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Libra

3.94 of 5 stars 3.94 · rating details · 5,941 ratings · 342 reviews

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 O...more

Hardcover, 1st, 456 pages

Published August 15th 1988 by Viking (NY) (first published 1988)

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Mar 06, 2012 Megha rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviews

DeLillo and I are friends now!!
We had started off on the wrong foot, but Libra has patched things up. I too share Paul's suspicions about Libra and White Noise having been written by the same person. Had I been handed these two books without the cover, I wouldn't have known those words had flown out of the same figurative pen.

Libra is a terrific piece of work. It has a huge cast of characters and a very complex web of events, all handled neatly and elegantly. While DeLillo's characters never rea...more

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Jun 25, 2012 mark monday rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: unstable-narratives

a work of bright and ruthless genius, the jfk assassination as recounted by some alien being from the far future. well actually, not really, not at all. well actually, at times it felt like it. is delillo less than human or more than human? the novel makes no attempt to be historically factual. actually, the facts presented are reasonable and sound. the novel is historically factual, as much as anything can be. the narrative is, of course, almost too complex to be detailed. although it is, in it...more

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Mar 24, 2011 Paul rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels

I'm told that the Don DeLillo who wrote this masterpiece is the same guy who wrote Underworld and White Noise, but as far as I'm concerned that's a plainly ridiculous theory and I'm not buying it at all and I've hired a private investigator to get to the bottom of why there are two Don DeLillos and why this one hasn't sued the other idiot for giving him a bad name. It's a mystery.

Libra is entirely great. Its vocals, its backing, the bass, the drums, man alive the drums, the harmonies - celestia...more I'm told that the Don DeLillo who wrote this masterpiece is the same guy who wrote Underworld and White Noise, but as far as I'm concerned that's a plainly ridiculous theory and I'm not buying it at all and I've hired a private investigator to get to the bottom of why there are two Don DeLillos and why this one hasn't sued the other idiot for giving him a bad name. It's a mystery.

Libra is entirely great. Its vocals, its backing, the bass, the drums, man alive the drums, the harmonies - celestial, Wilsonian is the only word. And - of course - the lyrics.

As we know it's about that JFK thing. The whole thing, all of it. So yes, this is the ur-conspiracy we are dealing with, which all the other conspiracies use as the template. Given my well-advertised detestation of all things conspiracytheoretical, you might think I would want to give Libra the widest of berths. Being a contrarian means I couldn't. I take contrary opinions to myself too. I had to pay my dues. I had to stare the god damned conspiracy in its jowles, I had to rummage in its belly and pick over what it ate last night, ugh, all its grimy details, its filthy postulates and its mind-damaging Agatha-Christie's-Murder-on-the-Orient-Express conclusion that - gasp, look away now - they ALL did it!

So I looked and stared and rummaged and poked and turned affadavits over in my hand and ran the tape found in the camera up Marilyn Monroe's backside, all of that. Ech. It's so displeasing. It does not make you a better person.

This book is like dancing with Don DeLillo, and dancing with the young President, and dancing with the handsome man who has no face, and cannot be named, while ten quaaludes are slushing through your blood system and dark hands are pouring margaritas for you at each slow waltzlike revolution of the enormous ballroom from whose windows the glitterball reveals gun barrels glinting. Through all the slow-as-the-Devonian-Age build up to even the first faint gleamings of the plot to kill John Kennedy your brain gets reformed, your aesthetic sense gets taken down and reworked with minor chords replacing all the major ones, its like a dream but a weird lovely one, one of those thousand year long dreams you wake from on some Sundays when the world can take long minutes to suck back into place... how long have I been away? Whose face is on my own head now? It takes so long to read Libra, it's such a slog through all this stuff which might have gone down like that or might on the other hand, or not, or partly.

What DD does in his gradually accelerating sarabande is to take the absolute standard CIA/Mafia/Teamsters/FBI/Cubans conspiracy and weave all the ghosts and spirits together, voices humming like a hive, all the five hundred characters, into a symphony of incidence and co-incidence wittingly but at the same time blindly moving like a giant shoal of fate towards the moving target in the limousine in Dallas on the day that Deep Purple by Nino Tempo and April Stevens was number one on the Billboard charts.

