut. This offers him a chance to do what he may or may not have been planning all along: disappear completely.
There are other people involved in the story, but it is a limited cast. In an incomplete list, other than Gray and the photographer, Brita, there is Gray's assistant, Scott, and there is Karen. The opening pages of the book, a preface, describe a mass wedding in a baseball stadium organised by the Unification Church and presided over by Sun Myung Moon. Here is where we meet Karen as she is married to a Korean man she has just met and who was picked out for her by Moon. But, by the time the book starts properly, they are in separate countries and she is with Scott. This is one of several plot developments that Delillo does not explicitly describe until well after they have happened: the reader is left to work it out and then see the details emerge as the novel progresses.
What the mass wedding in the preface does is introduce us to the idea of crowds which is a repeating motif through the book as Delillo contrasts crowds and individuals (Gray is a novelist looking to reach a mass audience - perhaps, but we take time to explore Mao Zedong and Ayatollah Khomeini as well as Sun Myung Moon).
"The future belongs to crowds."
And
"The cult of Mao was the cult of the book. It was a call to unity, a summoning of crowds where everyone dressed alike and thought alike. Don’t you see the beauty in this? Isn’t there beauty and power in the repetition of certain words and phrases? You go into a room to read a book. These people came out of their rooms. They became a book-waving crowd. Mao said, 'Our god is none other than the masses of the Chinese people.' And this is what you fear, that history is passing into the hands of the crowd."
Crowds are effectively contrasted with Gray's determination to disappear, to become more and more isolated.
Crowds are also the targets of terrorists. It is an ongoing theme in Delillo’s novels to compare the roles of novelists and terrorists. Here we read:
"Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated."
And
"'For some time now I’ve had the feeling that novelists and terrorists are playing a zero-sum game.'
'Interesting. How so?'
'What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous.'
'And the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art.'"
Mao II was first published in 1991, but it makes a fascinating read from the other side of events like 9/11: at times it seems almost prophetic when read 25+ years later. Coincidentally, it was written around the time when Salman Rushdie was condemned by Ayatollah Khomeini. Delillo has said the book is not about Rushdie, but he has acknowledged the connection.
Without doubt, this is a stylised book. No one writes dialogue like Delillo writes dialogue (only Delillo could write in the middle of a conversation "Bill laughed in a certain way" and the reader know what he means) and the story seems deliberately set up to allow Delillo to explore some of these big themes. For me, it is not an emotional book, but it is one that you have to admire and which manages to be engaging despite its lack of emotion.
Just as an aside, I couldn’t help but notice this quote:
"If they could send a woman wearing stockings who might whisper the word “stockings.” This would help him live another week."
and compare it with this from Delillo's earlier work
The Names:
"'Say heat. Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered … Use names,' I said."
The image as a way to bridge the gap between public and private, the contrast of crowds vs. individuals, the role of novelists compared with terrorists, the effect on a novel of its release into the public domain. A fascinating book to read even if, or perhaps because, the world has changed in the 27 years since its publication. -
Mao II centers around two events: the emergence of a reclusive author in New York and a hostage crisis in Lebanon. That both events are treated with the glibness and breakneck pace of news cycles isn't, in and of itself, reason to praise this novel, even if you consider that DeLillo does so as a commentary. What makes Mao II great, then, is that he goes all the way with commentary on the media, inviting the reader into the world of the twenty-four hour news rush, making you eagerly await every new update and feel as though you're part of something broader by following each post as it happens. If that wasn't enough, he uses the dark corners of the book as a place to put his understandable fear of what happens when the TV news gains too much influence and the people who watch are so caught up in the spectacle of events that they miss the broader picture, the driving forces behind them. Throw in a clairvoyant woman, a terrorist plot, and a brilliantly realized set piece about a mass Moonie marriage, and you've got better, sharper, smarter TV than most TV.
-
I can't deny that Don DeLillo has great way with words but the lack of traditional storytelling prevented me from enjoying this novel.
