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The Names

Don DeLillo

3.64 · Rating details · 3,407 ratings · 260 reviews

Set against the backdrop of a lush and exotic Greece, The Names is considered the book which began to drive "sharply upward the size of his readership" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Among the cast of DeLillo's bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator's estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the ...more

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Paperback, 339 pages

Published July 17th 1989 by Vintage (first published September 12th 1982)

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Feb 18, 2014 Violet wells rated it really liked it

There were times in this novel when I wished DeLillo did plots. The Names is set up, brilliantly, like a thriller. An American in Athens with a shadowy job, a risk analyst for a company that insures multinational companies against the hazards of political upheaval, and part of an international subculture of equally shadowy executive figures benefiting from middle eastern turmoil hears about the existence of a death cult in the region of Greece where his separated wife and son are temporarily liv There were times in this novel when I wished DeLillo did plots. The Names is set up, brilliantly, like a thriller. An American in Athens with a shadowy job, a risk analyst for a company that insures multinational companies against the hazards of political upheaval, and part of an international subculture of equally shadowy executive figures benefiting from middle eastern turmoil hears about the existence of a death cult in the region of Greece where his separated wife and son are temporarily living. She is a volunteer at an archaeological dig. The opening hundred pages of The Names is dazzling, especially there’s some of the best travel writing you’ll find anywhere in literature.

Everyone in the novel is about to fly somewhere else. Teheran, India, Beirut, Cairo, Cyprus, Turkey, Kuwait, Pakistan, Jordan, Zaire. Places that aren’t safe, places where there’s money to be made. There’s the sense most of these people are parasites. They are people who pride themselves on their sophistication. "This is where I want to be. History. It’s in the air. Events are linking all these countries. What do we talk about over dinner, all of us? Politics basically. That’s what it comes down to. Money and politics. And that’s my job." And yet, ironically, the novel begins to backslide more and more towards the primitive. It drops any aspiration towards plot and becomes more and more esoteric. It becomes a novel about language. About the roots of language and the darkness language seeks to edge us away from. A narrative about narrative itself. And almost everything narrated is second-hand, a distillation of the original experience. We learn about people and things twice, “the second time in memory and language”.

If you’ve tried DeLillo before and haven’t warmed to him then probably you won’t like this much either. Reasons? Firstly all the characters talk in the same voice and are all without exception, a child included, more eloquent and intelligent than anyone we’re generally likely to meet. They are all at one with the general cadence and fabric of the text itself. Secondly, DeLillo is very much an impressionist; he’s not a realist. And this is among his most impressionist novels. Libra and White Noise are probably as close as he gets to realism. And thirdly DeLillo is one of the all time great stylists; he can write sentences which take your breath away; but he doesn't really do storytelling in any accepted form. And this is even more true of The Names than most of his other books.

It’s astonishing this novel was published in 1986 because it predicts much that has happened in the Middle East so far this century. The death cult can even be seen as an eerie forerunner of ISIS- not Islamic or political in nature but backward looking, primitive and punitive in its simplistic dichotomies, its adherence to misrepresented ancient texts.

I can’t say I understood exactly what The Names was getting at. As a novel it remains a bit of a blur in my mind. But the writing at times is absolutely stellar.
...more

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Feb 25, 2011 Ian "Marvin" Graye rated it it was amazing

Shelves: de-lillo-rama, read-2011, reviews, reviews-5-stars

Designated Driver

Have you ever got the impression that, when an author started a book, they had no idea where it would go or how it would end?

That they would just slide into the front seat and let the book take over?

This is not such a book.

Instead, I got the impression that DeLillo was so firmly ensconced in the driver’s seat here that he wouldn’t have got out if a crew of firemen arrived to rescue him from his burning vehicle.

It was win or die, so he had to pull out all stops.