This is a fantastic novel. The imposter "Don DeLillo" could never have written it.(less)

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Jun 19, 2012 Marco Tamborrino rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

- Quando è il tuo compleanno?
- Il diciotto ottobre, - rispose Lee.
- Libra. La Bilancia.
- Sì, la Bilancia, - disse Ferrie
- L'Equilibrio, - disse Shaw.
Quelli della bilancia. Alcuni sono positivi, padroni di sé, equilibrati, con la testa a posto, saggi e rispettati da tutti. Altri invece sono negativi, cioè piuttosto instabili, impulsivi. Tanto, ma tanto, ma tanto influenzabili. Propensi a spiccare il salto pericoloso. In entrambi i casi, la chiave è l'equilibrio.

A volte finisci dei libri e non è...more

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Mar 22, 2011 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 1001-books-to-read-before-you-die, 5-star-books, read-in-2011

"Facts all come with points of view."
--Talking Heads

I became reasonably convinced that Libra is Don DeLillo's masterpiece about halfway through. After slogging through the first quarter of the novel -- you're introduced to dozens of characters, and they're all revealed to you in that customarily opaque way that any reader of DeLillo will instantly recognize, and the dialogue only takes you so far because DeLillo characters don't talk to each other so much as around each other, and it takes a wh...more "Facts all come with points of view."
--Talking Heads

I became reasonably convinced that Libra is Don DeLillo's masterpiece about halfway through. After slogging through the first quarter of the novel -- you're introduced to dozens of characters, and they're all revealed to you in that customarily opaque way that any reader of DeLillo will instantly recognize, and the dialogue only takes you so far because DeLillo characters don't talk to each other so much as around each other, and it takes a while to get on solid footing, except you never really get on solid footing with DeLillo, because he forces you to slow down, he writes prose that you can't glide over, and even when you have a handle on what's going on, he throws in a line that comes seemingly from nowhere but feels absolutely essential to your understanding of the novel, so you have little choice but to re-read the page, and so skimming is not an option, and even after all that close reading you STILL aren't given clear portraits of his characters, especially THESE characters, these men who live in the shadows, ruminating, plotting, conspiring, and instead you get to know them only through the sheer accretion of detail, which is all a roundabout way of saying that you have to stick with it because DeLillo assumes you're a patient and knowledgeable reader, and everyone knows what singular event this complicated engine with all its moving parts is chugging toward -- it all suddenly clicked into high gear.

I've been an admirer of DeLillo's for a while, but never before have I been sucked into his world so completely as I did while reading Libra. More focused than the sprawling Underworld (though it does contain that breathtaking prologue) and less zany than White Noise (indeed, this book is as airtight and humorless as they come), this fictionalized account of the Kennedy assassination is a taut, frighteningly plausible re-imagining of the event that "broke the back of the American century." And it seems to me that it's the perfect representation of everything DeLillo is about.

One such DeLillo hallmark on display is that sense of inexorability and dread hanging over every page. The plot to kill Kennedy may have started with a handful of disgruntled agents choosing to go off the reservation, but by November 22, 1963, the event seems almost preordained. And in DeLillo's version of Oswald, a treatment so sympathetic it led George Will to call it "an act of bad citizenship," you have a terrifically complex character, someone who believed he existed to shape history, but in truth, was someone shaped entirely BY history. Consider how after the assassination, Lee Oswald instantly and irreversibly becomes Lee Harvey Oswald, a name change so jarring that his mother no longer recognizes him as her son, but as a media creation forced into action by outside, alien forces.

For a while I played the game that I'm sure most readers played (especially now that it's so easy to do), firing up the Internet and comparing what's real versus what DeLillo conjured up. But at some point I stopped, because it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether Win Everett and Larry Parmenter are less real than David Ferrie, or if Lee Oswald really said and thought those things while in Minsk, or if Jack Ruby really was commissioned by the Mafia to take Oswald out. To read this book and assume you've read what DeLillo believes happened is short-selling the novel. The lasting image for me is of DeLillo's stand-in Nicholas Branch, the semi-retired CIA agent being asked to write the secret history of the assassination, alone in his study with mountains upon mountains of material, all the minutiae and trivia and arcana given to him by some unknown, god-like Curator. There is no making sense of all that documentation, but because it is documented, because we have Oswald's pubic hair and Jack Ruby's mother's dental records, and every single frame of the Zapruder film noted and memorized, it assumes there should be sense to make, that if you crawl deep enough into the rabbit hole you will emerge with a coherent narrative. And the joke is that of course you won't. Libra may come off as deadly serious, but it sells that dark joke for all it's worth.(less)

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Sep 06, 2007 Patrick Ciccone is currently reading it · review of another edition

OK, only halfway through, but I would like to point out Don DeLillo's ease with the looming unease of so much Americana (title of his first book):
"There was something about a long and low and open-space house with a lawn and a carport that made her feel spiritually afraid."

