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Nova York. Un dia del mes d'abril de l'any 2000. Assegut a la seva confortable limusina, el jove multimilionari Eric Parker recorre els carrers de Manhattan. Després d'una nit d'insomni, es troba una ciutat virtualment paralitzada. Les estrictes mesures de seguretat per la visita del president i una violenta manifestació antiglobalització a Times Square col·lapsen perillosament el centre. Al guardaespatlles de l'Eric, però, el que més el preocupa és un altre perill, un perill difícil d'identificar. Parker n'és l'objectiu. Amb un estil brillant i intel·ligent, DeLillo ha volgut recrear una possible societat postmoderna, un món dur i calculador en el qual el poder, la tecnologia i la violència intenten imposar les seves lleis.
Description
Now a major motion picture directed by David Cronenberg and starring Robert Pattinson, Cosmopolis is the thirteenth novel by one of America's most celebrated writers. It is an April day in the year 2000 and an era is about to end. The booming times of market optimism--when the culture boiled with money and corporations seemed more vital and influential than governments-- are poised to crash. Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age twenty-eight, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly customized white stretch limousine. Today he is a man with two missions: to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town. Stalled in traffic by a presidential motorcade, a music idol's funeral and a violent political demonstration, Eric receives a string of visitors--experts on security, technology, currency, finance and a few sexual partners--as the limo sputters toward an increasingly uncertain future. Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo's thirteenth novel, is both intimate and global, a vivid and moving account of the spectacular downfall of one man, and of an era.… (more)
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Publication
Edicions 62 (2003), 224 pages
Media reviews
The Guardian
Don DeLillo's new novel has bewildered most of its reviewers, both here and in the US.
Though he's grand and tough enough for that not to matter, he'd be entitled to feel some
bewilderment himself. It's not as if Cosmopolis is a departure for him. Its themes -
power, technology, violence, terrorism,
of contemporary culture - are those of White Noise, Libra and Mao II. The setting, a
contemporary yet futuristic New York, is familiar terrain. Stylistically, too, it's business
as usual. So what's the problem?
In a word, Underworld, DeLillo's masterwork of six years ago, an alternative history of
postwar America and an homage to the ordinary and overlooked. Underworld opened
with one of the great set-pieces of modern literature, a New York baseball game that
coincides with the beginning of the cold war. It gestured towards something we had not
seen before in DeLillo, something generous, populist and, well, not unlike Jonathan
Franzen's The Corrections, which when it appeared in 2001 was called "DeLillo Lite".
But DeLillo, when he's being DeLillo, is never easy. And Cosmopolis, which has hard
things to say about the direction postmodern society is taking, is an awkward,
rebarbative book.
"He speaks in your voice, American," runs the first sentence of Underworld , "and
there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful." Eric Packer, the main protagonist in
Cosmopolis , speaks in a different voice, one you'd never hear on the street. He's a multibillionaire
riding round New York in a stretch limo, and the shine in his eye is otherwordly. We follow him during the course of a long day in April 2000, as he goes
looking for a haircut, an ambition which is endlessly frustrated - partly by traffic jams,
partly by visitors to his stretch limo (his head of finance, his currency analyst, his
doctor, his philosophical adviser, his bodyguard), but mostly by his own willful
deviations. He's a hubristic visionary, a mix of Icarus and Faust. Before the night is out,
so DeLillo makes clear almost from the start, he will crack up, burn out and lose
everything - not just his wealth but his life.
In a world where, as the epigraph from Zbigniew Herbert puts it, a rat has become the
unit of currency, Packer is King Rat, a solipsistic trader in futures, master of an amoral universe. "Rich, famous, brainy, powerful and feared," with a casual expertise in
ornithology, botany, poetry, astronomy and old English etymology, he has forgotten how
ordinary humanity looks and sounds. "This is good," he says to his rich young wife of 22
days when they find themselves having a conversation about pain and sexual jealousy.
"We're like people talking. Isn't this how they talk?" "How would I know?" she replies.
The heroes of novels don't have to be likeable, and as the epitome of disengagement, cut
off from common pursuits and recognisable feelings, Packer isn't someone we're meant
to engage with. A running motif is his contempt for last week's big thing, especially
technology. Skyscrapers, airports, phones, walkie-talkies, personal computers,
vestibules, automated teller machines, assassination attempts on presidents: he finds
them all comically outdated. His own gadgetry, with its flashing monitors and flowing
numbers, works in another time-frame, bringing events before they happen and giving
them a sharpness they lack in "real life". Doubt and ambiguity aren't concepts he
understands. He sees himself as the future - and thinks that when he dies the world will
end, not him.
Packer is less a character than a cypher, a symbol of dystopian triumphalism. If he
doesn't seem "believable" or "realistic", so be it: the words have no meaning in the world
he inhabits. The problem for the reader is deciding what authority to accord his
observations: do we care what he thinks, given where he's coming from (a 48-room
apartment, with lap pool, card parlour, gymnasium, shark tank, screening room, borzoi
pen and annexe)? Brett Easton Ellis in American Psycho and Tom Wolfe in Bonfire of
the Vanities satirically distanced themselves from their sharkish heroes. DeLillo is more
ambivalent. Not that he approves of Packer. But he shares his enthralment with new
technologies. And he lets him think bright, dangerous thoughts and speak good lines.
The lack of narrative momentum is another difficulty. Dramatic events take place in the
street, beyond the windscreen (an anti-capitalist demo, the funeral of a rap artist). A few
even take place inside the limo: Packer is given a rectal examination while holding a
conversation with a female business associate, which proves orgasmically exciting to
them both. There are surreal episodes with rats and a pastry assassin, and the spice of
implausible coincidence: four times during his meanderings through the city Packer
runs into his wife. Sex happens, death happens, yet nothing moves forward. Even the
climactic meeting of Packer and his stalker is preordained, as the stalker clunkily spells
out: "everything in our lives, yours and mine, has brought us to this moment". Overall,
there's a sense of gridlock. Which is apt thematically, but tough on the reader.
Perhaps the best way to read Cosmopolis isn't as a novel (not even a "novel of ideas")
but as a prose-poem about New York - less Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four than Hart
Crane's The Bridge. There are brilliant descriptions of passing pedestrians, "the others
of the street, end less, anonymous, twenty-one lives per second ... where a quarter
second of a shared glance was a violation"; of the "apparitional" beauty of steam venting
through a manhole; of the swell and ache of car-horns, "a lament so old it sounded
aboriginal"; and of the sound of a gunshot, "one of the routine ephemera of the night, no
different from cats at sex or a backfiring car ... with the dead-ass drift of your personal
urban anomie, you can't be expected to react to an isolated bang". Sentiments such as
the last remind us of the values that 21st-century urban anonymity has supplanted - a
sense of belonging, or concern for other people.
There's a similar moment when Packer finally gets his haircut from a man called
Anthony, who goes way back and takes pride in old-style stuff like work, neighbourhood
and family. To discover through Anthony that Packer has parents is almost shocking. He
likes to pretend he's godlike and self-made, above all lowly kinship. But part of the
journey he makes (and there is character development, of a kind) is to recognise the
failure of his great dream - "to live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data, in whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from the void" - and accept his
mortality.
Is Cosmopolis a post-September 11 novel? Yes and no. When the planes hit the twin
towers 20 months ago, it looked like something from DeLillo, and having got there
before it happened he's surely right not to revisit the scene. But the omens are present,
both in images of New York highrises - "the last tall things, made empty, designed to
hasten the future" - and in an aside on American parochialism (the only geopolitics New
Yorkers know, it's suggested, they pick up from foreign taxi drivers). More would be
indecent. Nothing clamorous is required.