When he started, ...more

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Apr 09, 2016 Steven Godin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, america

An intelligent, mature and often quite complexing work from DeLillo who I am a fan, this is set mostly in Greece which centres on an American risk analyst staying in Athens who is slowly drawn to the workings of a mysterious 'language cult' who are obsessed with ancient alphabets and seem to be behind a number of unexplained murders. While described as an exotic thriller it's so much more than that, and tends to sway away from any conventional plot to focus more on deep and precise character stu ...more

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Aug 05, 2017 BlackOxford rated it liked it

Shelves: american

Vaulting into eternity ... well perhaps not that high

Pushing the logic of hippiedom to its extreme, The Names suggests an end point - a nihilistic cult whose reason for being is to murder people whose initials correspond to the names of their locations. Bizarre, senseless, and intentionally without benefit to anyone. Helter Skelter played out in the regions that produced Western civilization, Greece and the Middle East.

This cult fascinates James, a member the international financial gang whose Vaulting into eternity ... well perhaps not that high

Pushing the logic of hippiedom to its extreme, The Names suggests an end point - a nihilistic cult whose reason for being is to murder people whose initials correspond to the names of their locations. Bizarre, senseless, and intentionally without benefit to anyone. Helter Skelter played out in the regions that produced Western civilization, Greece and the Middle East.

This cult fascinates James, a member the international financial gang whose roles are just about as rational as those of the cultists; and Frank, a film-maker, who wants to exploit as much irrationality as he can; and Owen, an academic who is unaccountably swept into the spiritual maelstrom of the Indian branch of the cult. Who can blame any of them? Their lives are an empty wandering without any conscious intention. Only the bizarre and senseless seems to make any sense. They obsessively move toward the cult but with nothing as directive as desire. The cult is a kind of tar baby, an inert web, that traps the protagonists for no point whatsoever.

Everyone sounds the same in The Names, men, women, children, adults, bankers and archaeologists. Without 'he saids, she saids' it is often difficult to follow conversations. And since DeLillo doesn't do reflective internal dialogue except to confuse, it's also difficult to decipher motivations. Why do couples stay together, or not? Why do the men persist in their questionable businesses and resist returning to America? What attracts his characters to the distributed cult? DeLillo's not saying.

Then there are the literary non-sequiturs. "It never happens until it happens again. Then it never happened." Does this phrase have meaning? "There was something artless and trusting in the place despite the street meanders, the narrow turns and ravens." I should think artlessness was implied by such a scene, which has no obvious connection to trust or distrust. Or "In this century, the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth century writer that he aspires to madness." This would certainly qualify for the Pseuds Corner section of Private Eye.

My problem is that I think I share much of DeLillo's experience of the world and his gripes about corporate life, American interference in the world and the casual destructiveness of global finance. But I can't place myself anywhere in his writing. I get lost, as if I've become one of his rootless, bored, superficial characters who is "vaulting into eternity." I suppose this is his intention. If so I'm left with the question 'Why?'. ...more

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May 24, 2012 Darwin8u rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2017

“I move past the scaffolding and walk down the steps, hearing one language after another, rich, harsh, mysterious, strong. This is what we bring to the temple, not prayer or chant or slaughtered rams. Our offering is language.”
― Don DeLillo, The Names

description

For 4/5 of this book Don DeLillo was surfing in Mao II, White Noise, Underworld, and Libra territory. I was jamming. Words. Names. Cults. Terrorism. It was fantastic. But there was 1/5 (yup, math works) of this book right before the last few pages ...more

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Dec 29, 2010 Drew rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: hardcore delillo fans

Don DeLillo gets major points for style. Seriously, he's one of the all-time greatest American prose stylists; his knack for catching the rhythms of (educated, disaffected) speech is uncanny, as is his always-apt use of the interrogative-with-no-question-mark, which I've not seen effectively used in most writing but hear in speech every day. And he always picks good themes, if you want to call them that: technology, language, consumerism, intellectualism, violence, etc.

