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The Body Artist

3.15 of 5 stars 3.15 · rating details · 4,443 ratings · 345 reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
In whatever form Don DeLillo chooses to write, there is simply no other American author who has so consistently pushed the boundaries of fiction in his effort to capture the zeitgeist. In The Body Artist, DeLillo tells the hallucinatory tale of performance artist Lauren Hartke in the days following the suicide of her husband, filmmaker Rey Robl...more The Barnes & Noble Review
In whatever form Don DeLillo chooses to write, there is simply no other American author who has so consistently pushed the boundaries of fiction in his effort to capture the zeitgeist. In The Body Artist, DeLillo tells the hallucinatory tale of performance artist Lauren Hartke in the days following the suicide of her husband, filmmaker Rey Robles. Finishing out their lease of a rented house on the coast, living in a self-imposed exile, Lauren discovers a mysterious man in the bedroom upstairs who is able to repeat -- verbatim -- entire conversations she had with her husband before his death but does not seem to know his own name or where he came from.

DeLillo's emphasis on behavior and the inadequacies of language in The Body Artist will remind readers more of his plays (Valparaiso, The Day Room) than of his novels, and yet, in just a few pages -- 128, as compared to the sweeping, masterful Underworld's 800-plus -- DeLillo still manages to draw a rich portrait of contemporary American life in all its quotidian glory. Describing Lauren in the kitchen on the morning her husband will commit suicide, he writes, "She took the kettle back to the stove because this is how you live a life even if you don't know it." In this opening scene, Lauren and Rey silently struggle to assign meaning and relevance to an ordinary moment. They have a routine; they know what comes next. But they can't say what it is. They seem cut off from their own actions. How do you articulate the emotion that accompanies eating breakfast with your spouse? As Rey puts it, "I want to say something but what." When they finish eating, Rey drives to his ex-wife's apartment in Manhattan to kill himself.

The question remains open as to whether or not the strange man (whom Lauren affectionately names Mr. Tuttle, after an English teacher of hers, when she finds him upstairs) exists at all, or if he is merely a figment of her imagination. But Mr. Tuttle's origins are entirely beside the point. He has no origins. He defies description. He is neither old nor young. "Maybe this man experiences another kind of reality where he is here and there, before and after." And leave it to DeLillo to connect this enigma to the Internet. There is a live, 24-hour web site Lauren enjoys viewing: It shows an empty road in Kotka, Finland. Occasionally a car drives by or a person crosses the screen, but generally nothing happens. Lauren is fascinated by the notion that across the globe, at this very moment, this is happening, an episode "real enough to withstand the circumstance of nothing going on." This may also be the best way to describe The Body Artist, a book in which "it all happens around the word seem."

In DeLillo's unique brand of lucid, albeit elliptical, prose, The Body Artist addresses the very questions Gauguin inscribed on his famous painting: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? Lauren Hartke answers these questions by transforming the absurdities of her daily life -- that hours can seem long or short and still be hours; how a thing can look like something other than itself -- into a beautiful, suggestive live performance. Through her art, Lauren transcends the limits of language and body, approaching an understanding of her husband's death and more clearly discerning her own original nature. And in a brilliant act of spiritual ventriloquism, DeLillo, "the poet of lonely places," dresses himself up in this character, placing us in the extreme situation of her search for an experience of meaning she can call living.

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Paperback, 128 pages

Published January 8th 2002 by Scribner (first published February 6th 2001)

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Aug 03, 2012 Paul marked it as to-read

I surfaced into consciousness unwillingly like a resurrecting Jesus with too much alimony to pay. A slap to the chin and I remembered whose cleancut chiselled features were going to be framing the next supercilious question.

"Feeling better, Mr Bryant?" Yes, of course. It was The Don. But I wasn't going to go quietly.

"Not really, you post-modern gargoyle of unmeaning. You can take your silvery convolutions of ungrammatical feverdreams and shove them where the sun has never shone in a cavern mea...more I surfaced into consciousness unwillingly like a resurrecting Jesus with too much alimony to pay. A slap to the chin and I remembered whose cleancut chiselled features were going to be framing the next supercilious question.

"Feeling better, Mr Bryant?" Yes, of course. It was The Don. But I wasn't going to go quietly.

"Not really, you post-modern gargoyle of unmeaning. You can take your silvery convolutions of ungrammatical feverdreams and shove them where the sun has never shone in a cavern measureless to man down to a sunless sea, O Felchmeister of the English tongue."

Crack. That was my head bouncing off the dingy walls of whatever foul rag and bone shop DeLillo had me banged me up in.

"Less of your mouth, and more of mine," he said.

I felt two pairs of strong arms grip me from each side. I caught a glimpse of DeLillo's vile acolytes. Just as I guessed. Steve Erickson on one side and yep, the notorious transvestite Bret Easton Ellis (“Bretsy” to his friends, of which there aren’t any) on the other. They were giggling like schoolgirls

“Oooh give him one for us, Don!”
“Oooh, the things he said about me, and in public!”
“Oooh, let’s do page 147 and then page 301!”

The Don told them to shut up and they squeaked into silence. It was pretty clear to me that there were American postmodern novelists and there was The Don. His very eyebrow had been reviewed ecstatically in the NYRB more times than all the others' entire sets of genitalia. And they knew it. And now he was heating up a pair of ordinary garden secateurs over a pile of remaindered early Franzen novels ( the ones before Oprah spotted him).

“Snip snip, Mr Bryant. One snip for every nasty little thing you said about me in your nasty reviews, and one more for encouraging your friends to mock me in surrealistic boxing match fantasies, and a final little snip for my two good buddies who have been really quite hurt by the dreadful things you say. I suppose you wish us all to write like your precious but sadly dead Raymond Carver? Hmm? ‘And then this sad alcoholic fell over and then this other sad alcoholic went shopping for a mop. The end.’ Is that it? That’s how you want us all to write?”

I was about to demolish his crude travesties of my crude travesties of his and his good buddies’ rancid fictions – I had vowed wild horses wouldn’t get me to remind him that I’d given five stars to Libra – but the application of the secateurs to my dorsal extremeties put an end to rational thought. I heard the terrible giggling of Bretsy – “Just one more finger, please! Hee hee!” and I flashed back into the welcome abyss of no book reviews.
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Feb 01, 2012 Bennet rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels-stories

Couldn't sleep last night and re-read this, which had the effect of a rhythmic massage, primarily to a stiff neck and knotted shoulders that notably relaxed as I read. Something about the plainly poetic prose, with its quietly rhythmic language and the familiar, even mundane, details, rendered somehow incandescent in the telling, as if by a gentle voice reading barely aloud by dim lantern light.