-
I could feel DeLillo grappling with something important as I read this book, trying to deliver something profound, and that feeling made me want to press on, to see where he was going, even though I found most of his narrative a slog.
There were astounding moments. The funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini was gorgeous prose. The discussion between Bill and George about the power of the terrorist to affect change was tense and convincing. Karen's time in the homeless shantytown was poetic and always shifting. But nothing in
Mao II was easy;
DeLillo made us work for every piece of wonder he embedded in his text. And along with these moments of genius was the promise of something profound pushing me on.
DeLillo fulfilled his promise to me, but considering the myriad opinions concerning what
Mao II was about, I am sure what I found profound is only one possibility.
So here's what
Mao II was about for me: insignificance. Not the usual evocation of existential nihilism, but a workable insignificance in the face of our search for impossible significance. It wasn't telling us to give up because there is no meaning, but telling us to simply recognize that whatever meaning we find for ourselves is significant for that and nothing else.
DeLillo engages with issues and artifacts and concepts that our culture endows with the illusion of significance: architecture, the world trade center, terrorism and terror, belief, love, belief in love, religion, home and homelessness, art, the artist, photography, great men, and writing. Yes, even writing. All of it is insignificant beyond ourselves. And the search for significance in these things is equally insignificant.
It's a subtle shift from the nihilist perspective that nothing means anything, but the shift is a profound one (even if DeLillo is only adding to the voices of those who've already spoken about this possibility). It was the pay off I was hoping for. I am only sorry that it wasn't enough to make me love this book.
I wanted to love
Mao II. But I'll have to cope with simply admiring it and its author. I've been afraid to engage with DeLillo. His reputation is daunting, and so are the issues he tackles. But now that I've begun I am confident that somewhere in his body of work is a book I will love as much as I admire this one. I hope that book is
Libra. -
About 15 years ago I bounced badly off Underworld, supposedly De Lillo's magnum opus but seeing the synopsis of this one decided to give him another crack.
An ultra reclusive author Bill Gray, his fanatically devoted PA, live in fan Scott, ex Moonie cult member Karen and obsessive photographer Brita are the main characters in this very relevant novel that examines terrorism, the subjection of the individual to the lure of mass movements and the threat to novels and novelists themselves.
" Mao said 'Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people' and this is what you fear, that history is passing into the hands of the crowd."
Damn right sir.
I found it took me a bit of time to adjust to De Lillo's style after reading a couple of more modernist books but once I did I found his characterization convincing and the plot compelling. Some have criticised the ending of the book but I found it both appropriate.and powerful.
The star of this book is for me " Bill Gray" as he became. Weighed down by early success, frightened of future failure and in many ways doomed from the outset.
" Bill felt joined to the past, to some bloodline of intimate and renewable pain"
I will soon take on "White Noise" , if it is as good as Mao II I will be a happy boy. -
A mess. Opens with the reactionary premise that “the future belongs to crowds” (16) and descends from there. Something about a reclusive writer and another writer kidnapped by Lebanese Maoists. I suspect there is a concordance here between the artist who wishes to remain out of the public spotlight and the artist who is forcibly hidden. Dunno. The whole thing is kinda gross.
My copy is a first edition, which has a Pynchon blurb on the back--no surprise he likes it, considering P’s own alleged reclusiveness. “When a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear” (36). D, you can suck P off on your own time. Even worse: “The state should want to kill all writers. Every government, every group that holds power or aspires to power should feel so threatened by writers that they hunt them down, everywhere” (97). We gonna just have to get over ourselves, yo. But, even worser: “For some time now I’ve had the feeling that novelists and terrorists are playing a zero-sum game” (156)--“Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the new tragic narrative” (157). This is just Marinetti. Barf.
Similar concern as in
White Noise: "Because we’re giving way to terror, to news of terror, to tape recorders and cameras, to radios, to bombs stashed in radios. News of disaster is the only narrative people need” (42).