So why is it that he so ra ...more

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Mar 29, 2012 Greg rated it liked it

Shelves: fiction

I can't figure out what to write about this book. This review does have a soundtrack though, it's a Leonard Cohen song, listen to it here.

With the exception of The Players, I feel like I'm through with what I think of as the 'early Delillo'. Next up is White Noise, which I feel is vastly overrated but which I'm going to give another try, and then there is Libra, a departure from what I normally think of Delillo but a pretty awesome historical novel and then his novel about a Pynchon-like author ...more

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Dec 07, 2008 John rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: readers who want to know the world in its noisy entirety

Recommended to John by: many other writers & readers

Shelves: american-novels-that-matter

This man's got all sorts of work to celebrate. Start w/ GREAT JONES STREET, DeLillo's vision of the banality that suffocates the famous, more pertinently American rock royalty, & continue right through to FALLING MAN, his fable of 9/11 & an America in which every tower is a deck of cards. Too long, my Goodreads space has languished w/out him, & I've got to go w/ this early-80s novel, a well-night flawless performance, the initial breakthrough to his creative peak. THE NAMES astounds This man's got all sorts of work to celebrate. Start w/ GREAT JONES STREET, DeLillo's vision of the banality that suffocates the famous, more pertinently American rock royalty, & continue right through to FALLING MAN, his fable of 9/11 & an America in which every tower is a deck of cards. Too long, my Goodreads space has languished w/out him, & I've got to go w/ this early-80s novel, a well-night flawless performance, the initial breakthrough to his creative peak. THE NAMES astounds & scarifies even w/out the crowd scenes that tend to define DeLillo at his most breathtaking. This one's a divorce story, to begin w/, & the writer fires up hurting-love dialog of scorching rarity. There's an illicit seduction scene, on the downtown sidewalks of midnight Athens. More moving, though wildly different, is the phone conversation between the protagonist James, committed to Athens because of his cutting-edge work in "corporate risk-assessment," & his former wife, the evening she commits to divorce & to taking their preteen son to live with her in Seattle. DeLillo weeps! He pleads for love! Yet elsewhere we've got busy & cold-eyed passages, in a alacritous poetry bordered w/ concrete & ranking w/ his very best, full-throat oratorios of overwhelming humanity, of threat & its hair's-breadth escape. James becomes an homicide investigator malgré lui, drawn into making sense of a series of cult murders, & so this Italian-American's version of the return to the Old Country (most immigrant cultures have such stories, but this ethnic group especially) -- anyway, DeLillo's version avoids all sentiment as it excavates the axial lines of one family's collapse & what it has to do w/ the larger cultural moment. It swims the Greek Aegean rather than the Neapolitan Tyrhennian, & more significantly, it never fails to suss out the close allegiances between affection & murder, love & madness, transcendence & depravity. THE NAMES reminds us that, for the most honest "risk-assessment," we need to go into the wilderness & ask the howler in his cave. ...more

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Sep 18, 2017 Franco Santos rated it liked it · review of another edition

"En cierto modo, apenas existimos. Se trata de una vida difícil. Hay numerosos inconvenientes. Las células pierden contacto unas con otras. Surgen diferencias en torno a la teoría y a la práctica. Durante meses, no ocurre nada. Perdemos tesón, enfermamos. Algunos han muerto. Otros han decidido marcharse. ¿Quiénes somos, qué hacemos aquí? Ni siquiera hay peligro de que la policía nos identifique como criminales. Nadie sabe que existimos. Nadie nos busca".

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Apr 25, 2018 FotisK rated it liked it · review of another edition

Έχουν περάσει 3-4 χρόνια από τότε που το διάβασα, αλλά δεν με είχε ενθουσιάσει, όπως ο ο αγαπημένος "Υπόγειος κόσμος".