This is a dream of a book, little more than a hundred pages, likely to disappoint if you're unwilling...more Couldn't sleep last night and re-read this, which had the effect of a rhythmic massage, primarily to a stiff neck and knotted shoulders that notably relaxed as I read. Something about the plainly poetic prose, with its quietly rhythmic language and the familiar, even mundane, details, rendered somehow incandescent in the telling, as if by a gentle voice reading barely aloud by dim lantern light.

This is a dream of a book, little more than a hundred pages, likely to disappoint if you're unwilling to forgo plot and suspend disbelief for the sake of metaphor.Because really that's all this is, a sustained metaphor, made a story only by way of a character's (the wife's) mostly psychic progression, which takes place almost entirely inside her house.

It's a dreamy but not comforting story. To start, it's just another morning of habituated married company being taken entirely for granted. But immediately following this, the husband, Rey, dies. After his wife helps him find his lost keys, he drives away and commits suicide in his ex-wife's house, who calls the current wife to say: "This man, it was not a question of chemicals in his brain. It was him who he was. Frankly you didn't have time to find out. Because I will tell you something. We were two people with one life, and it was his life. I stayed with him until it ruined my health, for which I am still paying the price."

No kidding. This man. This strange man. Rey. If you could just slap him, just flat out slap some goddamn sense into him, damn him.

But this is not about him. It's about her, his wife, the current wife. We follow her as she proceeds alone in their rambling old beach house seeking the source of an insistently mysterious sound coming from behind the upstairs walls that turns out to be another strange man, this one of indeterminate name and origin, suffering some mental disability that has him hiding. He's spent much of his isolated time overhearing many married conversations, and has a knack for repeating verbatim what the wife and her husband have been saying to each other, and in their voices.

Very creepy, and works brilliantly as metaphor, I think, though my opinion is higher than that of most other GR reviewers. Ultimately the language makes the metaphor work for me, especially on a sleepless but dreamy night, alone with book in hand.

"Nothing else makes sense. It is the thing no one understands. But it makes and shapes you. And in these nights since he'd left she sometimes sat with a book in her lap, eyes closed, and felt him living somewhere in the dark, and it is colder where he is, it is wintrier there, and she wanted to take him in, try to know him in the spaces where his chaos lurks, in all the soft-cornered rooms and unraveling verbs, the parts of speech where he is meant to locate his existence, and in the material place where Rey lives in him, alive again, word for word, touch for touch, and she opened and closed her eyes and thought in a blink the world had changed."

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Feb 24, 2012 Venus rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novel

گاهی چیزی تمام می‌شود. چیزی درونِ آدم تمام می‌شود اما آن بیرون -بیرون از من- هنوز به حیات خود ادامه می‌دهد. هنوز راه می‌رود هنوز حرف می‌زند هنوز می‌خندد هنوز می‌بوسد. هیچ‌کس نمی‌داند چه بر سرِ زن آمده. اتفاق‌های امروز در امتداد دیروز است و سه روز پیش و هفته‌ای که گذشت، مثل همیشه؛ این‌جا اما قتلی‌ رخ داده است. این‌جا چیزی مرده است، و هیچ‌چیز مثل دیروز نیست. اتفاق، کم‌کم جا می‌افتد. سرگیجه می‌آید می‌نشیند پهلوی دل‌تنگی، پهلوی فراموشی...!

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Sep 15, 2007 Sarah rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is the third Don DiLillo book that I’ve read. I read White Noise in college, right along with everyone else, and thought it was a truly a modern classic, just like everybody else. Then, in graduate school, I also read Libra in a 500-level literature class called “Post Post Modern Fiction.” I thought it was terrible, although my reaction might have been warped the two utterly heartbreaking three-hour sessions my MA Literature classmates spent tearing the book apart, one-upping each other’s v...more This is the third Don DiLillo book that I’ve read. I read White Noise in college, right along with everyone else, and thought it was a truly a modern classic, just like everybody else. Then, in graduate school, I also read Libra in a 500-level literature class called “Post Post Modern Fiction.” I thought it was terrible, although my reaction might have been warped the two utterly heartbreaking three-hour sessions my MA Literature classmates spent tearing the book apart, one-upping each other’s vocabulary usage, and saying silly things about books in general. You might even say they tore tore the book apart.

I have mixed feelings about The Body Artist. It’s a slim, sparse book centered on a performance artist, Lauren, who is grieving for her late husband. In the wake of his death, a strange man (Ghost? Hobo?) appears in her house, acts really weird, and then disappears.

On the positive side, the book is beautifully written - it reads more like a prose poem then a novel. The majority of the book is spent inside Lauren’s head and DiLillo has just plain weird ability to capture how people spend time alone with themselves:

“She cleaned the bathroom, using the spray-gun bottle of disinfectant. Then she held the nozzle of the spray gun to her head, seeing herself as anyone might do, alone, without special reference to the person’s circumstances. It was the pine-scent bottle, the pistol-grip bottle of tile-and-grout cleaner, killer of mildew, and she held the nozzle to her head, finger pressed to the plastic trigger, with her tongue hanging out for effect. This is what people do, she thought, alone in their lives.”

He also does an admirable job playing with time and perception - repeated actions, lines of dialogue, and images cement the airy-but-claustrophobic feel of the book and give it even more of the feel of a prose poem, as do the short second-person vignettes at the beginning of each chapter. It is, in all ways, pretty.

On the other hand, the book does suffer from a few issues that I also picked up on in his other books - he can be a little heavy-handed at times with the themes of the book. Sometimes it feels like he’s shouting, “This book is about time and perception! And heart ache! Just in case you still don’t get it, I’ll make Lauren’s last name is Hartke (Hart Take! Heart Take! Heart Ache!) and I’ll have her do a performance art piece at the end of the book that summarizes the themes of the book all over again, in case you missed them.”

It also comes down to a problem I often have with poetry - the actual plot of the story is so vague and stylized that I often didn’t understand what’s happening. Even the major reviews I read of the book contradict one another when it comes to basic plot points. Is the man in her home a figment of her imagination, a ghost, a homeless man, or her actual husband? I don’t mind subtly or delicacy, but I do like to sorta kinda know what’s going on. Or at least get a few hints? And don’t say, “It is what is it” or “It is what you want it to be” or “who he is isn’t important” because I think those are all cheap cop-outs.

Either way, what it comes down to is that DiLillo can write a sentence and create an atmosphere. I’ve heard I should read “Underworld” before I judge any further.(less)

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Sep 12, 2011 Mon rated it 3 of 5 stars

I hesitated as I was rating since I technically didn't finish the book. Most of the time the fact that I didn't complete a book is enough for me to give it 2 stars or less, but this is also significant because it's under 130 pages and I was actually in a patient enough mood for postmodernism.

