The Body Artist [Großdruck] [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

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 -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

Don DeLillo's reputation rests on a series of large-canvas novels, in which he's proven to be the foremost diagnostician of our national psyche. In The Body Artist, however, he 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. And like James's tale, it seems to partake of at least seven kinds of ambiguity, leaving the reader to sort out its riddles. 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. And Lauren's performances--for she is the body artist of the title--sound pretty awful, the kind of thing Artaud might have cooked up for an aerobics class. Still, when DeLillo reins in the abstractions and bears down, the results are heartbreaking:

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the ones you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

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 -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

DeLillo's new novel is concise, especially compared to his last, the gloriously symphonic Underworld (1997), but appearances can be deceiving, a truism that is one of this surprising work's many preoccupations. Spare and somber, yet, ultimately, liberating, this tale takes place within the hypersensitive mind of a woman artist. In the opening chapter, time swells to a smothering dimension as an unidentified woman and a man eat breakfast in an old house by a bay. Every motion and shift in thought is obsessively noted until the excruciatingly slow pace takes on an elegiac tone, which is abruptly affirmed by a news story about the death of a film director, whose widow is identified as Lauren Hartke, the body artist. Alone after the funeral, DeLillo's enigmatic narrator discovers an intruder, a strange and seemingly aphasic man. Intrigued rather than alarmed, she offers him food and attention that vacillates from the clinical to the erotic. When she isn't trying to decipher her peculiar guest's cryptic pronouncements--he chants lines that read like snippets from e. e. cummings--Lauren practices her "bodywork," a rigorous regime of yoga poses and theatrical gestures, accompanied by radical forms of exfoliation and bleaching, ritualized attempts at erasure, and emulations of death. There is a curious physics at work in this intense narrative, which takes much longer to read than its size would suggest. Each sentence is like a formula that must be solved, and each paragraph adds up to unexpected disclosures regarding our sense of time, existence, identity, and connection. "Break it down and scrutinize," Lauren tells herself, an act DeLillo performs with consummate mastery in this rarefied and poetic study of grief and creativity, absence and presence, isolation and communion. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

Delillo's penchant for intermingling historical facts with fiction and his knack for creating uncanny but likely characters, such as the professor of Hitler studies in White Noise, are the most recognizable traits of his novels. While his latest work also explores the familiar themes of fear, mistrust, and misgiving, it is Delillo's most unusual as well as his riskiest endeavor. Residing in a ghostly seaside house, protagonist Lauren Hartke is a gifted body artist who contorts her body both to manipulate and to escape reality. After her husband's sudden suicide, she encounters a man (or a shadow of a man) who knows the most intimate details of her life and is even able to repeat back the couple's past conversations. The two begin a strange relationship that transcends time, space, and human imagination. One of the passing characters best summarizes the crux of the tale when she claims that Hartke's art is about "who we are when we are not rehearsing who we are." This sparse but precise novella may be easily read in one sitting, but it takes an attentive reader willing to give a major author like Delillo room to maneuver to value this kind of eerie symbolism. The Body Artist may not have an epic range, but it proves that its author does, and it will possibly open a new chapter in his prolific career.
-DMirela Roncevic, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

For thirty years, since the publication of his first novel Americana, Don DeLillo has lived in the skin of our times. He has found a voice for the forgotten souls who haunt the fringes of our culture and for its larger-than-life, real-life figures. His language is defiantly, radiantly American.

Now, to a new century, he has brought The Body Artist. In this spare, seductive novel, he inhabits the muted world of Lauren Hartke, an artist whose work defies the limits of the body. Lauren is living on a lonely coast, in a rambling rented house, where she encounters a strange, ageless man, a man with uncanny knowledge of her own life. Together they begin a journey into the wilderness of time -- time, love and human perception.

As the Seattle Times said of DeLillo's last novel, "Masterpieces teach you how to read them." The Body Artist is a haunting, beautiful and profoundly moving novel from one of the finest writers of our time.

Don DeLillo, 1936 in New York als Sohn italienischer Einwanderer geboren, hat ein umfangreiches erzählerisches Werk vorgelegt. Für den Roman "Weißes Rauschen" erhielt er den National Book Award, "Sieben Sekunden" über Kennedys Ermordung wurde in den USA breit diskutiert und "Mao II" mit dem Pen/Faulkner Award ausgezeichnet. Mit seinem monumentalen Romanepos "Unterwelt", das weltweit als literarisches Ereignis gefeiert wurde, hat sich Don DeLillo in die erste Reihe der amerikanischen Gegenwartsautoren geschrieben. "Unterwelt" stand monatelang auf den Bestsellerlisten und wurde als eines der wichtigsten Bücher des ausgehenden Jahrhunderts gerühmt. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.