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Jan 13, 2016 sologdin rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: of-best-sentence-and-moost-solaas, us-empire

A fairly impressive bait & switch, insofar as it begins as though it were domestic meditation (e.g., “What she and I needed was a way to be together without feeling there were issues we had to confront, the bloody leftovers of eleven years. We weren’t the kind of people to have haggard dialogues on marriage” (20)), but then develops through a weird set of cultic murders (“The alphabet itself. They were interested in letters, written symbols” (30)) into an espionage thriller of sorts.

Very muc ...more

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Apr 24, 2018 ΠανωςΚ rated it liked it · review of another edition

Με πονοκεφάλιασε αυτό το βιβλίο. Σίγουρα πολύ ενδιαφέρον, ειδικά στο κομμάτι του σχετικά με την αντίληψη των Αμερικανών για τον υπόλοιπο κόσμο (και την Ελλάδα), αλλά του υπόλοιπου κόσμου για τις ΗΠΑ. Η μελέτη του (ελληνικού) αντιαμερικανισμού δεν ξεφεύγει από κάποια κλισέ, αλλά στην τελική κι ο ίδιος ο αντιαμερικανισμός είναι μια θεωρία γεμάτη κλισέ (τώρα πια). Πέραν τούτου, δυστυχώς, ο Ντελίλο δίνει ένα (αχρείαστο, κατ' εμέ) στοιχείο θρίλερ στο βιβλίο με ένα εξωφρενικό εύρημα για μιαν αίρεση κα Με πονοκεφάλιασε αυτό το βιβλίο. Σίγουρα πολύ ενδιαφέρον, ειδικά στο κομμάτι του σχετικά με την αντίληψη των Αμερικανών για τον υπόλοιπο κόσμο (και την Ελλάδα), αλλά του υπόλοιπου κόσμου για τις ΗΠΑ. Η μελέτη του (ελληνικού) αντιαμερικανισμού δεν ξεφεύγει από κάποια κλισέ, αλλά στην τελική κι ο ίδιος ο αντιαμερικανισμός είναι μια θεωρία γεμάτη κλισέ (τώρα πια). Πέραν τούτου, δυστυχώς, ο Ντελίλο δίνει ένα (αχρείαστο, κατ' εμέ) στοιχείο θρίλερ στο βιβλίο με ένα εξωφρενικό εύρημα για μιαν αίρεση και κάτι δολοφονίες, που όχι μόνο δεν προσδίδουν τίποτε αλλά επιτείνουν τον πονοκέφαλο, ο οποίος όμως δεν έχω πει, ακόμη, από τι προκλήθηκε αρχικά: α) από τον πανομοιότυπο και κατ' εμέ αφύσικο τρόπο με τον οποίο συνομιλούν οι (στην πλειοψηφία τους, ασχημάτιστοι) χαρακτήρες του βιβλίου β) από την -δυστυχώς- κάκιστη μετάφραση. Ξέρω σχεδόν από πρώτο χέρι πόσο δύσκολη και (συχνά) κακοπληρωμένη δουλειά είναι η μετάφραση (και η επιμέλεια), γνωρίζω επίσης ότι μπορεί να έχουν συντρέξει χίλιοι διαφορετικοί λόγοι για την προχειροδουλειά αυτή, για τους οποίους ενδεχομένως δεν ευθύνεται ο μεταφραστής/ια, αλλά εδώ ο αναγνώστης βρίσκεται αντιμέτωπος με μια χρήση των ελληνικών που στο τελικό τους αποτέλεσμα δεν μοιάζουν με ελληνικά. Νομίζω πως η κακή μετάφραση του πιντσονικού Βάινλαντ (που το είχα τοποθετήσει στην κορυφή της άτυπης αυτής κατηγορίας) βρήκε το ιδανικό της ταίρι. ...more

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Oct 10, 2014 Sookie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