If you ask me what The Body Artist is about, I cam tell you about 4 things.
1) The main couple lives in a house
2) They eat human food, I think it was cereal, or maybe toast
3) They walk around the house a...more

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Apr 24, 2011 Oscar rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: mainstream, míos, postmodernos

Es admirable la capacidad que tiene DeLillo para hacer vibrar el interior del lector. Con su prosa precisa, como si de un bisturí se tratase, nos muestra de manera clara algunas de las cosas de la vida diaria, de las que sabemos su existencia pero no sabemos explicar con palabras, y que él nos describe de forma deslumbrante. Sólo conozco a otro escritor capaz de hacer los mismo, y es David Foster Wallace.

No es que haya leído muchos libros de DeLillo, de hecho estoy empezando a conocerlo, y aún n...more Es admirable la capacidad que tiene DeLillo para hacer vibrar el interior del lector. Con su prosa precisa, como si de un bisturí se tratase, nos muestra de manera clara algunas de las cosas de la vida diaria, de las que sabemos su existencia pero no sabemos explicar con palabras, y que él nos describe de forma deslumbrante. Sólo conozco a otro escritor capaz de hacer los mismo, y es David Foster Wallace.

No es que haya leído muchos libros de DeLillo, de hecho estoy empezando a conocerlo, y aún no es que acabe de convencerme todo lo que escribe. Tengo pendientes sus obras más importantes y espero que me gusten mucho más. Y es que con DeLillo tengo un problema, sus primeros capítulos son tan extraordinarios que después espero lo mismo de la parte central de la obra, y me llevo una desilusión al no encontrarlo. Eso sí, en el capítulo final siempre reencuentro la genialidad del principio. Y el desarrollo de la novela no es que sea malo, incluso te encuentras con momentos brillantes, pero lo encuentro demasiado embrollado, como un rompecabezas del que sólo él posee la muestra con la que guiarse, dejándote a ti, pobre lector, a ciegas. Es de esos autores de los que parece que te pierdas algo y no puedes disfrutarlos a fondo.

La historia de 'Body Art' empieza con una pareja, Lauren y Rey, llevando a cabo las típicas cosas que se hacen durante el desayuno. Y DeLillo nos lo cuenta de manera impresionante y minuciosa, casi de forma minimalista. Mientras ellos siguen con la parafernalia de cada mañana, mantienen una conversación en la que se deja entrever un misterio. Aunque más que conversación parece que cada uno esté pensando en sus asuntos, sin apenas atender al otro. Tras esta escena, nos enteramos de un hecho decisivo para la vida de Lauren. Posteriormente le sucederá algo que volverá a trastocar su mundo, y que te deja con la mosca detrás de la oreja sobre lo que realmente está sucediendo. Y precisamente aquí es donde más floja me parece la historia.

Pero esto no es óbice para no leer esta novela, llena de instantes y de significados brillantes. DeLillo siempre tiene algo que contar, y por eso me parece interesante.(less)

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Apr 14, 2008 Renee rated it 3 of 5 stars

The Body Artist is an interesting rumination, but my one piece of advice is--just be sure you are in the mood for this one. It's not your typical novel, because nothing really happens, there is no plot to speak of. It will, however, make you think. Think about the nature of identity and what makes us who we are. The Body Artist is really more of a parable than a novel. The two main characters--Lauren, a "body artist" who turns her own body into nothingness, a blank sheet and an odd man who she d...more

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Apr 09, 2009 Misha rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009, literary-fiction

The opening is a lengthy and gorgeous description of a couple having breakfast. Then the story turns into a deeply weird meditation on grief, time and self. The prose is gorgeous.

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Nov 24, 2008 Jonathan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2008

A small book about grief, following a wife alone in her husband's house after his suicide. Yet she finds out she may not be alone after all as evidence builds up of another resident hiding away. I make it seem suspenseful, and it is certainly mysterious, but I always had a sense that peace and calm were being slowly strived for and attained, mirroring the grieving process. The thing I will always remember most about the novel is the opening scene of the husband and wife sharing breakfast, their...more

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Mar 27, 2008 Nate D rated it 3 of 5 stars

The first chapter of The Body Artist is a near perfect bit of prose-poetry, two people microscopically dissected through a few minutes of mundane action. Everything proceeds in a sort of hyperreal slow motion, but it flows easily, naturally, even so. From there, the book switches gears into a study of self-isolation that rivals some of the loneliest passages of H. Murakami (who, in turn, has written some of the loneliest novels I know), but even at its brisk novella length, the book never grabbe...more

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Jul 06, 2012 míol mór rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: finished, on, nov, 15, 2009, library, loan, anglo-america, new, york, postmodernism, suicide, ghosts, novella

DeLillo's first novel since Underworld, preceded in 1999 by Valparaiso, his second stageplay.
As if marking the distance from its predecessor, it is very, almost impossibly terse; to the point that I find it difficult to consider it a novel(la), and not because of its brevity.
Commentators variously describe it as "haikulike", "a tightly constructed string quartet", in an attempt to capture its spareness.

But ultimately The Body Artist has nothing to do with poetry. Although DeLillo makes it do...more

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Jan 13, 2009 Ryan rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: good lit fans

I've long been wanting to read some DeLillo, and I was fairly well impressed. I was kinda cheap and bought the shortest one. Not just because of that, but also because it claimed to deal with concepts of time, which I am pretty interested in these days. And buying the shortest one backfired because I am definitely going to have to reread it, and soon, to try to understand it better. I see though already that his writing is strong and interesting, his eye for detail and expression in the mundane...more

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Mar 27, 2013 Leo Walsh rated it 4 of 5 stars

Not sure why, but "The Body Artist" is the first DeLillo book I've read. Another thing that puzzles me is it is sold as a separate book, though, since it seems more like a short story -- maybe 10,000 words -- than a novel or novella.

But brevity is often a good thing -- a fact we often miss in the contemporary world. Just look at "Infinite Joke," or "The Game of Thrones" series... A lot of words. But to what end?

In "The Body Artist," DelLillo is sparse as he can possibly be. At times, the story...more

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Dec 19, 2012 Κατερίνα Μαλακατέ rated it 4 of 5 stars

To “The body artist” είναι ένα βιβλίο για την απώλεια, το πένθος, τον επανακαθορισμό του ατόμου μετά το θάνατο του συντρόφου, ένα βιβλίο που μόνο ένας συγγραφέας σαν τον Delillo θα μπορούσε να γράψει με τόση κλινική σαφήνεια.

Μια γυναίκα γύρω στα 35 παίρνει το πρωινό της μαζί με τον μεσήλικο συγγραφέα άντρα της, με τις ίδιες μηχανικές κινήσεις όπως πάντα, ο καθένας ξέρει τη θέση του, τι του ανήκει, τι μπορεί να δανειστεί, ως που μπορεί να φτάσει. Ύστερα αυτός πηγαίνει μια βόλτα με το αμάξι και αυ...more To “The body artist” είναι ένα βιβλίο για την απώλεια, το πένθος, τον επανακαθορισμό του ατόμου μετά το θάνατο του συντρόφου, ένα βιβλίο που μόνο ένας συγγραφέας σαν τον Delillo θα μπορούσε να γράψει με τόση κλινική σαφήνεια.