Lotsa weird stuff about Reverend Moon. Uhh, yeah.
Recommended for readers with their own cosmologies of pain, city nomads more strange than herdsmen in the Sahel, and persons with a need for internal dissent, self-argument. -
DeLillo has always been good at capturing the way people actually talk -- syntax, cadence, etc.-- but his characters don't usually say things normal people say. They are always totally self-aware and generally pretty intelligent. They understand the psycho-socio-philosophical implications of lighting a cigarette; they get the significance of a half-second pause in a conversation. They can read each others' minds, finish each others' sentences. And this can be distracting, can take you right out of the book. But if you don't mind that (and I still haven't decided), DeLillo has a lot to offer.
-
Even better upon a second reading, DeLillo books are ones that need demand two readings you read and see things with such vivid clearity, a wedding party escorted by a Russian Tank.
Hey America deal makers or diplomats, " Don't bring your problems to Beirut" or Syria,
The novel can't compete with the war and death on the 24-hour news networks shown without remorse, we relay on the carnage seen on CNN so we feel lucking about drinking our Coke-a-Cola with out bombs falling on our heads feel less guilty becouase we are aware of the injustice even when CNN makes Billions of dollars of showing death! We should step back perhaps, read more ! -
I feel very safe when I read Delillo. I know I am going somewhere worthwhile, and I know that I can trust him to get me there smoothly and gently, that the time will pass and the journey and destination and details will all be taken care of. This novel is, by turns, deeply real and entirely metaphysical, an eloquent portrait of a small collection of individuals and individual drives and pains, and an entirely artificial means for Delillo to explore principles of art and meaning-making within the frame of larger political realities. It is a meditation on charismatic power and the function of literature in contemporary society, among other things.
I have heard that Delillo flirts with radical ideologies but rarely espouses them directly, preferring instead to allow their language and intentions to creep from the mouths of characters here and there. I was fascinated by those elements in this book - so potentially (falsely?) autobiographical at times. It is always dangerous to write about a writer, as all readers will secretly assume they see into the author him/herself. I think it is more likely, more useful, to see all characters, all situations, as products of the writer's mind, but not necessarily theses, not direct representations of belief or conviction, but merely maps of where that mind has been, seen in reflections and echoes and opposites.
Delillo's writer, Bill Gray - a character struggling with the nearly stereotypical writerly miseries of solipsism, doubt, and hatred of one's own work - has internalized the idea that writers are obsolete in the contemporary world. He decides that writers no longer hold the power to alter society's consciousness, cannot speak loudly enough or radically enough to create or catalyze change. Instead, the role of true belief and action has been taken over by the political concept of terror. Terrorists have become the only genuine voices of conviction and ideals that the world will listen to.
This idea is played out through a series of lucid and unlikely events that take on the glow and enchantment of one-act plays. Each is firmly rooted in the ground of the text, but has a meditative and inevitable quality that brings the reader in and out of the plot, rising and sinking along a fine line of abstraction and solidity. The writing is beautiful and familiar, the characters recognizable and strange, set against a backdrop of late 1980s and early 90s political iconography, and a thin running thread of Mao. -
I am a fan of Don DeLillo's artistic ambition and his want to address ideas more profound than simple character study. When Tom Wolfe wrote his diatribe against MFA writing programs and accused them of passing along a tradition of meaningless, nonempathetic stories rather than work that addresses morality and social meaning, he undermined his own argument with his own bare-faced self-promotion of _The Bonfire of the Vanities_, a work that may in essence have fit his own ideal but was poorly structured and almost unreadable in the end.