I would say the same of white Vermont clapboard houses too--though I like them.

To be cont'd.

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Jan 20, 2011 Ileana rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Normally not drawn to historical fiction, I was happily coerced into reading this fictional account of the life of Lee Harvey Oswald. While a lot of the looping facts and speculations are hard to keep track of unless you're fairly well-versed in the JFK assassination mythology, the novel itself is a faithful exploration of the intricate, often contradictory and marvelously coincidental nature of causation, the profound impact of the most subtle influence of one human on another, and the shocking...more

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Jul 13, 2012 Joseph Broadbent rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. At a question and answer session a few years ago the somewhat overrated actor Gary Oldman was asked: throughout his long and winding career, what was the most enjoyable role he has had the pleasure of playing? Oldman did not ponder, instead instantly blurting out

"Oswald. He didn’t do it, by the way."

This seven word statement was followed by cheers and a round of applause from a now rowdy, clearly conspiracy oriented, audience. Oliver Stone in the years following JFK had been a quite staunch cons...more At a question and answer session a few years ago the somewhat overrated actor Gary Oldman was asked: throughout his long and winding career, what was the most enjoyable role he has had the pleasure of playing? Oldman did not ponder, instead instantly blurting out

"Oswald. He didn’t do it, by the way."

This seven word statement was followed by cheers and a round of applause from a now rowdy, clearly conspiracy oriented, audience. Oliver Stone in the years following JFK had been a quite staunch conspiracy theorist – on one occasion forcing the late JFK Jr. to leave a dinner by consistently turning the conversation with lines like “you can’t seriously believe the Warren Commission?” – but Oldman’s quote and the subsequent response showed that the events of November 22, 1963 still have an effect on Americans as the fiftieth anniversary looms, and possibly the wrong effect.

I start with this grim reminder as I could not help but feel that DeLillo’s book must have, at some point, been considered as a Hollywood project. Published in 1988, long before Stone picked up a copy of On the Trail of the Assassins, DeLillo’s writing plays upon the reader’s images of Oswald and Ruby in such a way that its translation to screen would have been seamless. A further positive would be that DeLillo, unlike Stone, Garrison or Marrs, readily admits that his piece is fiction – a positive step in story telling which neither of the other two acknowledged about their own. It would not be hard to imagine this book with fifty pages of footnotes and placed on the ‘Alternate History’ shelves of your local bookstore. But it is this which DeLillo has done so well, he has taken an existing subject, gone down the “what if?” line, and written a wonderful story which smacks of reality in all the right places. Take the portrayal of Marguerite Oswald for example, the paranoid bizarre little lady that hired Mark Lane to “defend” Oswald in front of the Warren Commission. In Libra, Marguerite lives in her own world, consistently having to justify herself to a judge in her own fictional world. For example:

"Now, about Marina as Russian or French. It is amazing how her English improved right after Lee is killed. It is amazing how she suddenly has a cigarette in her hand, which I never witnessed when Lee was alive. I will research the picture of Marina to learn if it is true." (p. 452)

DeLillo frames her as a control freak that could control nothing and he does it beautifully. As he did with the fictional Nicholas Branch, a character which all researchers on the assassination (myself included) can relate to in one way or another. Branch, a retired employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, lives in his study which houses everything one could possibly need to write a history of the assassination and more. It would be easy to exchange the name Branch for ‘McAdams’ or, more poignantly, ‘Bugliosi’ – ignoring the conspiracy/lone-gunman element, of course.