Μια γυναίκα γύρω στα 35 παίρνει το πρωινό της μαζί με τον μεσήλικο συγγραφέα άντρα της, με τις ίδιες μηχανικές κινήσεις όπως πάντα, ο καθένας ξέρει τη θέση του, τι του ανήκει, τι μπορεί να δανειστεί, ως που μπορεί να φτάσει. Ύστερα αυτός πηγαίνει μια βόλτα με το αμάξι και αυτοκτονεί. Η γυναίκα του γυρνά στο εξοχικό σπίτι που πέρασαν τον τελευταίο καιρό τη ζωή τους, απομονώνεται, προσπαθεί να συμφιλιωθεί με το άναρχο και άψυχο μικρό ανθρωπάκι που έχει μείνει μέσα της, φτιάχνει την ψευδαίσθησή του και τη στήνει εμπρός της. Μετά μετουσιώνει το κορμί της σε τέχνη, σε μια παράσταση που καταλαβαίνουν μόνο κάποιοι. Για να φτάσει μέσα από τη διάλυση στη γνώση αυτού του εαυτού που θα είναι από δω και μπρος χωρίς εκείνον.

Εκπληκτική στη σύλληψη νουβέλα, που ανθρωποποιεί όλο το λούκι του χαμού αυτού που μετρούσε περισσότερο στη ζωή∙ ο θάνατος δε φεύγει ποτέ, παραμένει σα σκιά που δεν μπορεί να αρθρώσει ούτε λέξη, ανάμεσα στις διαστάσεις και τα πιθανά σενάρια. Και τελικά η λύτρωση έρχεται μονάχα αν αδειάσεις, φτάσεις να μην είσαι αλλά φυσικά πάντα να είσαι εσύ, για να βρεθείς ξανά κοντά στην αυτογνωσία. Κι αν η επίμονη άσκηση της ανάγνωσης δεν έφερνε στο νου μου τόσο κοντινές εμπειρίες, πιθανώς το βιβλίο να το είχα ξεπετάξει. Όμως κλείνοντας την τελευταία σελίδα ήξερα πως αυτή η διαδικασία κάτι μου θυμίζει.

http://www.diavazontas.blogspot.gr/20...(less)

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May 02, 2012 Lynn rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Lynn by: Tim Griffin

Shelves: fiction-contemporary

My college professor’s head would have exploded reading Don DeLillo’s latest work The Body Artist (2001). Choppy, confusing, drawn out, and occasionally droll, my professor’s “guide to writing fiction” her rules; “Get to the point, just say it, explain it, and move on. Write fully and clearly. Make your reader understand where you are leading them.” DeLillo does none of this. He takes the canon of technical writing and puts it on its postmodern head: “I want to say something, but what?” This is...more

My college professor’s head would have exploded reading Don DeLillo’s latest work The Body Artist (2001). Choppy, confusing, drawn out, and occasionally droll, my professor’s “guide to writing fiction” her rules; “Get to the point, just say it, explain it, and move on. Write fully and clearly. Make your reader understand where you are leading them.” DeLillo does none of this. He takes the canon of technical writing and puts it on its postmodern head: “I want to say something, but what?” This is a poignant line that moves beyond writing as a craft and speaks to the larger conditions of contemporary life.

These conditions are mirrored by the stylistic techniques employed by the author. A sideways handling- hyperrealistic, spoken in a everyday vernacular by people who know each other or themselves intimately. Missing dialogue quotations, erratic grammar, odd paragraph structuring, repetitious fixations, he flattens out and broadens what a word can do and in that process has redefined how words can live and function on a page. He assumes, as does contemporary society, that the facts are in the delivery. It is also indicative of the urban dweller subconscious. Living in such close quarters to each other, not being able to fence off the affluential from the undesirable, that one would inevitably effect the other. The delivery than become personal experiences. Urban populations as the author said in an interview with Paris Review in 1993 “react to the deteriorating situation around them” that they “need to invent beauty, search out some restoring force. A writer may describe the ugliness and pain in graphic terms but he can also try to find a dignity and significance in ruined parts of the city, and the people he sees there.” With the advent of the internet and the immense usage of it one could make the argument that ‘the urban population’ has become more affluent as a life style and that the geographical location as a fixed point is a diminishing factor as the world, like DeLillo’s words, becomes flatten and the common vernacular spreads.

Widely considered one of the central figures in literature today, DeLillo’s ability to find significance in the ruins has given purpose to his fictional works. A heroic endeavor knowing that “a novel that tries to equal to the complexities and excesses of the culture” might ultimately fail. Although, DeLillo, the author of seventeen novels, endless stacks of essays and short fictions, and a half dozen plays, has proven the risk is worth the bounty. His break out novel White Noise (1985) won him accolade and prestige but subsequent works have made him the target of the many slings and arrows from the army of critics. Much ink has been spilled on the author’s manners, methods, and suspect leanings. Be it from George Will, from the Washington Post, who claimed DeLillo’s study of Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra “was an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship” or when Bruce Bawer, from The New Criterion, accused DeLillo of implying “in one novel after another, to be a marauding, murderous maniac--and therefore a human-- than to sit still for America as it is, with its air-conditioners, synthetic fabrics, and credit cards.” As Peter Knight so eloquently posed in the Cambridge University Press, “The basic debate that has fascinated many readers of DeLillo is whether his writing is able to maintain a critical distance from the culture he describes. Put simply, is his writing a symptom, a diagnosis, or an endorsement of the condition of postmodernity?”

In The Body Artist one could say is an endorsement. In society it is the artist, for the most part, expected to suffer on our collective behalf. It is within their job description as society sees it; the starving artist; the estranged poet; the recluse writer; the tormented film maker; so on and so on. It is here that DeLillo ability to offer no comforts excepts those that lurk in the structures of language that bring this novel together to make it feel authentic but not soothing. Life can be an awful business.

A slim sparse book which in many ways is more prose than novel, DeLillo is able to descend with his reader into the abyss of self searching. In an intimate unorthodox way he painfully draws out what people do when they are alone--stuck almost, in the fog of their in their own mind. The concept of being alone here is treated as a byproduct of our now life-styled lives. Complicated, uncomfortable, mundane and harried. Lauren Hartke, the body artist, and protagonists of the novel, fills this role so completely performing for her audience the mental acrobats that is the “terror of another ordinary day.” She, akin to a method actor searches her own personal experiences to find the emotional core knowing and in disregard to the destruction it may inevitably cause.

A sense of emptiness that pervades the novel. The lost and bereavement of her newly wedded husband Rey Robles, a celebrated film maker who commits suicide within moments of him being introduced, the old empty house that was theirs but is hardly theirs, the time spent dwelling on the shopping list, the breakfast preparations, who owns what in the relationship, what does his and hers mean? “Meals, task, errands” these become the things that are important after a lost. They become the order in which people put back together this day and the next. Lauren spends her time- this painful excess of time-- seeking meaning so thin should she find it she could not be certain she would understand it.