There you are sitting with your handful of friends and acquaintances you managed to scavenge in a foreign country, drinking local wine and talking about the politics of your own country. You experience alienation from your country after being away for so long and still feel foreign where you have currently planted your roots in. Its a weird limbo to be in. Add traveling to the mix, you are living out of suitcases and hotel rooms, dangling conversations in airport bars, flirting while changing la There you are sitting with your handful of friends and acquaintances you managed to scavenge in a foreign country, drinking local wine and talking about the politics of your own country. You experience alienation from your country after being away for so long and still feel foreign where you have currently planted your roots in. Its a weird limbo to be in. Add traveling to the mix, you are living out of suitcases and hotel rooms, dangling conversations in airport bars, flirting while changing lanes and expanding your obsession with random encounters. You notice the decay in conversations with your spouse, the fragility with which you hold yourselves together. The arguments seem like an abstract painting: open to interpretations and discoveries.

Words don't mean a thing, contexts do, she says. The offense is so great that you simply snarl a "fuck you" and slam the bathroom door. Your son sits in his room and writes your friend's biography. The alienation spreads from your country to your family and you find yourself attracted to women who speak foreign tongue and share your love for politics. They talk about your country in a way that makes you uncomfortable with a perspective not really foreign or out of place but is that of a victim. You steer the conversation towards language and culture and let the woman's narration seem like a phantasmagoria.

Death doesn't shake you but the context around it does. Her yell about context and words slam you in the worst way, making you stumble your words. The conversations are chunky and clunky, embarrassing and scaring you in a way you didn't think was possible. You take the next flight back to a country you've been trying call your home and strike up a conversation with a fellow frequent flyer. Death, like context, needs words.

Words change with time. Words change with culture. Over the years, culture permeates the language and changes its flavor. Contexts add color. The names however kind of both mutate and manage to stay the same. ...more

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Nov 19, 2016 Matt Tomic rated it really liked it

The Names is an underrated gem, lost in the shuffle of the epic grand theme books by DeLillo that followed. The opening scene is written so well my jaw dropped to the floor and I literally shook my head and laughed out loud at the pure swagger and command of the prose.

The plot is a conundrum. It seems to whisper at something bigger, but never comes right out to say it. Characters flit in and out of the story. They're boozy, jet set expats, who deal with the constant risk that comes with doing bu ...more

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May 03, 2012 Mary rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction, 2012

I tried with this one, I really did. I think I dove into DeLillo with the wrong book.

The premise is intriguing. An estranged American/Canadian couple raising their son in Greece. There's mysterious murders. There's "cultured world travelling" friends who pop in and out to have wine fuelled discussions about world events and political upheaval. The protagonist is removed, detached, sad, always thinking, thinking... The descriptions of Athens and the Greek Islands are spot on, it really captures ...more

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Nov 15, 2014 Luís C. rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: on-my-own, lisbon-book-fairs, us-canada-author, 1001-done, mil-folhas, 300-400, reading-the-world

I go everywhere twice. The first one to have a false impression, and the second time to strengthen it.

Lisbon Book-Fair 2015.

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Mar 26, 2008 Scott Gates rated it really liked it

“A shaved head would do wonders for this group.”

Parts of The Names read like a tract of linguistic idealism. One of the characters, Owen Brademas, (who is obsessed with alphabets, the shape of words, and a cult that kills people based on their initials’ matching place names) posits that ancient structures were erected, tombs built, in order to have a place for the words. “The river of language is God,” he says, which is pretty close to Nietzsche’s “Without grammar, God is not possible” (or was i “A shaved head would do wonders for this group.”

Parts of The Names read like a tract of linguistic idealism. One of the characters, Owen Brademas, (who is obsessed with alphabets, the shape of words, and a cult that kills people based on their initials’ matching place names) posits that ancient structures were erected, tombs built, in order to have a place for the words. “The river of language is God,” he says, which is pretty close to Nietzsche’s “Without grammar, God is not possible” (or was it the other way around?).