----------------------

Closing in on 2013, the National Archives have recently released a statement saying that they will use their full mandate and release the remaining hundred-thousand documents in 2017, despite Michael Kurtz previously saying otherwise. Some still believe that these classified documents hold the key to the assassination, and there is no doubt that when they are released there will be swathes of people rushing in to look them over, as in the 1990s following the JFK Act (the one positive achieved by Stone’s motion picture). It is difficult to imagine that any document will be uncovered that will lead to headlines the next day, however it is very likely that more disgraceful incidents of ignoring CIA, FBI and Secret Service protocol will be found. Initially these came to the fore because of groundbreaking work by John Newman, an ex-Army intelligence officer turned lecturer. Newman found that the Agency had deliberately withheld information on Oswald from the FBI and Secret Service, even going as far as to move it into different files so that others within their organisation would not stumble upon and disseminate it. Newman worked tirelessly, interviewing all those he could that appeared in the files, some of whom were nonagenarians. When Newman released his book, Oswald and the CIA, in 1995 it was an extremely embarrassing episode for a lot of people. Yet, the reasons for this game of hide-the-file are still unknown. My hope is that the 2017 release will highlight concrete reasons for doing so, however one thing is almost certain – there will be no one to interview this time. You would be hard pressed to find an Agency apologist who would say that this was not the reason for the coy status – time is a healer.

Ultimately, the legacy of the assassination will be the innumerable fantasies created to understand the gaps in the official record, gaps that those responsible for the official record do not acknowledge. Every book has to make a “leap of faith” to join the first dot and the hundredth, but unlike DeLillo who readily accepts that he has written a fictional account of an alternate reality, the conspiracy theorists sell theirs as authentic works of history. This is damaging to reason and logical thinking. Is it unsurprising that many of those that believe a huge conspiracy killed Kennedy also believe that a cruise missile hit the Pentagon? Their books belong in the fictional section, but not on the same shelf as Libra, and not even in the same breath as DeLillo.
(less)

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Oct 29, 2007 Lee rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

This one took about a month to read so I should respect that time turning its pages and write a few commemorative words. All I can really say is that on every page the writing reeks of literature, but rarely is it literary. What I mean is that DeLillo's sentences always seem to have an eye on a subtextual prize, that is, they always seem like an updated, abstract response to that question posed long ago by some cavedweller about the meaning of life, as opposed to turns of phrase for the sake of...more This one took about a month to read so I should respect that time turning its pages and write a few commemorative words. All I can really say is that on every page the writing reeks of literature, but rarely is it literary. What I mean is that DeLillo's sentences always seem to have an eye on a subtextual prize, that is, they always seem like an updated, abstract response to that question posed long ago by some cavedweller about the meaning of life, as opposed to turns of phrase for the sake of well-crafted whateverness. Any given paragraph is obviously DeLillo. His style is absolutely particularly his, but also it's readable and clear, with lyrical potential, too, but never romantic, or sensory solely for the sake of activating the reader's senses. All characters are part of the whole (society, history, the universe), and all characters have been brought to life solely to speak DeLillo's words. This would annoy if DeLillo had nothing to say, but he has some serious things to say, and so his characters say them, then conspire to kill the president. A particular brand of American anxiety is represented here. This is a difficult review to write. What I should just say is that several times while reading this while walking to work I would laugh out loud at awesome language or a turn or development or insight (rarely at something funny, though humor exists if not necessarily abounds) and sometimes I'd even say out loud that this dude is a freakin' great writer. I should be better able to articulate why I'd say this aloud while walking/reading, but I think it has to do with his authority, ambition, dry-eyed humanity, intelligence/wisdom, scope/range, humor, boldness, the beautifully honed/hefty sentences of course, and also something to do with the structure, how scenes emerge and dissolve ("boldly" as Ethan says) without much helpful orientation from the author, and it all seems held together loosely, artfully, in a way that seems like it wants to very carefully, very gently create in the reader a state similar to what's being experienced by the characters? Something like that? It's real good. Maybe his masterpiece, even more so than "Underworld"? -- it definitely feels longer (maybe 'cause it's denser?) and goes slower than "Underworld" . . . Also, plot-wise, the whole time you know how this one ends, but such knowledge is hardly an annoyance, the opposite in fact, same as with re-reading Hamlet etc. (less)

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May 30, 2007 Matt Harris rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Americans or sympathisers!

At first the denseness and humourlessness of the book proved a bit hard to get into, the anti-hero Lee Harvey Oswald is really hard to like... He started to get under my skin though, and a few chapters later I was feeling sorry for him as prospective fall guy.

What a litany of depressing characters! Reflecting the American Dream to do whatever you want to do, although it may involve self-importance and dangerous acts... The men who DeLillo imagines were responsible for coming up with this grand p...more At first the denseness and humourlessness of the book proved a bit hard to get into, the anti-hero Lee Harvey Oswald is really hard to like... He started to get under my skin though, and a few chapters later I was feeling sorry for him as prospective fall guy.