Through the daily tasks, through the seeking, and the internal dialogue Lauren’s practice becomes more intense. A way to purify her purpose. To concentrate on the many levels of perceptions. As she remains in this secluded home that is not hers, as she keeps track of time that is not alive, as she creates manifestations of lost, she conjures up images of Marina Abramovic or Valie Export in that the artist’s body becomes a site, ‘a social body’ a place where corporeal action becomes ritual for the societal questioning; the “halfway between gesture and thought” or the as if “to do this or that, as if.” She , as her belated husband once remarked embodies “the dictator and the oppressed” but never does she as the artist abandon the commitment to the body. Painful, but only in the way it is supposed to be.

You can’t always describe it, but you know it when you see it, a non-technique-based art, it’s the unlearning of the academic, my professor would have bloody the paper but loved the story. I imagine many years from now moments of it will flood back in the way anything does that is slightly off, yet utterly honest, and completing unsettling. Like a Butoh dance DeLillo mechanics of writing are backwards, unconventional, but it conveys a fragile transformative spark. This novel was painful, but in the way it was supposed to be.(less)

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Jul 02, 2011 Danny rated it 5 of 5 stars

The Body Artist by Don Delillo. I find every sentence in the novel to be a phrase of poetry. But not poetry like Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray- not aesthetic poetry- just blunt poetry describing every fine detail of the surrounding environment. The first few pages are confusing. You sit there just wondering why did it start like this? what is going on? There is this stillness to the story that made me feel uncomfortable so I stopped reading it and came back to it a few weeks after.

I don't want to sa...more

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May 23, 2011 Rachel rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary-fiction

I first encountered The Body Artist as a dance performance in San Francisco. In a small, black box theater, two dancers repeated the same moves over and over, falling and catching each other, carrying each other, intimately lying nose-to-nose. The choreographer's synopsis of the story was something like, "a woman's husband dies and a strange visitor shows up at her door, claiming to be her husband." I would say this was a loose interpretation of what DeLillo actually wrote, although I could see...more I first encountered The Body Artist as a dance performance in San Francisco. In a small, black box theater, two dancers repeated the same moves over and over, falling and catching each other, carrying each other, intimately lying nose-to-nose. The choreographer's synopsis of the story was something like, "a woman's husband dies and a strange visitor shows up at her door, claiming to be her husband." I would say this was a loose interpretation of what DeLillo actually wrote, although I could see why this choreographer was so inspired to turn this story into a duet, and he was at least somewhat successful in capturing the tone of the story with its minimalism, darkness, and intimacy.

The first chapter was an exquisitely choreographed breakfast scene, each movement of the couple rendered in minute detail, the intimacy of their relationship emerging as a result. DeLillo plays with voice, although the majority of the novel comes from Lauren's perspective. Rey, the husband, remains opaque (naturally, since he's dead for the majority of the story--and the paranormal presence with Rey's voice that haunts Lauren does little to shed light on Rey's motivations). Some bits of the narrative are provided through newspaper reports. Others are given in second person, as if the reader has become Lauren, talking to herself, narrating her own life. Most of the time, though, DeLillo narrates Lauren as in a cropped shot. I felt like I was virutally on top of her for the majority of the text. This close watching of the mundane is mirrored in Lauren's obsession with watching live video feed of an empty highway in Kotka, Finland. The use of these voices is unsettling, both intimate and desolate.

Although I have loved reading DeLillo in the past, this is my favorite work of his because it is so distilled and personal. The disruption of the banal, which was the toxic cloud overtaking a community in White Noise has become a ghostly presence in a decrepit rental home. The off-kilter, unsettling narrative breaks achieved through Lenny Bruce quotations in Underworld are now obtained in subtle narrative shifts from third to second person. While DeLillo has certainly written extraordinarily effective lines in the past, none have danced off the page so gracefully as in The Body Artist. Although the dancers I saw were able to capture the dark dislocations of the story, they weren't ultimately able to render them as beautiful, and it's a first for me to say that the dance wasn't quite as good as the book. (less)

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May 06, 2011 Helena1404 rated it 4 of 5 stars

I think this book can be summed up in this quote:
"Maybe there are times when we slide into another reality but can't remember it, can't concede the truth of it because this would be too devastating to absorb," p 120.

The Body Artist is a really short novel, about 130 pages long - which means that you can read in a couple hours. It is mainly told in third person, describing the life directly before (but mainly after) the suicide of Lauren's husband Rey. What follows is a disconnected depiction of...more

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Apr 24, 2011 Lorraine rated it 2 of 5 stars

The disclaimer is that I haven't read any of Don Delilio's stuff except for this. Everyone tells me Underworld is very good, and that White Noise is slightly worse, but this means nothing to me because I haven't read either. I did, however (or maybe I was... dreaming) read a sentence by Don Delilio I think, when I randomly picked up one of his books, and the sentence was "I will drink my tea and die." And I thought, that guy is a good writer. So it has come to be that I now own The Body Artist,...more The disclaimer is that I haven't read any of Don Delilio's stuff except for this. Everyone tells me Underworld is very good, and that White Noise is slightly worse, but this means nothing to me because I haven't read either. I did, however (or maybe I was... dreaming) read a sentence by Don Delilio I think, when I randomly picked up one of his books, and the sentence was "I will drink my tea and die." And I thought, that guy is a good writer. So it has come to be that I now own The Body Artist, bought at a Borders Sale for S$2. The review will not be good. I am rethinking my evaluation. Yes, much of it has to do with death and art. But it wore me out. I don't know. I wasn't expecting this. I know it has something to do with absence, identity, being and the body. The bare facts of existence, etc. I suppose I could figure it out if I thought about it, but I can't be bothered to, and to me, this is always a bad sign. The figure, again, of some nameless and blameless, incoherent thing blabbering its fragmented words. Why do we always come to this? It would be ok if it were a cry for help, as some things are. But I didn't sense the sincerity in this. It's as though he wanted to do some sort of investigation of the relationship of the body to the self, the self to the other, and how this figures (literally) in the structure of our relationship (romantic?) with others. And this is the sort of novel one would write. It reminds me a bit of Winterson's Written in the Body in that way. I don't care about your fancy thought experiments. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy -- especially when you try to make THAT point (that there is something more, by portraying less) philosophically! Janet Frame's Scented Gardens for the Blind: another incoherent figure. Yeah, I know we all are, but surely... things can be more subtle? Getting bored is not good. By way of 'plot' I suppose I feel obliged to tell you guys it's about 'the body artist' and that the notion of body is important, especially in relation to the ideas of art and existence. I don't feel like writing about it per se though, because it all bores me. Wallace mentioned anhedonia in Infinite Jest and I think that's just it. This strikes me as too clever. I want to shake Delilio, to ask, what do you REALLY want to say, surely that can't be all, surely you can't be repeating, and DON'T give me bollocks about repetition and truth. There's a limit, alright. Repeating. Repeating goes on in here, structurally and literally in the text. That is to say, events in the text repeat, mirror one another, and then characters echo one another, and the whole text is ostensibly haunted. I say ostensibly, because honestly, you needn't fetishise your ghosts. Joyce didn't. Damnit, most good writers don't. What is missing, to me, in here, is that nebulous thing we call inspiration. Actually, more than that, because I love Beckett, and he wrote all about expiration, NOT inspiration. What is missing here is, if I can say it without sounding corny, the human element. Not radical nothingness. You cannot think nothing because thinking makes nothing something -- and no thing and nothing will come of nothing -- but here it's just wooden furniture in an office. I think his publisher was just saying, come out with something clever, and make sure you have 'evolved' your style, and that the reviewers would say something poetic about it. (less)