DeLillo has always been good at telling us where we're heading. What he describes here
is an enslavement to money markets, scrolling screens and virtual realities. The
heaviness of the message squeezes the life out his novel. But we ignore him at our peril.
Though he's grand and tough enough for that not to matter, he'd be entitled to feel some
bewilderment himself. It's not as if Cosmopolis is a departure for him. Its themes -
power, technology, violence, terrorism,
Show More
crowds, the movements and counter-movementsof contemporary culture - are those of White Noise, Libra and Mao II. The setting, a
contemporary yet futuristic New York, is familiar terrain. Stylistically, too, it's business
as usual. So what's the problem?
In a word, Underworld, DeLillo's masterwork of six years ago, an alternative history of
postwar America and an homage to the ordinary and overlooked. Underworld opened
with one of the great set-pieces of modern literature, a New York baseball game that
coincides with the beginning of the cold war. It gestured towards something we had not
seen before in DeLillo, something generous, populist and, well, not unlike Jonathan
Franzen's The Corrections, which when it appeared in 2001 was called "DeLillo Lite".
But DeLillo, when he's being DeLillo, is never easy. And Cosmopolis, which has hard
things to say about the direction postmodern society is taking, is an awkward,
rebarbative book.
"He speaks in your voice, American," runs the first sentence of Underworld , "and
there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful." Eric Packer, the main protagonist in
Cosmopolis , speaks in a different voice, one you'd never hear on the street. He's a multibillionaire
riding round New York in a stretch limo, and the shine in his eye is otherwordly. We follow him during the course of a long day in April 2000, as he goes
looking for a haircut, an ambition which is endlessly frustrated - partly by traffic jams,
partly by visitors to his stretch limo (his head of finance, his currency analyst, his
doctor, his philosophical adviser, his bodyguard), but mostly by his own willful
deviations. He's a hubristic visionary, a mix of Icarus and Faust. Before the night is out,
so DeLillo makes clear almost from the start, he will crack up, burn out and lose
everything - not just his wealth but his life.
In a world where, as the epigraph from Zbigniew Herbert puts it, a rat has become the
unit of currency, Packer is King Rat, a solipsistic trader in futures, master of an amoral universe. "Rich, famous, brainy, powerful and feared," with a casual expertise in
ornithology, botany, poetry, astronomy and old English etymology, he has forgotten how
ordinary humanity looks and sounds. "This is good," he says to his rich young wife of 22
days when they find themselves having a conversation about pain and sexual jealousy.
"We're like people talking. Isn't this how they talk?" "How would I know?" she replies.
The heroes of novels don't have to be likeable, and as the epitome of disengagement, cut
off from common pursuits and recognisable feelings, Packer isn't someone we're meant
to engage with. A running motif is his contempt for last week's big thing, especially
technology. Skyscrapers, airports, phones, walkie-talkies, personal computers,
vestibules, automated teller machines, assassination attempts on presidents: he finds
them all comically outdated. His own gadgetry, with its flashing monitors and flowing
numbers, works in another time-frame, bringing events before they happen and giving
them a sharpness they lack in "real life". Doubt and ambiguity aren't concepts he
understands. He sees himself as the future - and thinks that when he dies the world will
end, not him.
Packer is less a character than a cypher, a symbol of dystopian triumphalism. If he
doesn't seem "believable" or "realistic", so be it: the words have no meaning in the world
he inhabits. The problem for the reader is deciding what authority to accord his
observations: do we care what he thinks, given where he's coming from (a 48-room
apartment, with lap pool, card parlour, gymnasium, shark tank, screening room, borzoi
pen and annexe)? Brett Easton Ellis in American Psycho and Tom Wolfe in Bonfire of
the Vanities satirically distanced themselves from their sharkish heroes. DeLillo is more
ambivalent. Not that he approves of Packer. But he shares his enthralment with new
technologies. And he lets him think bright, dangerous thoughts and speak good lines.
The lack of narrative momentum is another difficulty. Dramatic events take place in the
street, beyond the windscreen (an anti-capitalist demo, the funeral of a rap artist). A few
even take place inside the limo: Packer is given a rectal examination while holding a
conversation with a female business associate, which proves orgasmically exciting to
them both. There are surreal episodes with rats and a pastry assassin, and the spice of
implausible coincidence: four times during his meanderings through the city Packer
runs into his wife. Sex happens, death happens, yet nothing moves forward. Even the
climactic meeting of Packer and his stalker is preordained, as the stalker clunkily spells
out: "everything in our lives, yours and mine, has brought us to this moment". Overall,
there's a sense of gridlock. Which is apt thematically, but tough on the reader.
Perhaps the best way to read Cosmopolis isn't as a novel (not even a "novel of ideas")
but as a prose-poem about New York - less Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four than Hart
Crane's The Bridge. There are brilliant descriptions of passing pedestrians, "the others
of the street, end less, anonymous, twenty-one lives per second ... where a quarter
second of a shared glance was a violation"; of the "apparitional" beauty of steam venting
through a manhole; of the swell and ache of car-horns, "a lament so old it sounded
aboriginal"; and of the sound of a gunshot, "one of the routine ephemera of the night, no
different from cats at sex or a backfiring car ... with the dead-ass drift of your personal
urban anomie, you can't be expected to react to an isolated bang". Sentiments such as
the last remind us of the values that 21st-century urban anonymity has supplanted - a
sense of belonging, or concern for other people.
There's a similar moment when Packer finally gets his haircut from a man called
Anthony, who goes way back and takes pride in old-style stuff like work, neighbourhood
and family. To discover through Anthony that Packer has parents is almost shocking. He
likes to pretend he's godlike and self-made, above all lowly kinship. But part of the
journey he makes (and there is character development, of a kind) is to recognise the
failure of his great dream - "to live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data, in whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from the void" - and accept his
mortality.
Is Cosmopolis a post-September 11 novel? Yes and no. When the planes hit the twin
towers 20 months ago, it looked like something from DeLillo, and having got there
before it happened he's surely right not to revisit the scene. But the omens are present,
both in images of New York highrises - "the last tall things, made empty, designed to
hasten the future" - and in an aside on American parochialism (the only geopolitics New
Yorkers know, it's suggested, they pick up from foreign taxi drivers). More would be
indecent. Nothing clamorous is required.
DeLillo has always been good at telling us where we're heading. What he describes here
is an enslavement to money markets, scrolling screens and virtual realities. The
heaviness of the message squeezes the life out his novel. But we ignore him at our peril.
Show Less
The New Yorker
In a land of chunky, garish, anxiousto-please books, Don DeLillo’s thirteenth novel, “Cosmopolis” (Scribner; $25), is physically cool, as sleek and silver-touched and palely pure as a white stretch limo, which is in fact the action’s main venue. On the front of the book jacket we see the
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limo from the front, and on the back from the back, and in between stretch a tad more than two hundred tall, generous-margined pages of metafiction. Eric Packer, a twenty-eight-year-old billionaire manager of other people’s money, rises after a sleepless night in April of the year 2000, in his forty-eight-room, one-hundred-and-four-million-dollar triplex (with shark tank, borzoi pen, lap pool, gym) at the top of an eighty-nine-story apartment building on First Avenue, and tells his chief of security, “bald and no-necked” Torval, that he wants to get a haircut at the other end of forty-seventh Street. Their exchange illustrates the terse, deflective, somewhat lobotomized quality of the novel’s dialogue:
“I want a haircut.”
“The president’s in town.”
“We don’t care. We need a haircut. We need to go crosstown.”
“You will hit traffic that speaks in quarter inches.”
“Just so I know. Which president are we talking about?”
