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Jul 10, 2010

karen rated it:

seriously, why does everyone suck this book's dick so much?

this book was recommended to me by an ex (who also recommended zuleika dobson and the joke, so he had a good track record until then) who knew how much i liked infinite jest so he thought i would like this one. and if i only liked infinite jest because it was a long book written by a white male, then i suppose i would have liked this book. but i didn't, so it must be something else i'm drawn to in the wallace.

i r More...

54 comments like (50 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Ethan rated it:

i've only put down three books in my entire life.

the first was Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," which i absolutely loved but got terribly sick of after about 700 pages of the same goddamn philosophy being crammed down my throat. (which sounds like its awful, but i really did adore those first two thirds).

the second was a speed reading book. it wasn't a very quick read, and i got bored.

the third is now Don DeLillo's Underworld, supposedly one of the gr More...

31 comments like (32 people liked it)

Oct 15, 2009

Paul rated it:

THE PILGRIM 'S HEART IS LIGHT AT THE COMMENCEMENT OF HIS JOURNEY

So I will strap on my backpack and don sturdy walking boots, an oxygen tank might be useful, and a supply of plasters and animal pelts - and then I will begin to scale the North Face of Modern American Literature. Let's see how far I get before I fall off one of its jagged cliffs or collapse choking with one of Mr DeLillo's sentences wrapped around my neck.

BUT DISCOURAGEMENTS ARISE UNBIDDEN

Update More...

40 comments like (36 people liked it)

Dec 27, 2011

Noce rated it:

Underwear: l’abbigliamento intimo dell’America.

Guardando Facebook, mi sono resa conto che il mio paese di mare (specifico di mare, perché di solito sto in un paesone di montagna, così quelli che sanno chi sono non vengono sotto casa a lanciarmi le uova marce) limita le scelte della gente. O la gente limita il paese, bah, chi lo sa!

Insomma: curiosando nei profili degli amici degli amici ( dove “degli amici” non è una ripetizione, è proprio che ficco il naso nelle cose dei ter More...

0 comments like (11 people liked it)

Aug 06, 2011

Chris rated it:

Don DeLillo is a first-rate modern writer: his clipped and adamantine use of words, his compacted sentences and digitalized detail, all come together to tell his stories in a taut and invigorating manner—and he can dissect the quirks and pathologies that are running through our culture, probe the leavenings that have adumbrated modern societies racing towards the western horizon, with impressive acumen. However, I am not convinced that he is a first-rate characterizer, and this aspect of his wri More...

15 comments like (11 people liked it)

Mar 29, 2009

Joseph rated it:

An excellent example of the critical consensus being just plain wrong. Underworld is bloated, confused, and turgid - yet critics who should have known better drowned it in praise. I think this is due to a number of factors.

One, pedigree: DeLillo is a critical darling, deservedly so. Two, Heft: just like in movies, critics assume size equals importance, and thus the longer it takes to get through something, the more that something must have to say. It's 854 pages, 600 of which co More...

7 comments like (11 people liked it)

Jan 02, 2008

Becca rated it:

I felt like this was one of those books where you kind of start getting drunk on the words and then you begin to think everything is super deep and has about 100 meanings and everything is interconnected. Then you start reading every sentence about 5 times and get lost in a daydream about how everything is related to waste, nuclear energy, more waste, and nuns.

When you finish the book you feel like you've gone on a journey but it's hard to talk about it and your not really sure exac More...

2 comments like (18 people liked it)

Jul 20, 2008

Matt rated it:

The central metaphor in Underworld, as I saw it, revolves around trash. One of the main characters, Nick Shay, works for a waste-disposal company. No matter how many different recycling bins his family divides their waste into (seven and counting), it cannot all be reclaimed. The trash builds up – and what holds true for the physical also holds true for the personal and the historical. No matter how we might try to reprocess, recast,or ignore our history/memory, our past accumulates, and the More...

0 comments like (12 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Lauren rated it:

People married, were born, and died in the time it took me to read this book. A kid sitting next to me on a plane commented "that's the fattest book I've ever seen. What's it about?" I told him "I have no idea--I'm only 580 pages into it." Having finished I still don't know what it was about but reading it was an extraordinary experience. The novella that introduces the book is perfect and complete in itself. What follows is discursive and ephemeral like some new kind of musi More...

3 comments like (22 people liked it)

Mar 30, 2009

Saxon rated it:

Following a series of characters all loosely connected, DeLillo attempts to encompass and explore the entirety of modern(post?) America from the outer boroughs of NYC to the suburbs of Phoenix over a span of five decades. Beginning at a baseball game in 1951 at the events that took place there and elsewhere in the world that day, Underworld embarks on an exhaustive depiction of events and facets that characterize America (baseball, suburbs, Cuban Missle Crisis, etc) and its effect on the America More...