What a litany of depressing characters! Reflecting the American Dream to do whatever you want to do, although it may involve self-importance and dangerous acts... The men who DeLillo imagines were responsible for coming up with this grand plot to scare a nation with an attempt on the life a leader watch as their plan starts to take on such a cancerous life beyond them, and still take part and push it along its locus. It is a solemn book in every respect, and Lee's essentially humanist at the core beliefs get subverted and changed as he joins the navy and then flees to communist Russia seeking asylum.

Many facts of his life I did not know until reading the book, and I am not sure how closely the author researched (I get the feeling it was very deeply) but Lee's mother and every character close to him is drawn so believably, as s neurotic lady with so many chips on her shoulder about life. So much of the depiction of his life at that time in USA makes me upset about the conditions and influences unkind to those of less social standing. Bullied, hung upside down by navy roughnecks, for his weediness or his interest in Marxism, Lee nevertheless keeps an amazing faith in "Little Cuba" and personal freedom.

Unfortunately there are many who want to use this unique person, exploit his sympathies and weaknesses, and these characters are creepily drawn by DeLillo, the character who cannot seem to register in his head that his oven is definitely off and it's safe to sleep, or the cruel gunmen who join him and finish the job on the fateful day in Dallas.

The last third of the book is quite eerily clever, lining up coincidences and showing the dark consciousness of someone on unstable mental ground. Lee goes by his aliases, including Hidell (Hide the L) and Leon, or O. H. Lee, and halfheartedly tries to hide evidence which will so obviously bring him down. His impassive brutality developing through the book even to the only people close to him, show the disintegration of a young man in pathetic and brutal grey.

A really difficult but worthwhile, unafraid and masterful novel.(less)

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Jan 04, 2009 Cynthia rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This was a very uneven book in my opinion. It’s premise of course is that JFK’s assassination was a vast conspiracy plot with many people playing out private agendas. The book delineated those agendas well: exploring/explaining each player’s motivations. There was the mafia who resented RFK going after them and interfered with their business or was it just because JFK had an affair with Giancana’s gumma? Jack Ruby was a bit player who’d worked with Giacona in Chicago and was in debt to mobsters...more

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Mar 16, 2013 Rosemarie Herbert rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been crossposted from my blog at The Cosy Dragon . Please head there for more in-depth reviews by me, which appear on a timely schedule.

This novel is one that stopped me from wanting to read it from the very beginning. Nothing about it suckered me in. I know I should have been more excited about it, given that De Lillo is quite a celebrated American author, but I just wasn't.

The intersecting plot lines are confusing, and often seem superflous. Just as De Lillo surely intended, I...more

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Jan 04, 2012 Carolyn rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Masterful obliquitous prose, Libra cahorts with the finest in DeLillo's use of written similitude and of a sly and sharp-toothed voice. Lee Harvey Oswald meanders between the roles of protagonist and villain, represented evenly as is appropriate to the key symbolic reference of the novel (the Libran scales of justice). A fascinating portrait of the killer is disrobed, alongside D.D.'s unique interpretation of the events of the Kennedy assassination. It is a pleasant thriller-mystery-history work...more

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Jun 05, 2011 Perry Whitford rated it 4 of 5 stars

Who shot JFK? And who, if anyone, was the puppeteer behind the shooter? This is undoubtedly one of the most explosive mysteries of the 20th century, and although I was born ten years after the event it has certainly intrigued me.
I have not read any non-fiction books about it, which I will at some point, but I have read novels that centre around it from writers as diverse as James Ellroy, Philip Kerr and Norman Mailer, as well as this typically meditative version of events from Don Delillo.

This...more

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Feb 01, 2011 Philippe rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-english

Libra was my first DeLillo read and I found it to be a very compelling one. The first few hundred pages of the book meander menacingly along like a slow movement in a Shostacovich symphony. There is no humour, no quickening of the pulse anywhere: instead we see bleakness, we feel the oppressing humidity of the South and witness the claustrophobic plotting of 'men in small rooms'. At first I was less taken by DeLillo's montage technique, but I honestly can't see how he otherwise would have been a...more

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Jan 16, 2011 Rhonda rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: modern-fiction, politics, psychology, sociology, history

I was dubious when I first picked this book up, but it was recommended by someone I respected and I thought it might be a nice respite from more serious concerns. Hence my surprise when I found a delightfully morbid account of who Oswald was and how he lived. Without any further amplification, the simple portrayal of the facts of his life sent chills down my spine. I have since seen so many men and a few women of a similar outlook, fringe players, essentially loners, but somehow capable of becom...more

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Dec 31, 2012 AC rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: assassinations, 1968, novels-english-american-writers

Spoilers -- kind of....