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Jan 30, 2011 Alex Telander rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-read-in-2002

The Body Artist cannot really be called a novel (and barely a novella) with a total of 126 pages and a font size of fifteen or more, but for its shortness I’m glad. “She rubbed in the cream to remove wastepapery skin in flakes and scales and little rolling boluses that she like to hold between her fingers and imagine, unmorbidly, at the cell death of something inside her.”

The book is full of these exhortations on life and humanity that serve more to annoy and aggravate than to enlighten and impr...more

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Jan 12, 2011 Kristoff Tilkin rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Don DeLillo is tot nader order onze favoriete chroniqueur van de uitwassen in de Noord-Amerikaanse samenleving. Sinds zijn debuut 'Americana' uit 1972 registreert de mediaschuwe King of New York in zijn romans duistere fenomenen als samenzweringen, verregaande obsessies met beeldcultuur of welig tierende paranoia. Daarmee behoren 'Witte ruis', 'Weegschaal' en het magnum opus 'Onderwereld' ook meteen tot het beste wat het literaire pretpark van Uncle Sam de afgelopen twintig jaar te bieden had. A...more Don DeLillo is tot nader order onze favoriete chroniqueur van de uitwassen in de Noord-Amerikaanse samenleving. Sinds zijn debuut 'Americana' uit 1972 registreert de mediaschuwe King of New York in zijn romans duistere fenomenen als samenzweringen, verregaande obsessies met beeldcultuur of welig tierende paranoia. Daarmee behoren 'Witte ruis', 'Weegschaal' en het magnum opus 'Onderwereld' ook meteen tot het beste wat het literaire pretpark van Uncle Sam de afgelopen twintig jaar te bieden had. Alleen jammer dat er slechts met mondjesmaat Nederlandse vertalingen van zijn werk verschijnen: naast bovengenoemde romans is enkel het vorig jaar verschenen 'Jachthond' uit 1978 verkrijgbaar.

'Onderwereld' was in alle opzichten een monument: een ruim achthonderd pagina's lange symfonie, een eigentijdse pendant van 'U.S.A.', de grootse trilogie waarmee John Dos Passos tijdens de jaren dertig van de vorige eeuw het failliet van de American Dream beschreef, en een klankbord voor het onderhuidse rumoer van een samenleving die er veertig jaar Koude Oorlog en een evenredig aantal trauma's op nahoudt. De opvolger 'Lichaamskunst' (Anthos/Manteau) is ietwat bescheidener van opzet: het telt amper honderdzesendertig pagina's, heeft een eenduidige plot en sprankelt van de zuinigheid qua woordkeuze.

Na de zelfmoord van haar echtgenoot, de filmregisseur Rey Robles, zoekt lichaamskunstenaar Lauren Hartke evenwicht op de smeulende puinhopen van haar leven. Ze houdt zich in het huurhuis dat ze met Rey betrok onledig met alledaagsheden, tot ze een achterlijke indringer in huis betrapt. Wanneer die flarden van conversaties die ze met Rey voerde tot in de fijnste details blijkt te kunnen reciteren, raakt Lauren gefascineerd door het tijdsvacuüm waarin de man leeft: 'Hij kan niets doen om zich tijd voor te stellen als iets met een geruststellend verloop, voorbijgaand, stromend, plaatsvindend ? de wereld vindt plaats, dat moet, dat voelen we ? met namen en data en verschillen.' Het emotionele littekenweefsel dat zich heeft gevormd wordt door haar confrontatie met het vleesgeworden verleden dan ook bruusk opengescheurd, tot de ervaring met de vreemde haar de drive levert om zichzelf te recycleren: 'In de spiegel wilde ze de klassieke onzichtbare persoon zien, iemand door wie je geleerd hebt heen te kijken, met niets vertrouwds meer, een griezel in de avondruis van elk openbaar toilet.'

DeLillo toont zich in 'Lichaamskunst' opnieuw een groot stilist: het vraagt behoorlijk wat métier om razende gedachten, slaapdronken gebazel en fracties van een seconde waarin het verstand op standby geplaatst wordt leven in te blazen, maar de schrijver slaagt daar met glans in: 'Dingen die ze zag leken twijfelachtig ? niet twijfelachtig maar voortdurend veranderend, in de greep van de metamorfose, iets wat ook anders is, maar wat, en wat.' Zo is er de briljante ontbijtscène in het eerste hoofdstuk, waarin DeLillo knipoogt naar zijn wat halfslachtige, maar bij momenten trefzekere roman 'Players'. De lezer wordt bovendien moeiteloos meegezogen in Laurens moeizame proces van emotionele genezing: 'Het gaat over wie we zijn wanneer we niet repeteren wie we zijn.' I think you hear me knockin' and I think I'm comin' in: DeLillo heeft met 'Lichaamskunst' een meesterlijke roman over de kunst van het verdwijnen geschreven.(less)

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Dec 12, 2010 Steve rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novella

Awful. Pretentious free-indirect/Joyce's Ulysses-stream garbage. A 30,000 word prose poem that sucks. I have noticed a pretentiousness in DeLillo's interviews--the big meaningless generalizations about American culture (which are really just semantic misunderstandings at bottom) [as if the job of a novelist is to parse a culture], the sacredness of writing and the writer, a kind of nonconformism which is just dressed up conformism, and so on. More pretentious than DeLillo, however, is the book j...more Awful. Pretentious free-indirect/Joyce's Ulysses-stream garbage. A 30,000 word prose poem that sucks. I have noticed a pretentiousness in DeLillo's interviews--the big meaningless generalizations about American culture (which are really just semantic misunderstandings at bottom) [as if the job of a novelist is to parse a culture], the sacredness of writing and the writer, a kind of nonconformism which is just dressed up conformism, and so on. More pretentious than DeLillo, however, is the book jacket for this novella (it's not a novel, no matter what it says on the jacket):

"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."