Lurking throughout the book is the Wittgenstein-ish idea that there is no meaning behind words or events but just the speaking of the words themselves, an act itself. The same character referenced above wants to run the hadj (yes, how Western) in spite of the fact that he does not believe in God. Belief is irrelevant, it’s the act that counts etc. etc. I guess that’s pretty much standard existentialism, isn’t it.

More so than in any other Delillo novel, it doesn’t matter at all who is saying any given thing. There are a lot of different characters, and a fair amount of time is spent making clear who is who, yet each is wholly defined by the comments he/she makes over drinks. I think this was done purposely. Late in the book the narrator concludes that when people visit a sacred place, the main thing they have to offer is language. And this is for sure the most talk-ridden Delillo book.

"Americans choose strategy over principle every time and yet keep believing in their own innocence. . . . The Americans learned to live with the colonels very well. Investments flourished under the dictatorship." The usual story of the US stomping out democratic uprisings and supporting ruthless militants when it serves its interests (i.e., when the leader will do whatever the US wants).

So there’s some real prescient stuff on the way world hates the US. The narrator (to alleviate guilt?) talks of the US’s position in the world in mythic terms, with the US serving as a needed archetype for the rest of the world’s fears. The characters in The Names are risk analysts, investors, economists, actuaries, spies, operatives; aloof from the turmoil and grievances of the regions they’re involved in, they dabble in them and move on. They scout out places of political turmoil and violence to see if corporations’ investments are safe; they have interesting conversations over dinner. They hoard rugs for profit and talk about the interesting things that happened to them the last time they were in Tehran. Kind of repulsive.

But these people are offset by the borderline lunatics of the book: the narrator, James Axton, and Owen Brademas. In literature, as often in life, it’s best to support the lunatics. It’s clear Delillo does. These two concoct whole other narratives for the regions they visit, and while maintaining your usual Delilloan ironclad grip on clear thought they push their thinking to out-of-bounds places. There is the tendency to draw profound conclusions from pretty much anything phenomena throws at them. “Everything is connected.”

When Delillo’s name is on a book you can bet your ass the writing will often be astounding. Throughout, often when you don’t see it coming, the writing will reach a crazy pitch. Plus the structure of The Names is just weird. It makes you feel as if you’re not quite thinking about it the right way, and that if you did you’d see the book differently.
...more

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Dec 19, 2016 Neil rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2016

There is a quote from the New York Times on the back cover of my edition of this book: "Delillo verbally examines every state of consciousness from eroticism to tourism, from the idea of America as conceived by the rest of the world to the idea of the rest of the world as conceived by America, from mysticism to fanaticism."

The book focuses on a group of Americans. They are not in America. They are in Greece and make frequent trips to other parts of the world. The only pre-requisite for where the There is a quote from the New York Times on the back cover of my edition of this book: "Delillo verbally examines every state of consciousness from eroticism to tourism, from the idea of America as conceived by the rest of the world to the idea of the rest of the world as conceived by America, from mysticism to fanaticism."

The book focuses on a group of Americans. They are not in America. They are in Greece and make frequent trips to other parts of the world. The only pre-requisite for where they go seems to be that there should be the threat of violence - against Americans. They are part of the "risk community" insuring large American corporations against the risks of travel. At least, that’s probably what they are: there is some ambiguity and there might be some CIA involvement.

"Americans used to come to places like this to write and paint and study, to find deeper textures. Now we do business."

It’s funny how choosing books from my TBR list at random often produces consecutive books that connect. The book previous to this was New Finnish Grammar and that is about language and so is this. Delillo is not really concerned with plot. He isn’t worried about distinct voices for his characters (they all, including the child - who is 9 not 6 as the blurb here says - a 6-year old novelist would be ridiculous, after all - talk in Delillo-speak which is unlike any dialogue you will read anywhere else). But he is, as in nearly all of his books, concerned with style and with language. Even sex is about words: "'Say heat. Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered … Use names,' I said."

