Book
Underworld
Record details
- ISBN: 0684848155 (pbk.)
- ISBN: 0684842696
- ISBN: 97806848481510 (softcover)
- ISBN: 9780684842691
-
Physical Description:
827 pages ; 25 cm
print - Publisher: New York, NY : Scribner, 1998.
- Copyright: ©1997
Search for related items by subject
| Genre: | Domestic fiction. Psychological fiction. |
Available copies
- 2 of 3 copies available at BC Interlibrary Connect.
Holds
- 1 current hold with 3 total copies.
Show Only Available Copies
| Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Holdable? | Status | Due Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hazelton Public Library | Fic (Text) | T 33972 | Adult Fiction - Main Floor | Volume hold | Available | - |
| Nakusp Public Library | FIC DEL (Text) | 35160000565664 | Adult Fiction | Volume hold | On holds shelf | - |
| Nelson Public Library | F DEL (Text) | 35148400050791 | Adult Fiction | Volume hold | Available | - |
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Monthly Selections - #1 August 1997
/*Starred Review*/ DeLillo always writes large, but here he has reached new dimensions as he taps into all the terrifying and confounding forces unleashed by the inception of the nuclear age. His stylistically magnificent, many-voiced, and soulful novel begins on October 3, 1951, at New York's Polo Grounds, where the decisive game in the race for the pennant between the legendary Giants and Dodgers is taking place, the same day the Soviet Union detonates an atom bomb. It's a spectacular scene, and DeLillo is everywhere: the announcer's booth where Russ Hodges is losing his voice; the stands where a young truant named Cotter is catching his breath after jumping the turnstile; the box seat where J. Edgar Hoover and friends exchange small talk and insults; and on the field, where baseball history is being made, and the unifying symbol of the story, the ball hit into the stands in the game-winning home run, begins its talismanic journey. As DeLillo zooms in on each sphere of action, and each psyche, he achieves an unsurpassed intensity of sensory and psychological detail, which is rendered with exquisite tenderness. He never once loses this quality, this warmth and sorrow, as the narrative sways back and forth in time, and as more and more compelling characters and situations are introduced. There's Nick Shay, a waste-management expert burdened by a violent past; Klara Sax, an artist creating a monumental work in the middle of the desert out of decommissioned B-52s; and incendiary genius Lenny Bruce. Like novelists E. L. Doctorow and Thomas Pynchon, DeLillo uses historical figures to great effect, but DeLillo is a far more emotive and spiritual writer, and Underworld is a ravishingly beautiful symphony of a novel. ((Reviewed Aug. 1997)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews - BookPage Reviews : BookPage Reviews 1997 October
If the history of the last 50 years really were a chain of particular facts, each logically linked to the next, as neat and tidy as a row of post-World War II suburban tract homes, then a reader might reasonably be outraged by the epic, gloriously disruptive, often funny, dream history of the interior life of Atomic Age in America that Don DeLillo presents in his 827-page novel "Underworld."Might . . . that is if a reader could also ignore the sheer magnificence of the prose of one of our most dazzling writers.But history is rarely a matter of facts, and interpretations of recent history have burned with an especially virulent fever of forgetfulness, so DeLillo offers "Underworld," a novel he recently called "a dream that is an antidote to history's nightmare." And "Underworld" is, quite simply, the best and most important book of the year, if not the decade.At its most elemental, "Underworld" follows the lives of Nick Shay, a waste manager, and Klara Sax, an artist, who had a brief, almost anonymous affair in the Bronx in 1952, when he was an angry teenager and she the vaguely restless wife of a schoolteacher. The novel begins with a kind of overture, a funny, disturbing, beautifully written section, describing a meeting of J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor - as well as the action in the stands - during the final game in the pennant race between the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants at the Polo Grounds on October 3, 1951. Bobby Thompson's legendary homer "the shot heard round the world," goes over the fence at about the same moment Hoover learns that Russians have detonated an atomic bomb. The search for Thompson's authentic home run ball is one of several recurring quests that run through this intricately plotted novel.From there, the novel picks up the lives of Shay and Sax, its plot radiating outward from the near present to the present before collapsing into the