This is a really great book -- for most of it, I really loved this -- partially because I'm an assassination buff, but also because there's a taut intelligence and poetry in much of the writing, and also (I thought, at least) some really sublime characterization and lots of Plot MoMo. The treatment of David Ferrie -- for example when he meets with Carmine .... just great writing...

This is my first DeLillo - and I know a lot of people here think he's way overrated -- so I...more

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Oct 15, 2011 Phil rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

My understanding of the general consensus is that Don DeLillo peaked with the four-book run of White Noise, Libra, Mao II, and Underworld. Having enjoyed Mao II and been downright floored by White Noise and Underworld, I intentionally put off reading Libra. I wanted to keep it in reserve as a special treat. A few days ago I looked at the nice hardcover copy I've had sitting on a shelf for several years and finally broke down, tearing into it with greedy relish. Don did not let me down. I think L...more My understanding of the general consensus is that Don DeLillo peaked with the four-book run of White Noise, Libra, Mao II, and Underworld. Having enjoyed Mao II and been downright floored by White Noise and Underworld, I intentionally put off reading Libra. I wanted to keep it in reserve as a special treat. A few days ago I looked at the nice hardcover copy I've had sitting on a shelf for several years and finally broke down, tearing into it with greedy relish. Don did not let me down. I think Libra is his masterpiece.

The book moves along at an even clip. DeLillo's rhythm never falters. His artful prose and the plot's gripping momentum flow together in perfect concord. In Underworld, great as it is, the shifts in setting are sometimes a little jarring. This is fine. It helps give that book its tremendous sweep. But in Libra, all the details are woven together from the very beginning. Part of the fascination for me came from the the way DeLillo traces the web of relationships between the numerous characters, setting in motion this swarm of clandestine actors, and at the same time humanizing them, drawing them out of the shadows by mixing together descriptions of their political ideologies, professional activities, and domestic lives. When it contributes to setting the scene, advances the plot, or fills out a character, he piles detail on top of detail, but when it's time to move along he pares it back before things can become bogged down.

It's a testament to DeLillo's creative powers that he was able to take a historical event around which so many conspiracy theories have been built up and craft a fictional conspiracy that feels fresh. Wacky though they may often be, conspiracy theorists have always fascinated me with their willingness to devote time to exploring the lives, in minute detail, of even the most peripheral figures of an alleged conspiracy. DeLillo captures some of that obsessiveness, both in describing the work of the story's CIA historian, who's trying to piece together an official Agency history of the Kennedy assassinaton, and in the characters involved in the events themselves—some of the most fully-fleshed and believable characters in any of his novels.

Above all, Libra is one of the best combinations of absorbing story and stylistically beautiful prose I've read in a while.(less)

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Apr 16, 2010 Jeremy added it · review of another edition

Shelves: american-fiction

It feels more centered, more focused than White Noise, in large part since it takes such a specific event and builds a weird, fevered narrative around it. It Shows how a group of extremely powerful but extremely isolated zealots find themselves drawn into a labyrinth connected by coincidence/destiny/large, vaguely defined forces of history. On one level Delillo is offering a very contemporary sort of critique about the nature of conspiracy theories and how people conceive of and develop them as...more

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Dec 01, 2012 Atilla Ozdemir rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Is it a story about a individual who is crushed by uncontrollable powers? A story of a man who had no chance from the beginning. A figure suited for a Greek tragedy. It's difficult to answer these questions.

