The Body Artist

Book Description

Critics

• The library in the body

  The Body Artist Don DeLillo Picador £13.99, pp124 Buy it at a discount at BOL After the revolution comes... well, what, exactly? Three years ago, with Underworld, Don DeLillo exploded the scope of the contemporary novel. He proved that it could fuse ... (read full critics)

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

• Reality, unplugged

  The Body Artist Don DeLillo 124pp, Picador, £13.99 Buy it at a discount at BOL The man who brought us the gargantuan Underworld starts his new book, the slimmest of novellas, with something for breakfast. A man and a woman are making toast, drinking ... (read full critics)

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

3 Reviews

• 5 people find this helpful

  

  In extremis: slow, spare and painful

  DeLillo's first novel since Underworld, preceded in 1999 by Valparaiso, his second stageplay.
  As if marking the distance from its predecessor, it is very, almost impossibly terse; to the point that I find it difficult to consider it a novel(la), and not because of its brevity.
  Commen ... (continue)

  DeLillo's first novel since Underworld, preceded in 1999 by Valparaiso, his second stageplay.
  As if marking the distance from its predecessor, it is very, almost impossibly terse; to the point that I find it difficult to consider it a novel(la), and not because of its brevity.
  Commentators variously describe it as "haikulike", "a tightly constructed string quartet", in an attempt to capture its spareness.

  But ultimately The Body Artist has nothing to do with poetry. Although DeLillo makes it do things novels don't do routinely. Much like Lauren Hartke, the protagonist, does with her body.
  Which brings us to another feature of the book: a wealth of metanarrative moments, with characters, dialogues and paragraphs working like the novel does as a whole. A fractal-like construction (see, I'm using figures of speech, too).
  DeLillo's amazing ability for developing two, even three lines of thought simultaneously over several paragraphs, as though in counterpoint, is here stretched to book length.
  Ultimately the novella is not so much about death, loss and mourning (which is what the reader gathers from most abstracts) as it is about time and its influence on the self. Perception, both of the outer world and of the self, is also investigated.

  Oh and I almost forgot, this is a ghost story.

  I love the cover photo.

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  míol mór said on Feb 28, 2010 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

• 1 person find this helpful

  

  A ghost story far from my favourite genre but I thought I would try it as it is a minuscule novella and would take very little time to read.

  The protagonist is Lauren Hartke, The Body Artist and the story centres on her being alone in a large house after the death of her late husband. Is she a ... (continue)

  A ghost story far from my favourite genre but I thought I would try it as it is a minuscule novella and would take very little time to read.

  The protagonist is Lauren Hartke, The Body Artist and the story centres on her being alone in a large house after the death of her late husband. Is she alone though as she discovers someone is living in the spare room. His physical presence never seems to be proved by Lauren and you are never quite sure if he is real or a figment of her imagination. He certainly seems to know a lot about her late husband Rey and even starts talking to her in his voice. A real person, a ghost, the ramblings of a recently bereaved woman; who knows?

  In all I found it very strange, but maybe I did not fully understand the style this was written in.

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  Lindyloumac said on Sep 8, 2009 about the Hardcover edition | Add your feedback

• 

  從”Where are you?”到”feel time go by, viscerally, even painfully”.主角體認出Body time的概念，也可以說是對Reality的重新確認

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  timberlake said on Mar 18, 2009 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

Book Details

• Rating:
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• English Books
• Audio CD
• Edition: Abridged
• ISBN-10: 0743518160
• ISBN-13: 9780743518161
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Pub date: Feb 01, 2001
• Dimensions: 968 mm x 839 mm x 194 mm Just how big is that?
• Also available as: Paperback, Hardcover, Audio Cassette, Others and eBook
• In other languages: other languages Livres Français, Libros en Español, Libri Italiani

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• NY Times Notable Book Club (482)

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