“United States. Barriers will be set up,” he said. “Entire streets deleted from the map.”
“Show me my car,” he told the man.
The crosstown epic begins. In its oft-interrupted course, Packer follows, via his limo’s bank of electronic screens—“all the flowing symbols and alpine charts, the polychrome numbers
pulsing”—the stubborn rise of the yen, on whose fall he has bet heavily. He takes in details of city life (“A man in women’s clothing walked seven elegant dogs”) and notices that on the limo’s spycam his image makes a gesture a second or two before he makes it in reality. This temporal dislocation recurs, indicating an underlying shift in the past-future paradigm. Packer’s “chief of theory,” Vija Kinski, explains it thus:
“Computer power eliminates doubt. All doubt rises from past experience. But the past is disappearing. We used to know the past but not the future. This is changing.”
DeLillo’s post-Christian search for “an order at some deep level” has brought him to global computerization: “the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet’s living billions.”
The limo, floored in Carrara marble, in its stop-and-go progress admits a coming and going of other passengers, including two advisers who advise Packer to bail out of the yen before he is ruined. Instead, the financier bails out of the limo for a number of quick trysts. he has an impromptu breakfast with “his wife of twenty-two days, Elise Shifrin, a poet who had right of blood to the fabulous Shifrin banking fortune of Europe”; soon thereafter, he copulates with an old acquaintance, an art dealer, and a newer one, a bodyguard, who pop up along his route. On the West Side, where Broadway and Seventh Avenue intersect, Packer runs into a violent demonstration against world capitalism, inspired, it seems, by the line from Zbigniew Herbert, “a rat became the unit of currency,” that DeLillo uses as an epigraph for “Cosmopolis.” The demonstrators rock the limo, spray-paint it, urinate on it, and hurl a trash can at the rear window. Nevertheless, Packer aloofly reflects within the tormented vehicle that there was something theatrical about the protest, ingratiating even. . . . There was a shadow of transaction between the demonstrators and the state. The protest was a form of systemic hygiene, purging and lubricating. It attested again, for the ten thousandth time, to the market culture’s innovative brilliance, its ability to shape itself to its own flexible ends, absorbing everything around it.
Kinski, the third expert adviser the limo takes aboard—“a small woman in a button-down business shirt, an old embroidered vest and a long pleated skirt of a thousand launderings”—tends to agree, and says of the yen, “To pull back now would not be authentic.”
This farce of extravagant wealth and electronic mysticism might feel more authentic from the pen of Kurt Vonnegut or that of Paul Auster, to whom “Cosmopolis” is dedicated. Nouveau roman meets Manhattan geography, under sci-fi moonlight. Vonnegut and Auster, however, keep on their fantastic plane undeviatingly, as if there were no other, whereas DeLillo gives signs of wanting to drop us down into the quotidian mundane, where we can be wounded. Though always a concept-driven writer, whose characters spout smart, swift essays at one another, he has shown himself—in large parts of “Underworld,” in almost all of “White Noise”—capable of realism’s patient surfaces and saturation in personally verified detail. His visionary side, fed by the bleak implausibilities of modern technology and tabloidized popular culture, has often enough enjoyed a counterweight of domestic emotion and common decency. In “White Noise,” the surreal supermarkets are the real thing, hilariously familiar, and Jack Gladney’s paeans to family life, from within his nest of impudently precocious children and spooky ex-wives, are not ironic. In “Cosmopolis,” implausibility reigns unchecked, mounting to a phantasmagoric funeral parade down Ninth Avenue for the Sufi rapper Brutha Fez; on parade are “the mayor and police commissioner in sober profile,” a dozen congressmen, “faces from film and TV,” foreign
dignitaries, “figures of world religion in their robes, cowls, kimonos, sandals and soutanes,” break-dancers, nuns in full habit, and whirling dervishes.
Now, a reader undertaking a novel grants the writer a generous initial draft of suspended disbelief. DeLillo spends this advance payment as recklessly as his hero overinvests in loans against the yen. Falling in love, in life and in novels, is an unpredictable business, but what about while you’re hunched over having a digital prostate examination in a limo parked in front of the Mercantile Library and at your other end consulting with your chief of finance, lean Jane Melman, sweaty from a jog on her day off? As never before, she and her boss are closely face to face:
Her mouth was open, showing large gapped teeth. Something passed between them, deeply, a sympathy beyond the standard meanings that also encompassed these meanings, pity, affinity, tenderness, the whole physiology of neural maneuver, of heartbeat and secretion, some vast sexus of arousal drawing him toward her, complicatedly, with [Dr.] Ingram’s finger up his ass.
DeLillo’s fervent intelligence and his fastidious, edgy prose, buzzing with expressions like “wave arrays of information,” weave halos of import around every event, however far-fetched and random. But the trouble with a tale where anything can happen is that somehow nothing happens. How much should we care about the threatened assassination of a hero as unsympathetic and bizarre as Eric Packer? DeLillo has a fearless reach of empathy; in “Mao II” he tells us just what it’s like to be a Moonie, and how the homeless talk. But for what it’s like to be a young Master of the Universe read Tom Wolfe instead. DeLillo’s sympathies are so much with the poor that his rich man seems a madman. In one of Packer’s most outrageous acts of diffident destruction, the money manipulator, responding to his wife’s generous offer to help him out of his difficulties with her own fortune, contrives, on a wristwatch computer, to break into her assets and lose them all for her. He even sneers at the amount: “The total in U.S. dollars was seven hundred and thirty-five million. The number seemed puny, a lottery jackpot shared by seventeen postal workers. . . . He tried to be ashamed on her behalf.” When he later confesses to her what he has done, she playfully laughs and makes love. She evidently doesn’t care, and the reader feels foolish for having cared on her behalf.
Packer, I suppose we should keep in mind, is working through a crisis in self-confidence. His first sexual partner of this busy April day, the art dealer Didi Fancher, tells him, “You’re beginning to think it’s more interesting to doubt than to act.” His would-be murderer, in a conversation so companionable and mutually attuned that murder seems a form of suicide, likens him to “Icarus falling” and tells him, “You did it to yourself.” On reflection, Packer has to wonder, “What did he want that was not posthumous?” Death has become his métier.
His pharaonic limo ride to an underground garage on the far West Side does, however, have a few stops in the world of the living, of the substantially felt. The very notion of a daylong push along Forty-seventh Street is funny and metaphoric—a soul’s slow-motion hurtle from the U.N.’s posh environs to the desolation of Hell’s Kitchen, with the diamond block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues providing a splash of noontide sparkle. And the notion of a wife wears some shred of the sacred for Packer and DeLillo both; Elise and Eric, though they were estranged from the start, keep meeting, in a series of coincidences that must be fated, and maximize their rapport while lying naked, as movie extras, on the tar surface of Eleventh Avenue. Eric “felt the textural variation of slubs of chewing gum compressed by decades of traffic. He smelled the ground fumes, the oil leaks and rubbery skids, summers of hot tar”: the billionaire, “his body . . . a pearly froth of animal fat in some industrial waste,” comes home to basic materials.
And he comes home to, it is tempting to reveal, the barbershop of his childhood, where clipped, elliptical DeLillo-diction sounds just right:
“But how come you’re such a stranger lately?”
“Hello, Anthony.”
“Long time.”
“Long time. I need a haircut.”
“You look like what. Get in here so I can look at you. . . . I never seen such ratty hair on a human.”
