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Underworld

By Don DeLillo

(112)

| Hardcover | 9780330369954

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Book Description

Our lives, our half century.

Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artContinue

Our lives, our half century.

Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.

Don DeLillo's mesmerizing novel opens with a legendary baseball game played in New York in 1951. The glorious outcome -- the home run that wins the game is called the Shot Heard Round the World -- shades into the grim news that the Soviet Union has just tested an atomic bomb.

The baseball itself, fought over and scuffed, generates the narrative that follows. It takes the reader deeply into the lives of Nick and Klara and into modern memory and the soul of American culture -- from Bronx tenements to grand ballrooms to a B-52 bombing raid over Vietnam.

A generation's master spirits come and go. Lennny Bruce cracking desperate jokes, Mick Jagger with his devil strut, J. Edgar Hoover in a sexy leather mask. And flashing in the margins of ordinary life are the curiously connectecd materials of the culture. Condoms, bombs, Chevy Bel Airs and miracle sites on the Web.

Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary times -- Don DeLillo's greatest and most powerful work of fiction.

Critics

  • The course of true life

    'It was a memory that clarified the connections,' muses Nick Shay at one point in this novel, Nick Shay being the central figure and occasional narrator of this extraordinary book. Indeed, if such a massive work can be rendered down to a one-sentence ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sun, 26 Sep 2010

  • Pass the parcel

    Underworld is self-consciously a map of the American late 20th century. Yet to hold together its different characters and their stories, it relies on an old-fashioned, even quaint, fictional device. Running through this complex novel is the story of ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

5 Reviews

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  • 5 people find this helpful

    Five stars please!

    I always thought that a four-range rating system is incomplete: you need a fifth star to mark masterworks.
    This novel definitely gets five stars, as far as I'm concerned.

    **********
    All right, I finally got the 5-stars rating range.

    Is this helpful?

    míol mór said on Oct 2, 2009 about the Paperback edition | 2 feedbacks

  • took me forever to read this book in the original language, but it was worth it

    Is this helpful?

    Gennaro said on Mar 1, 2012 | 1 feedback

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9780330369954 Hardcover $30.20 -- The Book Depository
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