How can language be "defiantly" American? Who doesn't want you to speak an American idiom? And because something is "American" is it good? Pretentious. Tell me a story, old man; tell me a bourgeois story with a beginning, middle and end. This should have been a 5,000 word short story; but instead he uses this little frame of a story to drop in 20,000 words of musings (NONE of which are profound, not a single one).

You don't even need to read the book; just read page 100: she thinks this invalid who appears in her house lives outside of time (and is eternal, therefore unchanging, but, er...) or he's just an invalid. He can imitate her dead husband so well blahblah. There's so much strangeness in here that DeLillo doesn't even address--why does she put the washcloth on her face just after it was on the invalid's genitalia? Why?

Garbage.(less)

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Nov 24, 2010 Ashley rated it 1 of 5 stars

Okay, so I tried really hard to look past the fact that I found this book to be a waste of words in almost every relevant literary category I can think of, except for maybe the mechanics.

As for the rest of it, if I was capable of mushroom stamping DeLillo I would have just to make the experience mildly interesting. The thing that strikes me is that, post chapter 1, the entire book is about Lauren's post-Rey experience, yet the setup of the first chapter leads me to believe that they had the most...more Okay, so I tried really hard to look past the fact that I found this book to be a waste of words in almost every relevant literary category I can think of, except for maybe the mechanics.

As for the rest of it, if I was capable of mushroom stamping DeLillo I would have just to make the experience mildly interesting. The thing that strikes me is that, post chapter 1, the entire book is about Lauren's post-Rey experience, yet the setup of the first chapter leads me to believe that they had the most horribly mundane life ever AND they were newlyweds. Had the opening scene been morning kitchen sex over breakfast I might not have minded that she thought about the milk so much. The internal war that they seemed to be having over possession of inanimate objects like the radio led me to believe that there was a huge separation between them, I guess later explained by the fact that he was chronically suicidal.

I also might not have minded the stream of consciousness perspective had the dialogue carried some life with it. I can get on board with the fact that Lauren was maybe just a boring person with not a whole lot going on in her internal thought process (though in that case I probably wouldn't write a book about about her), but I feel like to be successful from that angle you need something to pull you out of it and remind you that you're in someone's thoughts and are supposed to lack a certain amount of understanding. That's where dialogue would have been a good medium. However, the dialogue was just as shitty as the shit for brains Lauren. It was broken and irrelevant and sometimes just flat out didn't make sense. With Mr. Tuttles that makes sense because I kind of just made him out to be a ghost that was borderline retarded, but not with her and Rey.

As far as the irrelevant details are concerned (as in Chapter 2 where she thinks about how many cars are around her and it turns into a totally ordinary number and placement and she then moves on knowing that what she'd thought was completely unimportant), I feel like he was failing to mimic Beckett. In Malloy, also a sort of stream of consciousness, Beckett is doing what DeLillo is attempting to do in many respects, except Beckett just does it better... like, WAY better. Beckett's Malloy is INTERESTING for one, and his thoughts are irratic and completely fucked up. Instead of thinking about stupid cars, Malloy counts his farts... HIS FARTS. Beckett wins. So, in other words, DeLillo takes a mode that I enjoy and turns it into a point of frustration for me... not cool, DeLillo.

Which brings me to the sponge bath... what the fuck... I felt the same way I feel every time I try to read Lolita, like I'm watching someone do something wrong and I should try to stop it. I felt like she was jerking off a child. All the while she's thinking about her dead husband. The whole thing was just uncomfortable. I kept thinking she'd take off her cloths and get in with him, which would have at least meant something significant happened.

I will say that I enjoyed the article written about her at the end, only because I felt more comfortable with the perspective of the prying eye of a journalist. I was really happy to be out of Lauren's head. I did feel, however, that the article wrapped up the book a little too neatly for my taste. Everything kinda seemed to come together too perfectly considering the majority of the book.

I won't say favorite or least favorite lines, but memorable in either a positive or negative way:

"She scraped her upper teeth over her tongue to rid her system of the complicated sense memory of someone else's hair." - this just grossed me out

"In the first days back she got out of the car once and nearly collapsed - not the major breakdown of every significant function but a small helpless sinking toward the ground, a kind of forgetting how to stand." - I feel like this is one of the most real moments in the book. This gave me a sense of complete helplessness and dread, like losing someone is so much more that a major breakdown, like a major breakdown is too much, and the helpless sinking is all the body can hope to accomplish.

"Shut up. That you somehow but never mind. When the lease ends. Or something else completely." - This is one of those "I want to punch someone" moments.

"Many things are interesting, fool, but nowhere near true." - I like this. Period.(less)

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Sep 17, 2010 Chanel11 rated it 3 of 5 stars

I really am not quite sure where to begin on this one. So I will just start randomly, perhaps a little disjointed, like the language in the book.

Some love the opening scene, some don't - I am a 'don't'. The choppy and incomplete dialogue drove me nuts, both Lauren and her husband Rey sounded the same to me with their nonsense-English and the frustrating way in which they ate breakfast, constantly stopping sentences halfway to pick them up again and then discard them again or getting up and sitt...more I really am not quite sure where to begin on this one. So I will just start randomly, perhaps a little disjointed, like the language in the book.

Some love the opening scene, some don't - I am a 'don't'. The choppy and incomplete dialogue drove me nuts, both Lauren and her husband Rey sounded the same to me with their nonsense-English and the frustrating way in which they ate breakfast, constantly stopping sentences halfway to pick them up again and then discard them again or getting up and sitting down and getting up and doing things over and over as if they had Alzheimer's.
And then Lauren's inability to stop talking about the stench of soy milk (don't drink it then!) and her obsession with a foreign hair found in her mouth, omg the hair! - get over it (although the actual hair itself has a reason). In the end she lets it fall to floor which I did not find believable, if the hair caused you that much disgust you would flush it or bin it.
The opening scene also spent a lot of time telling the author what object was his and which was hers - the toast is his, the weather is hers, the cup is his the newspaper is hers - who cares! I almost put the book down, but since it was so short I thought I'd push through.

Sometimes the writing is simply amazing at describing moments hard to define with words, for instance - She woke early every morning and this was the worst time, the first murderous instant of lying in bed and remembering and knowing in the flow of the same breath what it was. Page 36.

And then the rest of the time it is Yoda-talk - Employees must wash hands before leaving toilet - and -
I want to say something but what.
About the house. This is what it is, something I meant to tell you.
All of the characters speak in this choppy, unfinished language that I find is just not realistic of spoken dialogue between two people, especially two people who don't live together or know each other well. It drove me nuts.

The story itself is probably more about the internal depth one feels when you lose someone you love. I wouldn't have minded reading only about her thoughts and struggle with this, but when the 'parrot-man' character came along it just made the book go nowhere and then finish, leaving you feeling as though you filled up your car but never left the servo.