Lulled by the barbershop, its archaic scents and voices, Packer, whose father grew up in a tenement across the street, relaxes his day’s work of frenetic self-assertion and falls, for a few blessed moments, asleep. The novel, relaxing likewise, gives us a venue in which we can repose belief. Show Less
Physical description
224 p.; 5.31 inches
User reviews
LibraryThing member MeditationesMartini
One thing, "Title: A Novel" as a naming convention is nowhere near as clever a piece of marketing strategy as you get the feeling its originators think it is.
Anyway, this A Novel adopts (spuriously) the trappings of Ulysses by being about a dude who goes across town in a day and has sexual and
This is all just empty shallow and handjobbery for greedy bastards, many of them still with chips on shoulders from being geeks in high school, many with nice hair but intrigued by the promise of some indirect Information Age gravitas, all salivating to believe the're on the front lines of the future. And DeLillo seems to think that's as fucked up as I do, actually, but he sure spends a lot of time coming on like it's kind of sexy too. And I'm with the protesters: it's fucking not.
Anyway, this A Novel adopts (spuriously) the trappings of Ulysses by being about a dude who goes across town in a day and has sexual and
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other encounters and considers the fragmentation of his identity and gets around to thinking about his dad eventually. And in the fathers-sons light of the Joyce book, it is a bit cute when Packer steps into the Dedalus role to shoot his Bloom in the fucking face. But in choosing NYC 2000 for his city and making his protagonist an android dotcom business hero, DeLillo really sows the seeds of his own, because dude, we remember 2000 and it was not 1985. Your perfect Aryan Masters-of-the-Universe types were and are still around, no doubt, but they were not personally relevant any more to the culture. I mean, they still read (and still do read) GQ, which liked this book big shocker, but the central figure of the dotcom era is SO OBVS not the hedge-fund manager/currency-trader/subprime-lender archetype but the good old Nerd. And so Packer has to be the captain of industry (or, let's say it, the jock) AND the nerd, and it doesn't work. DeLillo wants to talk about acceleration and information overload, and he needs a geek savant type for that, but he also seems to want to restage American Psycho, and the two can't coexist in one body or one book. So you can take Packer as metaphor for the sleek hot chassis of the era, and the focus on the WTO protests would make sense then, and him being how he is would make sense even though it doesn't make sense. But then you get into how nobody talks like this - New Yorkers, am I out to lunch here? - except for a couple of TV mobsters, and in this book everybody talks like this. And when it's Packer you can't help but think about how many Aspergery geeks with a mind for figures and a capitalist mien would imagine themselves, in a perfect world (i.e., 2000 dotcom boom forever), just like they are only buff and rich and oversexed and being a dick to everybody with their weird sub-David Mamet brass-balls bullshit. But then everybody else talks that way too, or the women just replace the balls with nonsequiturs, and you're like, shit, dude, there is, I am told, an art to dialogue - attempt to practice it. This is all just empty shallow and handjobbery for greedy bastards, many of them still with chips on shoulders from being geeks in high school, many with nice hair but intrigued by the promise of some indirect Information Age gravitas, all salivating to believe the're on the front lines of the future. And DeLillo seems to think that's as fucked up as I do, actually, but he sure spends a lot of time coming on like it's kind of sexy too. And I'm with the protesters: it's fucking not.
Show Less
LibraryThing member browner56
Eric Packer, 28 year-old billionaire hedge fund manager, does not know it yet, but he is about to have a really, really bad day. As he wakes up one spring morning in April 2000, the massive currency carry trade (i.e., short Japanese yen, long U.S. equities) on which he has staked his firm’s
So, what does Packer do? In his own version of Bloomsday (i.e., Leopold Bloom’s celebrated single-day wandering around Dublin in Ulysses), he decides he needs a haircut! Crossing mid-town Manhattan from the East River to the Hudson River in his customized limousine, he stretches that simple errand into a dizzying array of activities, including three meals with his wife, several casual sexual encounters, conducting his business affairs in a mobile office while getting a medical exam, getting caught in a protest demonstration, attending a funeral, becoming an extra in a movie production, and, yes, stopping in for a haircut. And none of that ends up being the most significant thing that happens to Packer that day.
This is the second time I have read Cosmopolis and I have to confess that I did not like it much when I encountered it upon its publication in 2003. Coming off a string of profoundly thought-provoking novels (e.g., White Noise, Libra, Underworld), I guess I expected nothing short of perfection from Don DeLillo. In fact, given that this was his first novel since the cathartic events of September 11, 2001, I suppose I thought Cosmopolis would be the author’s statement that helped put everything that had happened into perspective. Instead, what I found in the novel at that time was a tersely written, post-modern diatribe against global capitalism that featured one of the most unlikeable protagonists in recent memory. To make matters worse, the story was set a year-and-a-half before that terrible Tuesday and dealt with the threat of terrorism in an unsatisfyingly vague way.
However, what a difference a decade makes, at least to this reader. Given the global financial collapse in 2008—which can be viewed as terrorism of its own kind—as well as the resulting Occupy Wall Street protest movement, what once seemed like a missed opportunity on the part of the author now appears to be nothing short of a visionary statement. While it was not the book I wanted at the time—DeLillo got around to addressing the 9/11 tragedy a few years later in Falling Man--it was the story the author seems to have wanted and needed to tell. Time has shown that he made the right choice. If this was a novel you did not like (or even avoided) the first time, it might be worth a second look.
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entire future is inexplicably going against him. Further, there have been several threats on his life from an unspecified source. Seemingly worst of all, his heiress wife of only a few weeks has so far refused to sleep with him.So, what does Packer do? In his own version of Bloomsday (i.e., Leopold Bloom’s celebrated single-day wandering around Dublin in Ulysses), he decides he needs a haircut! Crossing mid-town Manhattan from the East River to the Hudson River in his customized limousine, he stretches that simple errand into a dizzying array of activities, including three meals with his wife, several casual sexual encounters, conducting his business affairs in a mobile office while getting a medical exam, getting caught in a protest demonstration, attending a funeral, becoming an extra in a movie production, and, yes, stopping in for a haircut. And none of that ends up being the most significant thing that happens to Packer that day.
This is the second time I have read Cosmopolis and I have to confess that I did not like it much when I encountered it upon its publication in 2003. Coming off a string of profoundly thought-provoking novels (e.g., White Noise, Libra, Underworld), I guess I expected nothing short of perfection from Don DeLillo. In fact, given that this was his first novel since the cathartic events of September 11, 2001, I suppose I thought Cosmopolis would be the author’s statement that helped put everything that had happened into perspective. Instead, what I found in the novel at that time was a tersely written, post-modern diatribe against global capitalism that featured one of the most unlikeable protagonists in recent memory. To make matters worse, the story was set a year-and-a-half before that terrible Tuesday and dealt with the threat of terrorism in an unsatisfyingly vague way.
However, what a difference a decade makes, at least to this reader. Given the global financial collapse in 2008—which can be viewed as terrorism of its own kind—as well as the resulting Occupy Wall Street protest movement, what once seemed like a missed opportunity on the part of the author now appears to be nothing short of a visionary statement. While it was not the book I wanted at the time—DeLillo got around to addressing the 9/11 tragedy a few years later in Falling Man--it was the story the author seems to have wanted and needed to tell. Time has shown that he made the right choice. If this was a novel you did not like (or even avoided) the first time, it might be worth a second look.