But Wolfe had an interesting point, proof of which was the simple fact that his statements caused such ire and intellectual retaliation among the MFA community. In the end, Wolfe would have done better to have used DeLillo as his primary example of writing that aspires to his ideal. DeLillo writes about people, but in the broadest sense of the term. He dwells not only in his characters, which is often the stopping point for many short-minded fictioneers with an assumption that their characters are worth reading (which often means that they are not), but also what those characters mean to the society they are in. _Libra_ is a wonderful example of this, as is _White Noise_ and _Cosmopolis_. Even in works where DeLillo's representations remain as just representations and do not engage as characters themselves (_Ratner's Star_), I am always impressed with his artistic ambition. DeLillo has a lot to say about the world, both topically and philosophically. This book, _Mao II_, is one that dwells on many relatively recent events (the Reverend Moon mass wedding, Khomeni's death), but even when read in 2006, these events hold meaning to the central points DeLillo is out to address--the influence of mass character over singular character, and the effect of art on the human psyche (and in this book, he even allows terrorism to enter into the world of art).
_Mao II_ is a work of DeLillo nearly at his best. We deal with singular characters who resonate strongly off the page--there is Karen, a former Reverend Moon cultist who has been only partly relieved through deprogramming. There is Brita, a photographer who deals only writers as her subject. She manages to schedule a session with Bill, a legendary writer who has been self-reclusive and unsure about whether to relinquish his latest project onto the world. And there is his secretary/assistant/connection to the real world, Scott. Every one of these characters, and the characters to come as Bill is drawn into a plan to reveal himself at a benefit for a poet who has been kidnapped in Beirut, distinguish themselves through DeLillo's sharp and witty prose, but they also deal with philosophical concepts regarding society, indentity and art, and it is here that DeLillo is always at his finest. While in books like _The Names_, the characters overconsume the content and diffuse both, in _Mao II_, the characters are sharply intersting because of both their moments of sympathy and antipathy. In short, his characters feel fully fleshed out rather than spokespersons of philosophy, which was what dragged down books line _Ratner's Star_.
The work of any artist must be looked at in its entirety rather than by singular example. A great poet is not one who has written one great poem, but has written a canon of work that has sometimes produced godliness, often greatness, and sometimes total misses. DeLillo can be considered a great writer even in the misses, for what he tries to do often far surpasses the greatest work of mediocre writers who dwell too much in the immediate rather than the universal. _Mao II_ may not be one of his greatest works and may not be pondered and scribed over like _Underworld_ or _White Noise_, but it is a great book, and I think many a DeLillo fan will cherish it for its precision and its thinking. -
The hardest thing about reading a Don Delillo novel is everything is quotable, every sentence he writes is a sentence only Don Delillo could've written, anyway you look at it. This is a short book, shouldn't take one more than a few days, but it's such a rich, deeply profound book that needs to be read slowly, with much concentration lest you miss out on all the cool stuff. Some of it isn't accessible, not right away, but when you mull over it, you do see it make sense. See it define your life somehow, coz that's what a Don Delillo novel does, it defines you, at least at some existential level. It's also a sad sad book, that will break your heart and leave you restless with longing, especially with what happens to all those cool Characters, but it's not all despairing because you can see it coming, I mean, the writer, Bill Gray is like Rorschach and his king-size death wish in Alan Moore's Watchmen. His struggle for total alienation is futile, but so enjoyable to follow him all through his metaphysical blundering.
I know I said a lot of the sentences are very quotable, but here are some of my favourite, at least the ones that resonate--
"We're all drawn to the idea of remoteness. A hard-to-reach place is necessarily beautiful. [...] And a person who becomes inaccessible has a grace and a wholeness the rest of us envy."
"The narrower the boundaries of my life, the more I exaggerate myself."
"The language of my books has shaped me as a man."
"There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live."
"The deeper I become entangled in the process of getting a sentence right in its syllables and rhythms, the more I learn about myself."
"This book and these years have worn me down."
"Does writing come out of bitterness and rage or does it produce bitterness and rage?
Or both?"
"Time became peculiar, the original thing that is always there. It seeped into his fever and delirium, into the question of who he was."
"Through out history it's the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark."