The only reason I enjoyed this book was due to a couple of lucid sentences that I either resonated with or simply appreciated their ability to articulate something I couldn't. I'll leave you with two more of my favourites.

He stood shaking the container. He shook it longer than he had to because he wasn' paying attention, she thought, and because it was satisfying in some dumb and blameless way, for its own childlike sake, for the bounce and slosh and cardboard orange aroma. Page 10.

My husband does this - when I read this I was nodding my head enthusiastically.

She sat there and finished her tea and thought of what she thought of, memory traces and flary images and a friend she missed and all the shadow dappled stuff of an unavoidable moment on a normal moment going crazy in ways so humanly routine you can't even stop and take note except for the Ajax she needs to buy and the birds behind her, rattling the metal frame of the feeder. Page 25.
(less)

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Sep 13, 2010 Dana added it

SPOILERS

My roommate doesn't meditate. I know because I read him a sentence about meditating out of this book:

"sat cross-legged, back straight, breathing dementedly. She blew through her nostrils and made echoey sounds in her throat, visualizing her body lifting and spinning, a rotation with every breath."

I meditate, but I have never visualized myself spinning. The spin cycle. The salad spinner.

She checks the time, she pirouettes.

There is a tape recorder. The tape recorder is of some significance...more

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Sep 13, 2010 Jafar rated it 4 of 5 stars

Aside from thoroughly enjoying DeLillo’s prose – it’s been many years since I read White Noise – what else did I get from this book? Not really sure. This is not an easy book to decipher. The story is about a woman whose husband has just committed suicide. She finds a strange young man hidden in their rental house. He’s probably – but you can’t be sure – a retarded person on the run from a mental institution with uncanny abilities to memorize speech and impersonate others. Lauren, the grieving w...more

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Aug 20, 2010 Colin Miller rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: cant-remember-well-enough-to-review, short-stories-novellas

I’ve been doing a string of ‘books I can’t remember well enough to properly review’ updates, but for Don DeLillo’s novella, The Body Artist, I can remember next to nothing, so I’m going to have to jog my memory a little.

The Body Artist is one of DeLillo’s short, style-over-plot reads (which I may like less thanks to the disappointing Point Omega) and according to the jacket, it’s about a young performance artist, Lauren Hartke, grieving over the death of her much older husband. Now that I’ve be...more

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Jul 14, 2010 Scott Swenson rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010

Well, I hadn't ever read a Don DeLillo novel, and I was told he is a must read author. The Body Artist was short so I thought it would be a good place to start. I liked the way that DeLillo fits his words together, they are beautiful pros for sure. The subject and way that this particular novel is written wasn't at all what I was expecting. The sparseness of the the plot and the unreliable narrative do a great job of capturing the tone of each scene, but it does create a barrier for a casual rea...more

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Jan 06, 2010 Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly rated it 4 of 5 stars

Rey and Laura, husband and wife. They rented a big, rambling, isolated house near the sea. Laura is Rey's 3rd wife.

One day, Rey went to his first wife's house. Alone, he sat on a chair there and blew his brains out with a gun.

Laura, by herself now, chooses to still live in the rented house by the sea and wait till the lease expires. One day, she discovered a retarded man in one of the rooms of that big house. He can't communicate but somehow apparently had observed Laura and Rey secretly before...more Rey and Laura, husband and wife. They rented a big, rambling, isolated house near the sea. Laura is Rey's 3rd wife.

One day, Rey went to his first wife's house. Alone, he sat on a chair there and blew his brains out with a gun.

Laura, by herself now, chooses to still live in the rented house by the sea and wait till the lease expires. One day, she discovered a retarded man in one of the rooms of that big house. He can't communicate but somehow apparently had observed Laura and Rey secretly before Rey killed himself, remembers what they said alone and to each other, and could speak as "Rey" [repeating what he had heard Rey said:] and sometimes he would speak as "Laura". Sometimes he would speak alternately, as if Laura and Rey are talking to each other, repeating a conversation they have had when Rey was still alive.

It turned out later that the guy was a relative of the house owner who was sent to a mental institution before Rey and Laura rented the house. But he escaped the institution and managed to go back to the house by himself. Laura felt some bond with this retard who sometimes sound like Rey but he was later returned to the mental institution.

Laura is a body artist. She uses the body to express her art. Her body and other people's bodies. After the lease expired, she leaves. But she was lonely so she returned to the house. Alone. And still lonely.

The end.

Simple story. So why is this in the "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die'? Because of what Don DeLillo did with this simple story, the things he did in between the chain of events. Have you ever dropped a paperclip on the floor before? I bet you've done so countless times. If you were to write about such an incident, about this papaerclip dropping on the floor, how would you do it? In the first place, would you ever find it worthwhile to write about a paperclip dropping on the floor?

Laura, alone in the house after Rey died, dropped a paperclip on the floor and this was how this virtuoso, Don DeLillo, put it into words:

"You stand at the table shuffling papers and you drop something. Only you don't know it. It takes a second or two before you know it and even then you know it only as a formless distortion of the teeming space around your body. But once you know you've dropped something, you hear it hit the floor, belatedly. The sound makes its way through an immense web of distances. You hear the thing fall and know what it is at the same time, more or less, and it's a paperclip. You know this from the sound it makes when it hits the floor and from the retrieved memory of the drop itself, the thing falling from your hand or slipping off the edge of the page to which it was clipped. It slipped off the edge of the page. Now that you know you dropped it, you remember how it happened, or half remember, or sort of see it maybe, or something else. The paperclip hits the floor with an end-to-end bounce, faint and weightless, a sound for which there is no imitative word, the sound of a paperclip falling, but when you bend to pick it up, it isn't there."

This, for just a mundane event. Of a paperclip dropping on the floor. What a mastery!(less)

2 likes · like · see review

May 05, 2012 Mersini rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: social-realism, transgressive-fiction, owned-books

Short but strange. I'm not entirely sure what to make of this book. On the one hand, it was written in an interesting way, mimicking patterns of thought, sometimes even stopping in mid sentence, which was a fascinating, not to mention different, though sometimes irritating, technique to read. Most of the time it was mindlessly repetitive, and while it conveyed a need for the main character to get close to her dead husband again, it was frustrating because she said it, but it went nowhere.

There w...more

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About Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo is an American author best known for his novels, which paint detailed portraits of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He currently lives outside of New York City.

Among the most influential American writers of the past decades, DeLillo has received, among author awards, a National Book Award (White Noise, 1985), a PEN/Faulkner Award (Mao II, 1991), and an American...more

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Quotes from The Body Artist

“At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn't see it the way she used to, as soul extension, dumb guttural wonder, a thing that lived outside language in the oldest part of her.” — 11 people liked it

“He said, "The word for moonlight is moonlight.” — 9 people liked it

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