DeLillo took an iconic historic event and breath life in to it. And by doing so made the story ours. What could be a meaningless event. A president killed by a man, without any deeper implications to it, gets through the work of DeLillo a direction to it. By the work of DeLillo we are able t...more

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Nov 05, 2009 Jeffrey W. rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 5-star

While not as awe-inspiring as Underworld, I'd have to say Libra comes pretty close. The opening paragraph provides a suitable representation of the novel itself: "The train smashed through the dark. People stood on local platforms staring nowhere, a look they'd been practicing for years. He kind of wondered, speeding past, who they really were. His body fluttered in the fastest stretches. They went so fast sometimes he thought they were on the edge of no-control." A train barreling down the trac...more

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Jan 19, 2011 Nelson rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I just can't get down with the whole conspiracy Oswald thing. I knew a guy for years who'd bum cigarette and coffee money off me in return for the latest info on polygraphs or time frames related to Oswald's movements in Russia. I didn't care then and I don't care now. Nor do I quite understand the urge to novelize real world events--DeLillo is not alone in doing this (and he has done it more than once). It's a rabbit hole I really don't want to fall into. The Nicholas Branch character, the CIA...more

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Apr 20, 2009 Adamstrohm added it · review of another edition

It's been about a decade since I last read this, and since I was lukewarm on it then, I decided to give it another try. I'm sorry to say that my opnion hasn't shifted dramatically. There's some good stuff here (the section that details the actual assassination and its aftermath is pretty spectacular), but the tone that Delillo adopts often renders his prose a little uninspired, I think. It's as if this is partially a genre piece (albeit a well-written one), and that hampers some of the Delillo-i...more

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Feb 23, 2013 Rick rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

DeLillo’s “Libra” (4 stars) is another Kennedy conspiracy book, and a very entertaining one in blending fact and fiction. This is not a linear presentation of the event, but one that flashes backward and leaps forward over the actual timeline. While telling the familiar storyline – after all we know what the end is – DeLillo weaves multiple viewpoints of numerous characters talking about Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, and includes sections of Oswald and Ruby talking about themselves. Libra con...more

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Apr 10, 2011 Tracie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Tracie by: Chris

I don't think this is a book I would have ever read on my own, but Chris read this first and wanted me to read it too, so I did even though I've never really felt a drive to read Don Delillo nor have I ever really cared much about the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory. But I liked this book. It's a good story. Chris really liked it but he was obsessed with the Cold War for awhile, so he could interact with it a little bit more. I had to go read the Wikipedia page on the Bay of Pigs because...more

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Mar 15, 2011 Nicholas Pell rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A real favorite of mine written by perhaps my favorite living author.

This is a historical fiction novel about the Kennedy Assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald is an engagingly sociopathic loner, angry at the injustices of society and frustrated by his lack of a connection to history. The story is a metanarrative (har har) as told by the main reviewing the CIA's entire case files on the subject. Many points of view are utilized from the vast palette of JFK conspiriana. For fans of Don Delillo and as...more

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Aug 10, 2010 Dave rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2010

This was my first Delillo experience, and I was suitably impressed. My favorite part of the books was the Lee Oswald character framed in such intimate detail while retaining a shroud of mystery. This mix of possible fact and possible fiction acts as a powerful glue that holds the somewhat scattered story together, but I should point out that this is much more than a conspiracy theory novel. Delillo is commenting on historical events that have been etched into America's chronology not because the...more

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Jul 07, 2012 Joe rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is not one of the DeLillo novels I've seen on syllabi or people with heads ponderously heavy full of po-mo stuff carrying around, but maybe a novel about how injecting a secretive organization that keeps secrets from sectors of itself in nesting dolls of unknowledge with the imperative to kill enemies of the state ends up backfiring horribly--given that when you remove all targets for these networks of operators, the machinery of plotting keeps on churning and the technology of violence dev...more

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Aug 12, 2011 David rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011

Having read two other Kennedy assassination conspiracy books this year (James Ellroy's American Tabloid and Charles McCarry's Tears of Autumn), this is at least as good as American Tabloid and noticeably better than Tears of Autumn. The plot DeLillo takes is well developed and very believable. The narrative is nicely sliced into three story lines, featuring two the most. The first is the plot to kill Kennedy which begins as a "fake" assassination plot meant to be traced to the Cubans and scare p...more

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Feb 19, 2011 Brad rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book has a vast cast of characters involved in the plot to off JFK. Few of these players are distinguishable as real individuals. The focus on these minor players detracts from the central interest in the book: Lee Harvey Oswald himself. The fictionalized biographical account of his life remains interesting throughout. Of particular note are the chapters devoted to his life in Russia.

The systematic organization of the narrative is impressive. The chapters dealing with the conspirators have...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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“Facts are lonely things” — 43 people liked it

“The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.” — 14 people liked it

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