Product Description

A gripping, masterful blend of fact and fiction, alive with meticulously portrayed characters both real and created, Libra is a grave, haunting, and brilliant examination of an event that has become an indelible part of the American psyche. In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald’s odyssey from a troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. In his new introduction, DeLillo reexamines the evidence surrounding Oswald’s role in the assassination as well as Oswald’s place in popular culture.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #92423 in Books
• Published on: 1991-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

From Publishers Weekly
DeLillo's ninth novel takes its title from Lee Harvey Oswald's zodiac sign, the sign of "balance." And, as in all his fiction ( Running Dog , The Names , White Noise ), DeLillo's perfectly realized aim is to balance plot, theme and structure so that the novel he builds around Oswald (an unlikely and disturbingly sympathetic protagonist) provokes the reader with its clever use of history, its dramatic pacing and its immaculate and detailed construction. The plot of the novel is history itselfand history, here, is a system of plots and conspiracies: the U.S. government has plotted to invade Cuba, and there are CIA agents who want retribution against President Kennedy for his halfhearted support of the Bay of Pigs operation; there are Cubans plotting revenge on JFK for the same reason and for, they fear, his plot to forge a rapprochement with Castro; there is a lone gunman, Oswald, who is conspired upon by history and circumstance, and who himself plots against the status quo. The novel bears dissection on many levels, but is, taken whole, a seamless, brilliant work of compelling fiction. What makes Libra so unsettling is DeLillo's ability to integrate literary criticism into the narrative, commenting throughout on the nature and conventions of fiction itself without disturbing the flow of his story. The characters are storytellers: CIA agents and Cuban immigrants retell old plots in their minds and write fantasy plots to keep themselves alive; Nicholas Branch, also of the CIA, has spent 15 years writing an in-house history of the assassination that will never uncover its deepest secrets and that in any case no one will read; Oswald, defecting to the Soviet Union, hopes to write short stories of contemporary American lifedyslexic, he is aware of words as pictures of themselves not simply as name tags for the material world. DeLillo interweaves fact and fiction as he draws us inexorably toward Dallas, November 22. The real people (Jack Ruby, Oswald, his mother and Russian wife) are retrieved from history and made human, their stories involving and absorbing; the imagined characters are placed into history as DeLillo imagines it to have come to pass. By subtly juxtaposing the blinding intensity of DeLillo's own crystal-clear, composite version of events against the blurred reality of the Zapruder film and other artifacts of the actual assassination, Libra ultimately becomes a comment on the entire body of DeLillo's work: Why do we understand fiction to reflect truth? Why do we trust a novelist to tell us the whole story? And what is the truth that fiction reveals? 50,000 first printing; $50,000 ad/promo; BOMC main selection; QPBC selection; first serial to Esquire.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone in assassinating President John F. Kennedy? In his ninth novel, American Book Award winner DeLillo (for White Noise , LJ 2/1/85) addresses this question, skillfully weaving together fact and fiction to create an engrossing tale. It is a measure of his success that while reading, one must keep reminding oneself that this is, indeed, a novel making "no claim to literal truth." DeLillo's vision is not of a single, perfectly working scheme but rather of "a rambling affair that succeeded in short term mainly due to chance." The cast, both real and fictional, ranges from scheming CIA agents to Mafia dons, but what haunts the reader most is the image of Oswald as a confused young man searching for an identity and accidentally caught up in something bigger than himself. Sure to be a best seller. David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Back Cover
Now with a new introduction by the author—"a thriller of the most profound sort"
—Chicago Tribune

"Libra operates at a dizzyingly high level of intensity throughout; it’s that true fictional rarity—a novel of admirable depth and relevance that’s also a terrific page-turner."
—USA Today