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LibraryThing member NordicT
Having recently finished "Cosmopolis" I can't decide if my mind has been blown or I'm underwhelmed. I'm leaning towards the latter. During billionaire Eric Packer's quest through New York for a haircut, I had a hard time shaking the hackneyed feel of the "rich guy does sleazy things before an
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existential crisis and epiphany" progression. Like other reviewers, I also occasionally lost track of who was speaking during DeLillo's sometimes lengthy dialogue exchanges and found myself guessing at times. I understand the "Ulysses" comparison and can appreciate the heightened relevance following the 2008 financial meltdown (notable since this book was published years before the crisis), but I felt myself giving up after Eric experiences a revelation during the dead rapper's parade. In a book of 209 pages (in my borrowed 1st edition), the parade felt like it lasted about one quarter of that total. The concluding pages felt more thematically fitting as Eric begins to fully understand how tragic, pathetic and complete his demise has become, but I get the feeling that this evolution in his sense of self could, and should have been handled in the short story format. With the exception of the particularly exciting, violent political demonstration that grips lower Manhattan while Eric's limo wanders through, so much of this book seems to be about his sexual escapades and his electronic gadgets. Maybe that's the point, but I just wasn't feeling it. I'll delve into some of DeLillo's earlier works at a later time, but I was surprisingly disappointed with "Cosmopolis." Show Less
LibraryThing member clogbottom
I was pleasantly surprised, upon completing this book, to find that I had had an enjoyable Don DeLillo experience, for it had been awhile. 'Underworld' didn't hit me in the right place, and 'The Body Artist' seemed forced. I confess I felt near to giving up on him for awhile, but I'm relieved that
'Cosmopolis' reminded me of the searing power that Mr. DeLillo wields. More than any other author I've read, his words are bursting at the seams. He makes them do things they were not meant to do. They are the cracked and smoldering surface of a river of lava, barely concealing the molten flow. Or, more poetically put, they are a viciously overstuffed burrito. He heats them to glowing, wrenches them around, and douses them, leaving them frozen into shapes they were never meant to attain.
So yeah, there's a lot of that. There is a lot of DeLilloesque dialogue, surprisingly, which has always been my least favorite thing, and the reason I didn't enjoy 'The Body Artist' very much. The characters talk over and around each other in a way that is, for me, neither realistic nor of artistic or entertainment value. But it's kept to a minimum here.
It's really a novella more than a novel, but the amount of apocalyptic dread he is able to create in such a short space is impressive.
Many people seem to be fiercely critical of DeLillo, but I believe that is less a function of how he writes as it is the mystique that has been created around him. Approached as God's gift to late 20th century fiction, as some sort of sorcerer that summoned demons in a pentagram to help him channel 'Pafko At the Wall,' as some untouchable scion of literature--you will likely find him disappointing. Approached as merely a very skilled contemporary fiction writer, you will probably enjoy more what he has to offer.
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I didn't.'Cosmopolis' reminded me of the searing power that Mr. DeLillo wields. More than any other author I've read, his words are bursting at the seams. He makes them do things they were not meant to do. They are the cracked and smoldering surface of a river of lava, barely concealing the molten flow. Or, more poetically put, they are a viciously overstuffed burrito. He heats them to glowing, wrenches them around, and douses them, leaving them frozen into shapes they were never meant to attain.
So yeah, there's a lot of that. There is a lot of DeLilloesque dialogue, surprisingly, which has always been my least favorite thing, and the reason I didn't enjoy 'The Body Artist' very much. The characters talk over and around each other in a way that is, for me, neither realistic nor of artistic or entertainment value. But it's kept to a minimum here.
It's really a novella more than a novel, but the amount of apocalyptic dread he is able to create in such a short space is impressive.
Many people seem to be fiercely critical of DeLillo, but I believe that is less a function of how he writes as it is the mystique that has been created around him. Approached as God's gift to late 20th century fiction, as some sort of sorcerer that summoned demons in a pentagram to help him channel 'Pafko At the Wall,' as some untouchable scion of literature--you will likely find him disappointing. Approached as merely a very skilled contemporary fiction writer, you will probably enjoy more what he has to offer.
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LibraryThing member Disquiet
Read this for the third time this weekend -- well, finished for the third time; took it real slow this time around. Cosmopolis is the second of the now four short novels that Don DeLillo has published since his massive Underworld. I have a theory on how the four work together that I've been working
The story is about a wealthy Wall Street guy making his way across town in a white limo, observing the markets and pleasing himself while lingering threats get closer and closer.
The first half is worth reading, even if it can seem like Jay McInerney riffing on Nicholson Baker, or maybe the other way around -- Manhattan high-end social-strata observation occurring in a super-slo-mo, hyper-detailed mode.
The second half, when the threat becomes more real, is less effective. The threat is simply much more interesting when it's just a threat. That's sort of the point of the book, too, but it almost proves it too well by ending on one long denouement.
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on, in the form of a short essay (about how all the novels are intended to investigate challenges to the primacy of the written word), and this read was to focus on supporting the thesis.The story is about a wealthy Wall Street guy making his way across town in a white limo, observing the markets and pleasing himself while lingering threats get closer and closer.
The first half is worth reading, even if it can seem like Jay McInerney riffing on Nicholson Baker, or maybe the other way around -- Manhattan high-end social-strata observation occurring in a super-slo-mo, hyper-detailed mode.
The second half, when the threat becomes more real, is less effective. The threat is simply much more interesting when it's just a threat. That's sort of the point of the book, too, but it almost proves it too well by ending on one long denouement.
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LibraryThing member traciolsen
This is a really weird book, which will make a really weird movie. I can't wait. It's very masculine, very Hemingway: short, curt sentences, lots of poetic inner monologues. Time/money/events are moving so fast that they lose structure; Eric sees events occur on his monitors that then occur in
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real-time seconds later. I think once of twice he sees events happen while his eyes are closed...am I remembering that right? Eric is oddly likable in an unlikable way. He is ruthless, self-absorbed, and yet: Maybe I just like characters that are introspective and smart, regardless of jerk factor. He gleefully embraces the chaos and destruction, in fact invites it and creates it. I wonder how many times "what." is used in this book. My estimate: lots. There is a whole theme throughout on the meaning of words, or rather the non-meaning, like how "skyscraper" and "vestibule" are an antiquated words that have lost meaning in the "future" time of 2000. I wonder if they will keep that sort of thing in, as dialogue or something. I recommend it. PM me if you wish to borrow, Goodreads friends that I know in person. ;) Show Less
LibraryThing member Niecierpek
It was overdone and kitschy. It had a few things going for it like the premise, and occasional good dark humour, and a strikingly befitting metaphor from time to time. The whole story takes place in New York in the space of one afternoon as a fabulously rich 28 year old asset manager is in his
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luxurious limo on his way to get a haircut. Moving very slowly through the traffic jam, he receives many people in his limo including his financial advisors and a doctor who examines his prostate. He occasionally leaves the car to have sex or to get something to eat, or to meet his wife, always by chance. The limo is travelling very slowly through the New York City, and it encounters a presidential cavalcade, a funeral procession and a violent protest. All at the same time Eric- the main character- is speculating on the money market from the depths of his car, and starting to lose big sums of money. The idea is interesting, but the execution brushes with kitsch just tad too much. If it was the intention of the author to show the meaninglessness and kitschiness of life of so rich that it becomes meaninglessly rich, he exceeded his own expectations and created the story which became kitschy itself. This has been my second book by DeLillo. I still have to read something that will live up to his reputation. Show Less
LibraryThing member dquazzo
very "modern" -- not sure delillo is for me. fear and loathing with less interest. currency trader -- master of the universe -- loses everything and "finds" intimacy with his wife and then murdered -- or is he -- vacuous personality -- no heart, no charity -- bleak novel
LibraryThing member phillynyc
Not one of Delillo's best. This book reads like a top pop fiction book at best. Some of the idea here are on the brink of literary, but they come up short. In the end this feels like a Brent Easton Ellis novel not a Delillo novel.