past, to the moments when Shay and Sax have their affair, and Shay is led to the violent act that sets his life in motion.But such a synopsis of "Underworld" is both too little and too much. Too little, because it affords the most meager glimpse of the range of characters and events that circulate through DeLillo's most ambitious and complex novel yet. It's as reductive as calling "Ulysses" the story of a stroll through Dublin. And it barely hints at the fact that the power and extravagant beauty of this novel are found not so much in its events (as moving as they are), but in the vibrant pulse of language that connects people and events, giving their lives and actions meaning.Too much, because a synopsis will color, distort and, I fear, reduce your own experience with this wonderful book. "Underworld" is big and long and worth every minute you'll spend reading it. Read it for yourself and see.Reviewed by Alden Mudge. Copyright 1999 BookPage Reviews - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 1997 July
Working at the top of his form, DeLillo draws on his previous novels (Mao II, 1991, Libra, 1988, etc.) in shaping his most ambitious work yet, a grand Whitmanesque epic of postwar American life--a brainy, streetwise, and lyrical underground history of our times, full of menace and miracles, and humming with the bop and crackle of postmodern life. DeLillo's bottom-up chronicle is also the history of garbage, from a rubble-strewn lot in the Bronx to nuclear waste dumps in the Southwest. And the true-blue American who spans these landscapes is one Nick Shay, now an executive with a waste-management firm, once a j.d. on the not-so-mean streets, where his father kept book and his mother worried her rosary for her two boys, the other a chess prodigy who later lends his mathematical genius to the weapons industry. From the '50s on, DeLillo's always accessible narrative is also the history of a baseball, the one that was the ``Shot Heard Round the World,'' Bobby Thomson's pennant-winning home run in 1951. The fate of the actual ball, a relic of spiritual significance, seemingly lost, is also a lesson in enterprise. Snagged by a young black kid from Harlem, who identifies with Thomson's Homeric homer, the ball quickly becomes an object of commerce, purloined by the boy's desperate father. Eventually, Nick acquires it, but for him it more properly commemorates failure: Branca's losing pitch. Beyond garbage and baseball, DeLillo surveys the Cold War years with a satirist's eye for meaningful detail and a linguist's ear for existential patter. Sweeping in scope and design, incorporating such diverse figures as Lenny Bruce and J. Edgar Hoover, DeLillo's masterpiece shouts against the times in the language of the times: postmodernism against itself. He kicks the rock of reality, teases out the connectedness of things, and leaves us in awe. (Film rights to Scott Rudin/Paramount; Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club main selections; author tour) Copyright 1998 Kirkus Reviews - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 1997 June
In DeLillo's newest, to be released on October 3 (a significant date in the novel), luminaries gathered in a box at the New York Polo Grounds to watch the Dodgers and the Giants battle it out for the pennant receive word that the Russians are testing an atomic bomb. DeLillo then flashes forward through a half-century of the Cold War as seen through the eyes of two protagonists briefly united by their passionate affair. BOMC and Quality Paperback Book Club main selections. Copyright 1998 Library Journal Reviews - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 1997 September
On October 3, 1951, there occurred two "shots heard round the world" Bobby Thomson's last-minute homer, which sent the N.Y. Giants into the World Series, and a Soviet atomic bomb test. The fallout from these two events provides the nexus for this sagalike rumination on the last 50 years of American cultural history. DeLillo's opening depiction of the scene at the N.Y. Polo Grounds that day is masterly. Unfortunately, sustaining the initial brilliance proves difficult. There are some marvelously Sister Edgar, a vision-seeking nun of the old school; Ismael, a ghetto-based graffiti artist and budding capitalist; J. Edgar Hoover and thought-provoking ideas, e.g., waste as the cornerstone of civilization and the power of remembered images lurking just beneath the surface of our minds. But somehow the various parts of the story seem more satisfying than the whole. DeLillo is one of our most gifted contemporary authors whose works belong in all academic and public libraries, yet one suspects that his truly "great" novel is yet to come. David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla. Copyright 1998 Library Journal Reviews
