The Body Artist

by Don DeLillo | Literature & Fiction |
ISBN: 0330484974 Global Overview for this book
Registered by wingruzenawing on 7/23/2014
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3 journalers for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by wingruzenawing on Wednesday, July 23, 2014
(2001,) Picador pocketbook 2001. 124 pages.

Amazon.co.uk Review:
In The Body Artist, Don DeLillo sacrifices breadth for depth, narrowing his focus to a single life, a single death. The protagonist is Lauren Hartke, who we see sharing breakfast with her husband, Rey, in the opening pages. This 18-page sequence is a tour de force (albeit a less showy one than the author's initial salvo in Underworld)--an intricate, funny notation of Lauren's consciousness as she pours cereal, peers out the window and makes idle chat. Rey, alas, will proceed directly from the breakfast table to the home of his former wife, where he'll unceremoniously blow his brains out.
What follows is one of the strangest ghost stories since The Turn of the Screw. Returning to their summer rental after Rey's funeral, Lauren discovers a strange stowaway living in a spare room: an inarticulate young man, perhaps retarded, who may have been there for weeks. His very presence is hard for her to pin down: "There was something elusive in his aspect, moment to moment, a thinning of physical address." Yet soon this mysterious figure begins to speak in Rey's voice, and her own, playing back entire conversations from the days preceding the suicide. Has Lauren's husband been reincarnated? Or is the man simply an eavesdropping idiot savant, reproducing sentences he'd heard earlier from his concealment?

DeLillo refuses any definitive answer. Instead he lets Lauren steep in her grief and growing puzzlement, and speculates in his own voice about this apparent intersection of past and present, life and death. At times his rhetoric gets away from him, an odd thing for such a superbly controlled writer. "How could such a surplus of vulnerability find itself alone in the world?" he asks, sounding as though he's discussing a sick puppy. Still, when DeLillo reigns in the abstractions and bears down, the results are heartbreaking.

At this stage of his career, a thin book is an adventure for DeLillo. So is his willingness to risk sentimentality, to immerse us in personal rather than national traumas. For all its flaws, then, The Body Artist is a real, raw accomplishment, and a reminder that bigger, even for so capacious an imagination as DeLillo's, isn't always better.
--James Marcus --

***
So who is Mr. Tuttle: Ray reincarnated, Lauren's thoughts, Lauren's grief, or, pure hallucination? To grieve over a dear person - is it like a serious illness, a mental disorder, thus must have run from an asylum and should be returned there to cure? Or is it that you just listen to your "Mr. Tuttle", and when it starts to talk in reasonable sentences (which in fact prove to be your own), you get over it? Lauren's way of thinking goes beyond the reality horizon, and returns. With his short and incomplete sentences and weird incidents, DeLillo in a rather peculiar way shows an experience of embarrassment and anxiety.
Literature is able to transcent everyday thinking and explain the inexplicable.

But the Finnish reader is astonished: why on earth Kotka? He just put the finger randomly on the globe? :D

-ruzena

197/1001 read.

Journal Entry 2 by wingruzenawing at Surprise RABCK, A Bookcrossing member -- Controlled Releases on Thursday, March 11, 2021
Όπως γράφτηκε γι’ αυτό το τελευταίο μυθιστόρημα του ΝτεΛίλλο, "τα αριστουργήματα σε διδάσκουν πώς να τα διαβάζεις".

Journal Entry 3 by wingDelphi_Readerwing at Delphi - Δελφοί , Fokida Greece on Wednesday, April 7, 2021
Thank you very much ruzena, what a nice surprise! The Body Artist arrived in Delphi today as a bonus, along with an other book I was expecting, a cute magnetic bookmark and a beautiful letter! It's true, I like to write my impressions after I read a book and I'm glad this is a book you liked. It seems like something I'd enjoy too. Αριστούργημα, ε ; Let's wait and see...

To be read pile is monstrous but sometimes intresting little books skip the queue
; )
Ευχαριστώ Πολύ!!!

Journal Entry 4 by wingDelphi_Readerwing at Delphi - Δελφοί , Fokida Greece on Monday, April 19, 2021
This was an interesting book dealing with universal themes, like how people perceive the world and the various stimuli, lesser or major around them, how they experience and "internalize" those, how they deal with mourning and loss, the meaning they may give to incidents, feelings, concepts, how they manage to carry on, sometimes re-inventing their selves and the world around them - or not...

The writting was poetic and idiosyncratic and after a couple of pages the reader gets used to it. I enjoyed the prose and I appreciated what the author tried to accomplish here. What left me a bit frustrated is the means by which he tried to achieve his purpose. The inspiration about the stowaway in the house left me a bit cold. I understand the symbolism and his ambigious presence, but I somehow felt the way I feel when I cross paths with those too "artistic" body performances or these high quality "cinephile" films. The main character of the book is a "Body Artist" anyway...
Well, frustrated is not exactly the word, but I can't find an other. Maybe this kind of art is too intelligent for me, I don't know.

All in all, this was a beautiful, interesting, quick book and I'm glad I read it, but I don't think it's one calling for a re-read soon! So it's maybe the perfect BookCrossing book : )

Thanks once again ruzena for sharing this!

Journal Entry 5 by wingDelphi_Readerwing at by Post, A RABCK -- Controlled Releases on Wednesday, May 26, 2021

Released 2 yrs ago (5/31/2021 UTC) at by Post, A RABCK -- Controlled Releases

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

The Body Artist got itchy feet and is now travelling to Athens as part of my 5th Bookiversary celebration's RABCKs!
And then...Who knows?

Good Luck little book and Don't forget to write your news from time to time!

Journal Entry 6 by wingLubiettewing at Kallithea - Καλλιθέα, Attica Greece on Wednesday, June 9, 2021
Thank you ! Intriguing title and interesting comments, I can't wait to read it.

Journal Entry 7 by wingLubiettewing at Kallithea - Καλλιθέα, Attica Greece on Sunday, January 9, 2022
So poetic and weird. I loved the language but not so much the ghost story or whatever it was. A strange book about grief, loneliness and sadness, made into a movie by Benoît Jacquot.

Happy reading !

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