- Paperback: 827 pages
- Publisher: Picador; 1st Edition edition (13 Dec 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0330369954
- ISBN-13: 978-0330369954
- Product Dimensions: 19.7 x 12.9 x 5.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (60 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 36,792 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Underworld
and over 900,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Authors
Discover books, learn about writers, and more.
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
While Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the Cold War and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying. Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter--the "shot heard around the world"--and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand.
"It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria.
Through fragments and interlaced stories--including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others--DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled. --Amazon.com
Salman Rushdie
‘Underworld is a magnificent book by an American master’
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Huge, intense, beautifully written - worth the effort,
By A Customer
This review is from: Underworld (Paperback)
It took a big effort to read this - carrying around that extra weight to and from work and in planes, and having to search for the concentration to draw together the myriad threads of the storylines in the midst of the rest of my life. But I have to say that it was well worth the effort.It is not just the length that daunts. This is not a "page-turner" in the normal sense. Whilst some sections draw you through, the majority of the text, for me, cried out to be read lovingly and for meaning - which meant that I had to slow right down to make sense of it all. If you have the time, and energy, (and are prepared to read something almost wholly American) you should read this book. It is surely of the highest quality. True - there were the odd fifty pages here or there which I struggled with. But that was counterbalanced with some moments of such emotion (the argument over which brother should look after the aging mother; the description of flying through the blast; the scenes of infidelity; the scene with the shotgun to name only a few) to make up for this many times over.
24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Bravura opening fades away,
By Mr B (Devon) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Underworld (Paperback)
My advice: pick up this tome at your local bookshop and read the wonderfully evocative first 50-60 pages which describe a mythical baseball game at a pivotal moment in American history. Watch the game slowly unfold through the eyes of the youngster who vaults the turnstiles. Savour the descriptions of the stands going wild, the papers and programmes spiralling through the air and wonder on the fate of that coveted home run ball. And then replace your copy. For after this almighty beginning, Underworld's joys are but fleeting epiphanies. For me, De Lillo reads as if he is just trying too hard at times, and nowhere more so than in his constant reference to GenX assembly parts like linoleum and styrofoam in his descriptions. And it's such a shame because the set pieces are so huge in scale and ambition that you'd go with them, if the characters and situations didn't seem so studied, so plotted out. All the right tunes, but sadly minus the soul.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Don't get too excited,
By A Customer
This review is from: Underworld (Paperback)
I loved the first chapter. The baseball game was electric. Then it meadered for pages and pages. Granted, all of his words are chosen and delivered with ace precision. Problem is, a page is a heavy morsel on its own. You get through 50 and feel full-up! I couldn't stomach too much of this "great" writing. It's now back on the shelf, for the time-being.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/02/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192198663_.gif){kind=small}
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