3 comments like (4 people liked it)

Oct 16, 2007

Daniel rated it:

The prologue is 60 of the best pages of fiction written by an American since "Invisible Man." It's a god damned marvel of point-of-view, movement and action. J. Edgar Hoover is there, sitting in Ebbetts Field with Jackie Gleason, and this game sets off the rest of the nearly 900 pages that moves backwards, from 2000 to 1950. It's the story of the Cold War in America, and in typical DeLillo fashion, I want to take every third sentence and screen print it on a t-shirt. The prose is beaut More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Apr 06, 2008

Hamish rated it:

I totally fail to see what makes Don DeLillo such a great writer and why people are all over this novel. It's that obnoxious Pynchon/Wallace type of post-modern fiction where all the emphasis is placed on novelty and not enough on the fundamentals of good writing. The prose is mediocre, the dialogue is wooden and the characterization is TERRIBLE. 800 effing pages and I still have no clue who any of these characters are, none of them have even the slightest sense of realness. But the plots in More...

2 comments like (5 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

joyce rated it:

Underworld, at 200-some pages in, I'm gonna have to get all Robert Plant and put you down for a little while. Not because I can't quit you, but because a) I'm not into baseball, b) the Cold War has no visceral appeal to me and c) neither does postmodernity. Seems to me a far bigger punch could have been delivered in far fewer pages, despite the fact that your prose and dialogue are lovely and I would give a limb to be able to write half that well. So I'm sorry, Underworld. We can still be fr More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 22, 2010

Isaiah rated it:

I tried so hard. But I just can't. Fucking. Do it.

I submit this final plea to the goodreads universe. Give me a reason to keep going, or on page 381 shall I forever lie.

54 comments like (9 people liked it)

Sep 13, 2011

Vivian rated it:

I read this a few years ago and was blown away. (I taught WHITE NOISE, but never this.) A few weeks ago, Michiko Kakutani in the TIMES declared a re-reading of UNDERWORLD to be imperative on her "bucket list" of things to do before summer flies away from us all. I decided to follow her advice. So, on a second reading, my evaluation can be summed up in the same single word that I thought of the first time: BRILLIANT. Now that I'm writing on Goodreads, I'll add: this is one of the More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 14, 2008

Mark rated it:

I found this a stunning book, a reminder of what good writing can be.
I was reading this book in September 2001, when I put it down to go on vacation in Switzerland. While on vacation, 9-11 happened. When I returned, I picked the book up again and the cover - which prominently featured a creepy, black and white picture of the World Trade Center taken from the cemetery at Trinity Church - had a new meaning for me.
It was such a wonderful, sweeping, poetic book that it's hard to en More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jul 06, 2007

Ted rated it:

A great big book about baseball, trash and the Cold War.
Underworld has an interesting structure, going backwards for the most part. The 60 page prologue is the best part of the book, brilliant prose about the Giants' triumph over the Dodgers at home at the Polo Grounds on the last day of the 1951 penant race, Bobby Thomson's Shot Heard Round the World, linking Cotter Martin, a young black boy from Harlem who jumps the gate and nabs the home run, J. Edgar Hoover, who hears about a Russian a More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Aug 01, 2007

Kait rated it:

After much consternation, I think I don't like this book very much. It was bloated and very hard to follow without delivering on the narrative greatness that its absolutely stunning prose promises.

If I were you (unless you are gaga for DeLillo and don't mind if things don't really come to a satisfying culmination), read Pafko at the Wall instead. It's the first 60 pages of this book and it is some of the best writing you will ever read. Though Underworld has a few lovely moments a More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 27, 2011

Patrick added it

Things I remember from this book:
-Honeymooners
-the baseball
-Lenny Bruce
-J. Edgar Hoover & friend
-recycling
-airport graveyard and plane ride
-stupid pretentious black paper chapters.
-That's about it.