"DeLillo’s novel is like a stop-motion frame of the crossfire, a still picture of an awful moment.... [His] prose has a quality of demented lyricism."
—The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Brilliant Example of What Historical Fiction Should Be
In the very first chapter of this profoundly provocative novel, we take a ride in a speeding New York City subway with a truant Lee Harvey Oswald. As the young Oswald stares out the front window, little does he realize how much the rest of his life would be just like this: being carried away by a powerful machine and only catching flickering glances of the things and people along the way. Released very close to the 25th anniversary of JFK's assassination, LIBRA does not attempt to seriously propose a conspiracy theory. What he does do is take some of the facts, some of the tempting coincidences, and several of the possible scenarios, and create a labyrinth of intrigue and a world filled with shadows within shadows. This is a creepy book that haunts you, to use a tired cliche but I can't think of how else to put it. (Apparently the assassination is a favorite topic for DeLillo, as the Zapruder film and discussions about JFK conspiracies reappear in DeLillo's later book, UNDERWORLD.) Underneath it all is a dark struggle between what is planned and what occurs: strategy versus chance, conspiracy versus spontaneity, the best laid plans... etc. In LIBRA, the scales tip one way then the other and, yet, the result is the inevitable tragedy of November 22, 1963. This is what historical fiction should be.

The Scales preside over a trauma center of American mythos
The so-called "secret diaries" of Lee Harvey Oswald show him to be a half-educated man struggling with some of the most profound political problems of his era. DeLillo himself was early on inspired by recordings of Oswald's radio appearances, where he defended his faux-Marxist fantasies to a no-doubt baffled Texan audience, achieving a powerful oratorial performance, especially in light of his age (23) and educational background (dyslexic high-school dropout, followed by a Marine tour-of-duty in the Pacific). Throughout LIBRA the shadowy palimpsest of Oswald is granted a complex human dignity far beyond the usual dismissals as a sociopathic, alienated loser. He is presented as both victim and victimizer, a brutal hypocrite and charlatan (let's not forget the actual assassination), but also a dejected idealist who was trashed, bastardized, and buried alive by the American mass socius of the 50s and 60s. DeLillo's working title was *An American Murder*, but he changed it to LIBRA (Oswald's sign in the zodiac) to indicate the arbitrary scales of justice presiding over a personality seemingly made of pure contradiction. A Marxist who joined the Marines as soon as he came of age only to defect to Russia and then repent two years later? Indeed, Oswald's scatterbrain identity-confusion has made him a dingy, well-worn avatar in the annals of our postmodern geek show. Most startlingly, DeLillo's genius is able to evoke the now-familiar media-consciousness expressed by Oswald in his writings and behavior, arguing that Oswald *knew* how he would be perceived by the public, that in the depths of his isolation the Panopticon of the televisual was at work dramatizing his every move, tasting every dreg of his perplexed and cryptozoic existence, securing for him a perverse nook in our collective nerve and trauma centers, a world-historical Sin against the future. This novel comes with my highest recommendations.

Constructing History
DeLillo's Libra is a fascinating read, not only because its topic is one of America's most traumatizing events in recent history--not the assassination of president Kennedy is the point of interest in the book--but the question: What made this event so terrifying, why had it such an impact?

In answering this question DeLillo leaves out the obvious reasons: JFK's popularity and people's hopes connected with his politics. Instead, he puts the focus on a more profound problem: With the assassination of JFK the American people were woken up from their dream of security and regularity. A conclusive explanation of the how and why of the event could have put them back to sleep. Such an explanation is not available though. It is just not the way history works, and DeLillo skillfully shows exactly that in his book. He depicts a conspiracy that gets out of hand and Oswald as a manipulated and constructed individual.

Presenting his version of the events, DeLillo at the same time questions its validity. Reading his novel we become aware of the impossibility of drawing the right conclusions of the mass of hard facts and vague hints--the infinite possibilities of what can be held for the truth. Therefore, any historical account can only be a possible version of the real. In so far, DeLillo's Libra places itself somewhere between fiction and history.

Libra is a novel that deserves every attention.