LibraryThing member NativeRoses
A limo ride that reads like a hallucinatory trance or a dream sequence. Start's strongly by setting up the solipsism of a 28-year old billionaire asset manager, then falls into a less interesting lull as an anarchist uprising is described including rappelling down walls, rocking limos, a bomb
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thrown into a bank, etc. Typical street-protest, action-novel crap that's not particularly gripping. The narrator eventually comes to the same conclusion leading to further considerations of how to truly leave a mark on society. Other characters are metaphors more than people as they fall neatly into place in order to allow Delillo to make his points about art, sexuality, control, psychosis, death, intentions and their impact, poverty, love, etc. Delillo's talented wordplay and imagination make this an entertaining read that is ultimately as insubstantial as a dream. Show Less
LibraryThing member CMHguy
A day in the life of a Wall Street carry trade baron, in which he falls apart. Rather overwrought and lacking empathy for the MC, which made it a tedious read.
LibraryThing member xtien
The whole book is about the protagonist Eric Packer being driven through town, through traffic jams, mostly standing still, while inviting people into his limo, talking to his ex wife through the side window while she is stuck in traffic in the opposite direction. A very remarkable novel. Despite
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the fact that the action seems to be boring, once you read you an't stop. Delillo has a very convincing style of writing, the reading itself makes the novel fun to read. After you read this, read Underworld. Show Less
LibraryThing member lukespapa
A short novel with over-the-top characters that includes money, sex, and murder in New York City at the dawn of the 21st century. This work doesn't hold up to other DeLillo novels for me, most notably the epic Underworld, although it does portend financial excess and greed that has shaken the
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current economy. Show Less
LibraryThing member jeffome
wow....the lowest rating i have ever left.....either it was a bad book or it went right over my head....thank goodness it was short!! This book was entirely unbelievable to me. A few brief moments of intrigue, but very few. I can live with skewing the believability curve if we are in a fantasy or
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sci-fi setting. But this had too many self-absorbed characters concerned about vapid topics and reacting to events in unnatural ways, all in a believable setting, and the combination left me lost and uninterested, two responses an author would prefer not to get from a reader. And again, i may not be up the intellectual level necessary to 'get' this book, but since I read for pleasure, my reaction is what it is. As always, I will anxiously read all the other reviews after i have finished mine to see what others think, and maybe even learn something. In closing, too may unlikable characters reacting in an abnormal ways to ridiculous situations to ignite any passion in me. I hope DeLillo's larger epic novels are better because there are several of them still on my shelf to be read. Show Less
LibraryThing member HadriantheBlind
To be honest, I had no idea a movie was out until just yesterday. Does that speak to the movie's lack of advertising, or my near-total ignorance of movies?
All's well. I'd rather not have the movie affect my perception of the novel. It was a safe bet, as this was a deeply challenging and stimulating
DeLillo's ornate and hallucinatory prose style is reason enough to read him. So we turn to the 'plot', which is a very loose definition for the series of events forthcoming, and again is a string of thoughts, reflections, and vivid events and ruminations.
We see Eric Packer, a young tycoon, venture across New York in a marble-floored limousine, through presidential motorcades, a mystic-rapper's funeral, immolation, the ideological crises of late 1990s capitalism, and so forth. The Odyssey in the New York of Giuliani, of Enron, and Trump. I do not know who the actor for Packer was, so I saw instead a mask-like face, distorted by plastic surgery. Thinking and observing mostly. He ponders the deepest structural changes while aiming for the most cosmetic one - a haircut. Overwhelming streams of data and capital, and the atavistic impulse to smash it all.
More of a prose-poem than a novel, really. Deliciously heavy and ominous. Fits in our world as much as it did then. Perhaps only he might have predicted the decade after.
All's well. I'd rather not have the movie affect my perception of the novel. It was a safe bet, as this was a deeply challenging and stimulating
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little book, and now one of my favorites by DeLillo. DeLillo's ornate and hallucinatory prose style is reason enough to read him. So we turn to the 'plot', which is a very loose definition for the series of events forthcoming, and again is a string of thoughts, reflections, and vivid events and ruminations.
We see Eric Packer, a young tycoon, venture across New York in a marble-floored limousine, through presidential motorcades, a mystic-rapper's funeral, immolation, the ideological crises of late 1990s capitalism, and so forth. The Odyssey in the New York of Giuliani, of Enron, and Trump. I do not know who the actor for Packer was, so I saw instead a mask-like face, distorted by plastic surgery. Thinking and observing mostly. He ponders the deepest structural changes while aiming for the most cosmetic one - a haircut. Overwhelming streams of data and capital, and the atavistic impulse to smash it all.
More of a prose-poem than a novel, really. Deliciously heavy and ominous. Fits in our world as much as it did then. Perhaps only he might have predicted the decade after.
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LibraryThing member TheTwoDs
A headlong rush to oblivion, Cosmopolis is DeLillo's take on the consequences of pure unfettered unregulated market capitalism. Comparing society to capital markets is not unique, but viewing the travails of one twenty-something billionaire on a quest to get a haircut as a microcosm for market
Eric Packer, self-made billionaire by way of a computer program to predict foreign currency markets, wants to get his hair cut. He leaves his multilevel penthouse apartment, summons his driver, and embarks across Manhattan on a day from hell. The President is in town, a massive protest is taking place, and a famous rapper's funeral procession are all converging on Eric. This is going to be a long drive. That Eric could probably step out of his limo and walk to get his hair cut perfectly symbolizes the sheer inhumanity on display by the soulless megarich in their pursuit of wealth for wealth's sake.
As Eric lurches through the crosstown traffic, various people intrude upon his mobile sanctum, including his new wife, whom he has barely seen since their marriage though she has apparently been in their massive apartment (perhaps on the other side of the gigantic aquarium), various business functionaries such as his company's Chief of Finance and Chief of Theory, whose sole job seems to be to stimulate Eric's capacity to think of new ways to make more money. Packer has bet on the yen and bet large - so large that if he has bet wrong he and his company could be ruined. The avarice that allows someone to risk such a fortune regardless of the consequences reminds me of the massive JP Morgan trading losses comeing to light in June 2012.
As with much of DeLillo's work, the things said and unsaid are equally important as no one writes of the small spaces and hesitating communication gaps as well. The second person dialogue, rather than intruding upon the reader, reinforces the impersonality of Packer and helps with the feeling that Eric is out of synch with time, much as the markets seem to be out of synch with society. So much is spoken of the market, it begins to take on anamorphic qualities - ironic since the people attempting to master or manipulate it couldn't be less human.
In an effort to predict and control the markets, the attempt leads to a spectaclar conflagration of ego and id with devastating consequences. After all, if corporations are people, according to standard psychological definitions, they would be sociopaths - lacking empathy and the ability to understand other people.
Read it and weep.
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forces, theoretical capitalism and the never ending quest to separate capital from labor, and thus humanity, is brilliant on multiple levels.Eric Packer, self-made billionaire by way of a computer program to predict foreign currency markets, wants to get his hair cut. He leaves his multilevel penthouse apartment, summons his driver, and embarks across Manhattan on a day from hell. The President is in town, a massive protest is taking place, and a famous rapper's funeral procession are all converging on Eric. This is going to be a long drive. That Eric could probably step out of his limo and walk to get his hair cut perfectly symbolizes the sheer inhumanity on display by the soulless megarich in their pursuit of wealth for wealth's sake.
As Eric lurches through the crosstown traffic, various people intrude upon his mobile sanctum, including his new wife, whom he has barely seen since their marriage though she has apparently been in their massive apartment (perhaps on the other side of the gigantic aquarium), various business functionaries such as his company's Chief of Finance and Chief of Theory, whose sole job seems to be to stimulate Eric's capacity to think of new ways to make more money. Packer has bet on the yen and bet large - so large that if he has bet wrong he and his company could be ruined. The avarice that allows someone to risk such a fortune regardless of the consequences reminds me of the massive JP Morgan trading losses comeing to light in June 2012.