If there’s a plot, it is largely about the possible existence of a "death cult" about which the main character sets about trying to discover the truth. But, in truth, it is really about character studies and commentary on America. The second half of the book becomes less and less concerned with plot and more and more concerned with style and language. I am not 100% confident I understood it all, especially the final 50 pages or so. But it contains some beautifully crafted sentences and though-provoking comments. It is perhaps one of those books where the best plan is to let it wash over you - enjoy the craft of the writing and worry less about the plot.

In his review in The Guardian (written in 2014), Geoff Dyer argues that Delillo would have won The Man Booker prize 3 times if Americans had been allowed to enter earlier, firstly for this book and then later for White Noise and Underworld. It’s hard to disagree. Dyer ends his review with this comment about The Names: "'Are they killing Americans?' – gets asked with increasing rhetorical anxiety. The Names is a prophetic, pre-9/11 masterpiece: a 21st-century novel published in 1982." (https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...). ...more

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Jul 31, 2010 Ricardo Lourenço rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Sétimo romance de DeLillo, precedendo a publicação de Ruído Branco, que impulsionou a sua ascensão no panorama literário internacional, Os Nomes, apesar das críticas favoráveis, continua a ser um título imerecidamente menosprezado dada a sua qualidade, mas também por se desprender da crítica à sociedade americana pela qual o autor é reconhecido, para nos apresentar uma meditação política e espiritual do início da década de 80.

"When I work," he goes on, "I'm just translating the world around me i Sétimo romance de DeLillo, precedendo a publicação de Ruído Branco, que impulsionou a sua ascensão no panorama literário internacional, Os Nomes, apesar das críticas favoráveis, continua a ser um título imerecidamente menosprezado dada a sua qualidade, mas também por se desprender da crítica à sociedade americana pela qual o autor é reconhecido, para nos apresentar uma meditação política e espiritual do início da década de 80.

"When I work," he goes on, "I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear."

in Guardian

Superficialidade é algo que não encontrarão neste romance. Embora apresente um estilo analítico, algo que se deve ao carácter do narrador, o executivo James Axton (simultaneamente o principal protagonista), as descrições de DeLillo são detalhadas, procurando sempre atingir um significado mais profundo, revelar uma ideia que não é aparente. Esse nível de detalhe é transportado para os inteligentes diálogos, cuidadosamente construídos e muitas das vezes entrecortados pelas divagações de James.

“Começava a considerar-me um eterno turista. Havia nisto qualquer coisa de agradável. Ser turista é fugir da responsabilidade. Os erros e os defeitos não se colam a nós como em casa. Somos capazes de vaguear por continentes e línguas, suspendendo a actividade do pensamento lógico. O turismo é a marcha da imbecilidade. Contam que sejamos imbecis. Todo o mecanismo do país hospedeiro está adaptado aos viajantes que se comportam de um modo imbecil. Andamos às voltas, aturdidos, olhando de esguelha para mapas desdobrados. Não sabemos falar com as pessoas, ir a lado nenhum, quanto vale o dinheiro, que horas são, o que comer ou como o comer. Ser-se imbecil é o padrão, o nível e a norma. Podemos continuar a viver nestas condições durante semanas e meses, sem censuras nem consequências terríveis. Tal como a outros milhares, são-nos concedidas imunidades e amplas liberdades. Somos um exército de loucos, usando roupas de poliéster de cores vivas, montando camelos, tirando fotografias uns aos outros, fatigados, disentéricos, sedentos. Não temos mais nada em que pensar senão no próximo acontecimento informe.”

Os Nomes foca-se, sobretudo, na importância da linguagem para a humanidade e no distanciamento da realidade, na ausência de paixão que afecta James. Separado da sua família, e sem um rumo definido para a sua vida, James acaba por se interessar pelo mistério que envolve os assassinatos ritualistas, sendo esse o principal motor da narrativa, que quebra a rotina do analista americano impelindo-o a compreender esse seu interesse e, através do conhecimento das razões por detrás dos seus intentos, perceber-se melhor a ele próprio.