"Survival means you lean how to narrow the space you take up for fear of arousing antagonistic interest and it also means you hide what you own inside something else so that you may seem to possess one chief thing when it is really many things bundled and tied and placed inside each other, a secret universe of things, unwhisperable, plastic bags inside plastic bags, and the woman is somewhere in there too, bagged with her possessions."
"What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous. [...] And the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art."
"The only way to be in the world was to write himself there. His thoughts and words were dying. Let him write ten words and he would come into being once again."
"Is there time for a final thought?" -
An ice-breaker in a class discussion today on this: “Did anyone read the first one?” Sorry to report the ice held.
But onto the book, which I harbor many different feelings for—from awe to irritation, near-reverence to doubt. Some pages downright astonish with insights, masterfully articulated, into that postmodern condition of the threatened self versus collective/crowd, representation via words versus images, and the status and relevance of the writer-artist versus the terrorist, who harbinges their “decline as shapers of sensibility and thought.” Loving books as we do here, Scott’s introduction (browsing in a bookstore, feeling that familiar “fine excitement,” hearing the books “shrieking Buy me”) should stir us towards some delighted identification: haven’t we heard the same siren call?
But other pages kinda annoy with some overlong descriptions of this one park and over-philosophisation, with certain stiff dialogue by even stiffer characters, admittedly with this latter probably being consistent with the loss-of-self theme featured throughout. The obviousness of this becomes inescapable every time a crowd appears, which is to say: almost all the time (at stadiums, on TV, in paintings, and even in actual photos preceding parts of the book), and their descriptions invariably gave my goosebumps goosebumps.
We have Bill, a self-tortured and -exiled genius, exemplifying the quintessential writer of yore, a modernist figure amid postmodern shenanigans. He also hallucinates his book as this stalking thing, “a naked humped creature with filed-down genitals”—lovely image, as I cross my legs. Although there are three other semi-main characters (Brita the photographer, Scott the super-fan, Karen the believer), they largely exist as extensions of Bill’s character, whose downward spiral we trace throughout the book as he emerges from self-exile to save another writer, a poet held hostage by a terrorist group.
Along the way, DeLillo waxes electric poetry on crowds, cults, images, words, myths, etc., fixated throughout on the increasingly unstable nature of language that’s become unwieldy (”There’s too much everything, more things and messages and meanings that we can use in ten thousand lifetimes”). Yet Bill as this archetypal Modernist Writer still abides old-fashionedly by language’s ontological power, that “code of being,” and it’s morbidly fun to watch this belief system unravel. Pretty good book, though hesitantly recommended. -
Uma interessante reflexão sobre o papel e influência cultural que a palavra escrita teve durante a história, e a forma como esta se alterou na sociedade actual. DeLillo parece sugerir que a importância da palavra escrita e a sua capacidade de alterar o panorama moral e cultural da sociedade foi sendo gradualmente suplantada pela imagem e o terror. No entanto, evidencia que toda e qualquer ideia antes de tomar forma é, habitualmente, primeiro anotada em forma escrita e que, consequentemente, tem a sua génese na escrita (inclusive em documentos e obras que antecedem o autor destas novas ideias).
Apesar de se debruçar sobre um tema extremamente interessante (recorrendo a figuras históricas centrais como Mao Tsé Tsung, autor do "livrinho vermelho" ou Hitler, autor do "Mein Kampf" como exemplos do poder destruidor e motor cultural e social da palavra), o romance é por vezes pouco imersivo, parecendo ser mais uma série de acontecimentos algo erráticos e dispersos (ainda que relacionados entre si) do que um romance propriamente dito. O objectivo do autor parece ser mais o de refletir e colocar o leitor a ponderar sobre o tema indicado acima do que construir uma narrativa com principio, meio e fim. No entanto, a ideia que transmite e a forma como o faz é de tal modo poderosa que dispensa uma narrativa demasiado limpinha, sendo um romance que permanece na memória do leitor muito depois deste o ter acabado de ler.