Is that bad? Well, I did read it quite a while ago. But I don't remember enjoying it as much as Pynchon's "V," which I read at about the same time for class. It was a very dead book, sytlistically and in content. Delillo writes dead. More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 14, 2012

christa rated it:

“Underworld” was published when I was in college, a part time bookseller who touched so many books in the course of a day, shelving new fiction, shelving classics, shelving How-To manuals and graphic novels and dictionaries. “Underworld” was something else, much buzzed about, a grey image of the World Trade Center buildings bisected with a church steeple. I directed many-a customer to its spot in the store and set it into hands. That’s one of the rules of bookselling: Make the customer hold the More...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 10, 2011

Ensiform rated it:

An 817-page novel, a tome on the last half century, on the cold war and waste disposal and how lives are connected in subtle ways, told backwards for the most part. I found it hard to appreciate some passages: the characters for the most part share the same heavy-handed angst-ridden viewpoint, with little differentiation between characters’ outlooks. And certainly the novel could have been shortened a bit. But the writing is sharp, the prose sure, the descriptions poetic and the observations More...

0 comments like

Jan 14, 2009

Holly rated it:

(3.5/5) DeLillo is obviously an excellent writer, but this book was a bit too epic, too long, too many characters. Much of it would make excellent short story material, and I have to admit that it was fun when correlations fell into place (e.g. at one point the owner of the infamous baseball, Chuckie flew in the bombers that Klara ended up painting; Hoover's garbage was searched; the change minus the dollar price of the ball was thirteen, etc). I also appreciate modern writers' ability to flex More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 04, 2011

Paul rated it:

I was asked what this book is about, and I didn't have a good answer. It's about America, from the 90s back to the 50s. It's about baseball, and a baseball. It's about relationships, and how they're intertwined.

It's not an easy read, as it travels backwards and forwards in time, starting with an excellent fictionalized account of Bobby Thomson's famous home run, then jumping to the early 90s, and back. Things are revealed in the current present, then explored in more depth as the past is brought More...

0 comments like

Oct 01, 2011

Frosh rated it:

Reading so many of the negatives reviews here shocked me. To each his own, I guess. As for me, another reviewer put it perfectly:

"... this is one of the most important, most ingenious, most brilliant American novels written in the late 20th century - or ever. It's not for everyone."

I read this over a decade ago, and still recall the end, where I was, how completely floored and speechless I was. The writing is off the charts, and the story, ultimately, is more More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 13, 2011

Steve rated it:

Despite the award nominations and the praise from great contemporary authors like David Mitchell and David Foster Wallace, I didn’t go into this book knowing much about it. Pomo, writerly, and long: those were my only preconceptions. Now I can at least pretend to see what the fuss is about. The book starts with a resounding shot, as in the one “Heard Round the World” – a phenomenal account of the 1951 playoff game where the Giants took the pennant from the Dodgers thanks to Bobby Thompson’s More...

5 comments like (3 people liked it)

Aug 11, 2011

Ronald rated it:

A book of significant size that went in many directions along a rather convoluted timeline. The story begins on October 3, 1951, when a gate-crashing kid ends up with the homerun ball that decided the game between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers. That baseball resurfaces repeatedly through the rest of the book. The main story line has very little to do with baseball, but that historic baseball moment plays a pivotal role for many of the book's characters. There are many issues that surf More...

0 comments like

Jul 27, 2011

Kaleidoscopic added it

Having just finished DeLillo's epic 'Underworld' I've had to wait for a few days before even considering writing a review. Scenes from the novel have been re-playing in my mind, and characters have been popping into my consciousness, reminding themselves to me like old friends. Underworld is a book which I believe I will continue to dwell on for many months, if not years.

The novel in the main is set in the USA during the cold war, but also weaves in and out of time, and expertly links the stori More...

0 comments like

Jun 12, 2011

Tim rated it:

For starters, "Underworld" has possibly the greatest prologue ever written; this 60-page section also might be the best writing about baseball in history, and the novel isn't even about baseball. DeLillo's lyrical account of Bobby Thomson's 1951 "Shot Heard Round the World" is so stunningly good I got chills on just about every page. Including witnesses J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason, along with players, announcer Russ Hodges and the person who comes up wi More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 06, 2011

Ted rated it:

On the subject of the greatest 100 novels written in English the 20th Century, I was momentarily smug when I realized that I'd read 75 of the group compiled by the folks at Modern Library.But appreciated the misgivings of reader factions who felt that their groups, their "voices" had been ignored, shunted to the side, 'marginalized" , with the editors making inadequate efforts to broaden the Canon. But the real use of such list, I think, is to start a controversy, to get a debate More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Aug 28, 2010

Agnes rated it:

I started out really loving this book. At 827 pages, it was quite a commitment and it came at just the right time - I was looking to totally immerse myself in a story of epic proportions. While it started out that way, it didn't hold my interest quite as well as I'd hoped.

If this book is any indication, there's no questioning DeLillo's place among the great living literary legends. He is an expert manipulator of the English language and he managed to make it easy to keep track of doz More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)