As with much of DeLillo's work, the things said and unsaid are equally important as no one writes of the small spaces and hesitating communication gaps as well. The second person dialogue, rather than intruding upon the reader, reinforces the impersonality of Packer and helps with the feeling that Eric is out of synch with time, much as the markets seem to be out of synch with society. So much is spoken of the market, it begins to take on anamorphic qualities - ironic since the people attempting to master or manipulate it couldn't be less human.
In an effort to predict and control the markets, the attempt leads to a spectaclar conflagration of ego and id with devastating consequences. After all, if corporations are people, according to standard psychological definitions, they would be sociopaths - lacking empathy and the ability to understand other people.
Read it and weep.
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LibraryThing member ifionlyhada
This is my first read of DeLillo. I enjoyed the read. It is not my usual type of book. I am interested in seeing the movie now. It has some surreal and humorous aspects to it. It was not a happy story. I think it is meant to remind you of a modern day Howard Hughes.
LibraryThing member Petroglyph
I'm in two minds about this one. On the one hand this novella left a feeling of profound meh. Plot-wise, it describes a day in the life of Eric Packer, an emotionless billionnaire, and his limo ride to the other side of NYC to get a haircut at the usual place. Interruptions along the way -- lunch,
On the other hand, this isn't a novella that is intended to be enjoyed at plot-level only. Style-wise and idea-wise I found more to hold my attention here, but only barely so. The cyclical structure leading from one insipid character/thought to the next feels played out around halfway in, but is sustained throughout. I understand that this is intentional -- much of the characters' musings deal with being hyper-aware of themselves at the centre of the changing times and with feeling vaguely puzzled about the encroaching obsoleteness of Concepts and Notions and Things. But I still think that this would have worked better in an even shorter form.
As Eric's identity disintegrates he destroys the lives of more and more people around him. Here Cosmopolis gains some momentum, some characters are finally making an impact on other characters, but it's too little too late. Everything drowns in the sustained aversion to affection that Delillo throws at us.
In conclusion, I think Cosmopolis is a clear case of style over content, with too much repetitiveness in both to make the whole fall short of an engaging read.
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a protest march, a hotel room quickie with a bodyguard -- as well as regular but semi-random meetings with staff members are used as entry points for unnatural conversations that run on vapid technobabble and self-obsessed pomo musings. Then there's the weird relationship with his wife Elise, an intentionally unemotional marriage de raison that both partners are proudly indifferent about. None of the characters are likeable, none of the characters care about anything except the quiet consideration of their own desperate attempts at not feeling bored. Or perhaps at feeling bored as long as no-one else is -- it's hard to say. All of this makes Cosmopolis a scarcely uninterrupted monotony of disinterested observations about nothing in particular. Or about market forces -- it's hard to say. On the other hand, this isn't a novella that is intended to be enjoyed at plot-level only. Style-wise and idea-wise I found more to hold my attention here, but only barely so. The cyclical structure leading from one insipid character/thought to the next feels played out around halfway in, but is sustained throughout. I understand that this is intentional -- much of the characters' musings deal with being hyper-aware of themselves at the centre of the changing times and with feeling vaguely puzzled about the encroaching obsoleteness of Concepts and Notions and Things. But I still think that this would have worked better in an even shorter form.
As Eric's identity disintegrates he destroys the lives of more and more people around him. Here Cosmopolis gains some momentum, some characters are finally making an impact on other characters, but it's too little too late. Everything drowns in the sustained aversion to affection that Delillo throws at us.
In conclusion, I think Cosmopolis is a clear case of style over content, with too much repetitiveness in both to make the whole fall short of an engaging read.
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LibraryThing member evanroskos
When I first read Cosmopolis on its release I thought it was okay but not great. After the heft and glory of Underworld, I figured The Body Artist would be his throat clearing and that Cosmopolis would get back to critiquing the world. (Which is not to say I disliked The Body Artist -- I KNEW it
Then I read it again while preparing to write my MA thesis on DeLillo and discovered that Cosmopolis adds to his overall commentary. Perhaps I just got so deep into his work that I believe the book works better than it does, but I suspect a second read would cause alot of the mediocre reactions I've heard and seen out there to change for the better.
Then again, I still get sad when I see how many people hate Underworld.... so maybe I'm just a DeLillo optimist.
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would be nothing like Underworld and was okay with that). But I felt that Cosmopolis's statements about money and art were nothing grand.Then I read it again while preparing to write my MA thesis on DeLillo and discovered that Cosmopolis adds to his overall commentary. Perhaps I just got so deep into his work that I believe the book works better than it does, but I suspect a second read would cause alot of the mediocre reactions I've heard and seen out there to change for the better.
Then again, I still get sad when I see how many people hate Underworld.... so maybe I'm just a DeLillo optimist.
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LibraryThing member AdvaKramer
I am on the fence with this one - I have yet to decide whether I liked it or not. I found the book confusing, had a few annoying grammar issues and it left me with too many question marks: not the kind that helps you process the story, but the kind that leaves you with the feeling that too much
For me the novel was, for lack of a better word, spazy. I had a hard time tracking the conversions and some occurrences: having to re-read whole passages and sometimes just giving up and moving on. There were some dialogue instances that I felt there was an attempt to create a stream of consciousness or a two-dialogues-in-one sort of thing, but it only managed to read disjointed, bumpy, and unclear.
Also, the numerous financial talks (a lot of time delivered in long monologues), really managed to zone me out. This point maybe because of me - I tend to get cross-eyed when faced with financial/mathematical theories. At some point it felt almost like a finance guidebook, or the like. Not what I'm looking for in prose.
I have an affinity to hopelessly flawed characters, especially if they are on the sociably-unaccepted-behavior side of the scheme. Detached, lost, strangers to proper social conducts, unaffected, numb, bored, indifferent characters hold a special place in my heart. Eric Packer is such a character. Not only is he well defined, he's consistent.
However, he's the only developed character in the book. I could not, for the life of me, understand Benno Levin. Not who he is, not his intentions. Nothing. He definitely has an issue, but I don't think the answer of this can be found in Cosmopolis. That kind of misses the point of a book - it leaves you with the wrong kind of a question mark.
I don't understand Eric's wife - at all - to the point of contemplating whether she's just a figment of someone's imagination (Eric's?). She's practically a ghost, only set to appear when Eric notices the world around him. Though this paragraph can describe almost all other characters, as well.
Not all was bad. The out-of-context and candid conversations were refreshing: they were fun, they were flowing, they had a nice edge to them - even a charisma, maybe (do conversations have charisma?). Eric's character was appealing (to me, like I've said, I love them when they are obnoxious). Some scenes where painted remarkably, to the point I could feel and hear and smell the scenery (while some, I had the feeling, defied the laws of physics).
The most important thing to me when reading a book, is whether I get sucked in, and this is where Cosmopolis really sits on the fence: I was eager to read on, but the chapters are so long, you don't get the breath to say, "okay, I have GOT to read this next one". It became sort of tedious at some point, especially because I make it a point to put down a book only at the end of a chapter (I have weird reading rituals). There were enough places where the book could have been cut to insert chapters, and I think it would have helped with the book's overall flow (and not impede it).
It is my first Don DeLillo, probably a great grievance on my side, after reading the other reviews. I will try to read some of his other work; it may help me judge this one better.
