Got another big haul of books that probably is more than I could chew lol. Idk when I'm gonna get to finish all of them:
Understanding Flannery O'connor
Understanding Cormac Mccarthy
Understanding Don Delillo.
Don Dellio's Mao II, Falling Man and Underworld (Bloomsbury essays)
Mao II
Libra
Scandal by Shusaku Endo
Sachiko by Shusaku Endo
Dominion by Tom Holland.
Anyways, I'll give some brief thoughts about the ones I've finished so far.
Libra.
Probably my favorite Dellilo novel so far, though I'm still torn between Libra and Falling Man. I think I enjoyed reading Libra so much because of its history-biography nature and how character focused it was, which is usually a hard thing to look forward to when reading DeLillo, I actually cried at the ending. A bit of a spoiler though the event I'm going to describe is pretty obvious when you consider this is a sort of historical novel, but Oswald's funeral was really heartwrenching, especially his mother's reaction who kept insisting he was set up all along, and how in a sense Lee was swept away by the tides of history, a mission he conciously chose. Through all of the book, we get to see Lee's fantasies about being part of let dialectics of history, but when we see that, at the end of the day, in his funeral there's still a mother crying for his dead son, that really touched me and got me thinking.
Lee Harvey Oswald. No matter what happened, how hard they schemed against her, this was the one thing they could not take away--The true and lasting power of his name. It belonged to her now, and to history.
JFK's assasination was so intense and well written too. Despite the flaws I think he has, Don Delillo has a talent for capturing american mythos, lore, americana? Idk how to describe, the american idiosyncratic ethos I guess. Like the image of the american mass shooter, though Oswald wasn't technically a mass shooter (You need to kill more than 3 people for that I think), it's hard to see how his cultural impact didn't shape future shooters in the country. I think his wish of becoming a man remembered by history really stuck into the minds of americans, we all know most school shooters, and certainly the popular ones, wanted their acts to be remembered by fame. Though I'm by no means an expert on America's history of assasinations/terrorism, from my viewpoint as a zoomer, it seems that Oswald birthed that idea into the broader culture.
Then there's Mao II
Another great novel which got me thinking a whole lot. I've already written my general thougths on the ideas of the novel in my profile posts and the school shooter thread, though they're still a bit scattered, I gotta read more essays to organize them, since the novel contains some very complex ideas. There's not a lot I can say about Mao II without turning it into a philosophy of art discussion, and that is DeLillo's greatest strenght imo, he puts some deep stuff into paper. But, like most of Delillo's work, his characters feel dull and boring, too detached. And while yes, it is intentional, I don't see how that justifies their lack of strong arcs and characterization (For the most part). You end up feeling like many of his novels are more fit to have been an essay than a novel.
Scandal by Shusaku Endo.
Great novel, and I love this cover art so much! Really different from Endo's other works too (That I've read), though you can see how it follows naturally from his literary and philosophical interests. It made me reflect a lot about how a christian writter should engage with degeneracy, and even made me reconsider stuff like porn. Honestly, I think this is a novel many agorans would enjoy. It has that 1985 Tokyo vibe many of us dig, and the idea of having a dark and degen double is more relevant than ever thanks to internet anonimity. The novel deals with the idea about if you can separate your degen self and your normal, outside self. So basically if you can be horny on main. Though when Endo wrote this novel, this wasn't all that fesable because therew was no internet--Though, as the novel argues, big cities like Tokyo make that sort of ventures somewhat possible--, thanks to the internet we now have to wrestle with the chance to be the darkest parts of ourselves online vs being 'normal' IRL, if that's a good thing or a bad thing, and what could be the consequences.
The novel felt a little bit too meta for me at parts, and I think I'm missing a lot of Endo's biography to better understand this novel, since by reading the introduction for the edition I got (Pic related), this novel was following the tradition of japanese watakushi shosetsu (I-Novel) literature, where the protagonist is closely modelled after the author himself. But regardless, I don't think you need to know a lot of context for Endo's life at that point to enjoy the novel (I didn't and the into commentary was good enough to ground me on the context of the novel.
So, would recommend.