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information was missing. But, the more I think about the novel, the more it grows on me. Although, I can't seem to find the words the explain why. Just a feeling.For me the novel was, for lack of a better word, spazy. I had a hard time tracking the conversions and some occurrences: having to re-read whole passages and sometimes just giving up and moving on. There were some dialogue instances that I felt there was an attempt to create a stream of consciousness or a two-dialogues-in-one sort of thing, but it only managed to read disjointed, bumpy, and unclear.
Also, the numerous financial talks (a lot of time delivered in long monologues), really managed to zone me out. This point maybe because of me - I tend to get cross-eyed when faced with financial/mathematical theories. At some point it felt almost like a finance guidebook, or the like. Not what I'm looking for in prose.
I have an affinity to hopelessly flawed characters, especially if they are on the sociably-unaccepted-behavior side of the scheme. Detached, lost, strangers to proper social conducts, unaffected, numb, bored, indifferent characters hold a special place in my heart. Eric Packer is such a character. Not only is he well defined, he's consistent.
However, he's the only developed character in the book. I could not, for the life of me, understand Benno Levin. Not who he is, not his intentions. Nothing. He definitely has an issue, but I don't think the answer of this can be found in Cosmopolis. That kind of misses the point of a book - it leaves you with the wrong kind of a question mark.
I don't understand Eric's wife - at all - to the point of contemplating whether she's just a figment of someone's imagination (Eric's?). She's practically a ghost, only set to appear when Eric notices the world around him. Though this paragraph can describe almost all other characters, as well.
Not all was bad. The out-of-context and candid conversations were refreshing: they were fun, they were flowing, they had a nice edge to them - even a charisma, maybe (do conversations have charisma?). Eric's character was appealing (to me, like I've said, I love them when they are obnoxious). Some scenes where painted remarkably, to the point I could feel and hear and smell the scenery (while some, I had the feeling, defied the laws of physics).
The most important thing to me when reading a book, is whether I get sucked in, and this is where Cosmopolis really sits on the fence: I was eager to read on, but the chapters are so long, you don't get the breath to say, "okay, I have GOT to read this next one". It became sort of tedious at some point, especially because I make it a point to put down a book only at the end of a chapter (I have weird reading rituals). There were enough places where the book could have been cut to insert chapters, and I think it would have helped with the book's overall flow (and not impede it).
It is my first Don DeLillo, probably a great grievance on my side, after reading the other reviews. I will try to read some of his other work; it may help me judge this one better.
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LibraryThing member jovemako
I wanted to like this one more than I really did. I had a hard time reading it- not due to language, just because of how it came across. To me, the plot came off as very self absorbed, and nihilistic. It's kind of a depressing read. I wasn't fond of the print either. A stupid point, I understand,
I picked up this book because I wanted to read it before I watched the movie.....kind of wondering if I'm going to watch the movie now.
Bottom line- It wasn't all that great of a read for me.
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still it's one to be made. The print seemed too big for story. The vocabulary was large enough but came off almost too simple. I picked up this book because I wanted to read it before I watched the movie.....kind of wondering if I'm going to watch the movie now.
Bottom line- It wasn't all that great of a read for me.
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LibraryThing member Britt84
Cosmopolis tells the story of a young and very wealthy man as he spends his day in his limousine, meeting employees, seeing his wife and mistresses, getting caught in a large protest, getting a haircut, and finally, losing grip of reality.
The book reminded me very much of American Psycho. It shows
Though the book is well-written, and I understand the point DeLillo wants to make by writing in this way, I didn't find it a very enjoyable read. It is impossible to really connect to the characters in the novel and I never really got into the novel. I get that this is probably done on purpose, but it's not a novel I'd want to reread or would recommend to someone.
The book reminded me very much of American Psycho. It shows
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a rich man, involved in sex and grandeur, but who suffers from a lack of real feeling, and in the end, resorts to violence. It shows an enormous emptiness in the lives of the rich and gives a sense of being out of touch with reality and with humanity.Though the book is well-written, and I understand the point DeLillo wants to make by writing in this way, I didn't find it a very enjoyable read. It is impossible to really connect to the characters in the novel and I never really got into the novel. I get that this is probably done on purpose, but it's not a novel I'd want to reread or would recommend to someone.
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LibraryThing member Eyejaybee
This novel tells of a day in the life of Eric Packer, a 28 year old mufti-billionaire, who decides to drive (or, rather, be driven in his colossal white stretch limousine) across New York for a haircut. Packer lives in an immense 48 room apartment which has its own cinema, swimming pool and every
However, Packer has chosen the wrong day to try to cross the city - the President is in town, complete with Security Service motorcade, and a fabled dead rapper's funeral draws thousands of mourners. To compound the gridlock an anti-capitalism riot kicks off in Manhattan.
This books resounds with DeLillo's prose which somehow manages simultaneously to be both stark and almost poetic. The city itself is the real hero of the book and DeLillo's descriptions of the urban architecture are engrossing. However, too often it tapers into authorial self-indulgence, and for much of the book I simply felt that I couldn't care less about Eric Packer.
I think that I am glad I read it, but I would hesitate to recommend it to anyone else.
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other conceivable accessory, and the limousine at his disposal seem almost equally well-appointed, weighed down with multiple computer screens, banquettes, televisions and the capacity for a mini operating theatre.However, Packer has chosen the wrong day to try to cross the city - the President is in town, complete with Security Service motorcade, and a fabled dead rapper's funeral draws thousands of mourners. To compound the gridlock an anti-capitalism riot kicks off in Manhattan.
This books resounds with DeLillo's prose which somehow manages simultaneously to be both stark and almost poetic. The city itself is the real hero of the book and DeLillo's descriptions of the urban architecture are engrossing. However, too often it tapers into authorial self-indulgence, and for much of the book I simply felt that I couldn't care less about Eric Packer.
I think that I am glad I read it, but I would hesitate to recommend it to anyone else.
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LibraryThing member lriley
I had never read much of Delillo until my interest perked up watching him on C-Span (on the Pen sponsored event against the Patriot act and censorship) reading Zbigniew Herbert's 'Report from the besieged City'. A great poem and it gave me the impetus to look into Delillo a little more deeply. The
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epigraph to 'Cosmopolis' is from the same poem--'and a rat became the unit of currency'. How apt in these times--at least I believe so--when profits from the corporate world more often than not are made from chasing figures on papers--debits and credits--around the globe--and more or less this is the way in which I took the basic theme of the book. The books somewhat hedonistic soulless main charachter Eric Packer has 2 missions as he begins his day. To go out and get a haircut and to stake his billions against the yen. Along his journey he has numerous sexual encounters. Demonstrations are taking place in the street as a Presidential motorcade blocks off major parts of the city as he rolls along in his limo like a general on a battlefield taking or discarding the financial advice of a host of advisers. The action of the book has a somewhat haphazard feel to it almost like a camera turning one street corner to another discovering scenes that do not altogether relate to each other. In the end everything collapses for Eric who is disconnected pretty much from the rest of the human race. He sits facing indifferently a man who has come to kill him. Show Less
LibraryThing member jonfaith
Poetry pours from Cosmopolis, a sweaty rut of discourse and images about the nature of power in our world. Delillo is prescient and impactful, but he's always been, hasn't he?
The protagonist finds obsoletion everywhere and the reader cringes, suddenly questioning their own utility. The ending
The protagonist finds obsoletion everywhere and the reader cringes, suddenly questioning their own utility. The ending
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proved blurred but effective. I sense the message within. The dedication to Paul Auster was intriguing as well. I may see the film now. Show Less
Subjects
Call number
082
Original language
Catalan
Original publication date
2003
ISBN
8429753117 / 9788429753110