“Sabemos que havemos de morrer. Isto é, em certo sentido, a nossa virtude redentora. Nenhum animal sabe isso excepto nós. É uma das coisas que nos distingue. É a nossa tristeza particular, este conhecimento, e, por conseguinte, uma riqueza, uma santificação.”

Não deixa de ser impressionante verificar como, através da complexidade inerente às questões existenciais com que personagens se confrontam, entre as profundas reflexões políticas, sociais, religiosas e linguísticas, Don DeLillo consegue dar liberdade ao leitor no que a conclusões diz respeito, como que entreabrindo a porta que permite alcançar as respostas, enquanto diminui as distorções que afectam o nosso raciocínio, submergindo as vozes enganadoras que nos tentam desencaminhar constantemente.

“- Neste século, o escritor tem mantido uma conversa com a loucura. Podemos quase dizer que o escritor do século vinte aspira à loucura. Alguns conseguiram-no, evidentemente, e ocupam lugares especiais na sua consideração. Para um escritor, a loucura é uma destilação decisiva do eu, uma edição decisiva. É o submergir das vozes enganadoras.”
...more

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Jul 08, 2012 Robert Jacoby rated it really liked it

Here is a caveat: I read poetry, novels, and short stories for both pleasure and work: to enjoy the writer's use of language and to learn how the writer did what he or she did, and to take away from the experience lessons for myself in my own work. As a writer, I give this novel 5 stars; as a reader, I give it 3 stars.

As a writer I stand in awe of DeLillo's use of language. He is constantly surprising you with his quirky and inventive use of words and phrases.

As a reader, be prepared to find n Here is a caveat: I read poetry, novels, and short stories for both pleasure and work: to enjoy the writer's use of language and to learn how the writer did what he or she did, and to take away from the experience lessons for myself in my own work. As a writer, I give this novel 5 stars; as a reader, I give it 3 stars.

As a writer I stand in awe of DeLillo's use of language. He is constantly surprising you with his quirky and inventive use of words and phrases.

As a reader, be prepared to find not much of a story to drive any sort of action. There is no readily apparent narrative arc. The dialogue is unreal. People don't speak like this. I think DeLillo provides hints at the struggles with story he experienced while writing this novel: "What we lacked was a subject"; "...a shouted dialogue lacking sense and purpose." Yeah, it kind of feels like that, like DeLillo started writing and just kept writing. On my first attempt at reading this novel I stopped at about page 47 (someone once told me: Give a book 50 pages; if it hasn't grabbed you by then, feel free to give it up). Well, I did give up; I put it away for about a year. But then I circled back to it. And I'm glad I did. As a writer more than a reader. Because that's what pulled me along. Not the story, not the characters, not the action. But the language. Which is of course DeLillo's intention.

But here is where my writer and reader minds collide. Even as I was enjoying the beautiful and startling use of language on the pages, I was thinking that these conversations could never take place because real people do not speak like this, nor does a person think like the main character thinks. If we are to believe that the main character--a risk analyst living in Greece, who used to be a technical writer--is really who he says he is, then he is in the wrong line of business. He should be a poet (a Poet Laureate, for that matter), or a novelist.

Oh. That's right. He already is. It's DeLillo.

This is where the book "falls apart" for me, in this page-by-page collision. But it's a beautiful collision. And if you can hang on for the ride you'll be rewarded with a new way of viewing the world, and the world of words. ...more

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Jul 26, 2012 D. rated it it was amazing

i've tried and failed several times to put into words the fullness of my admiration for this author. then:

DON DELILLO DROVE ME INSANE BY MAKING MY BRAIN EXPLODE AT REGULAR INTERVALS. THEN HE WOULD REEL ALL THE PIECES BACK IN AND WEAVE THEM TOGETHER...ONLY TO BLOW THEM UP AGAIN WITH THE NEXT PARAGRAPH!! I DIDN'T EVEN REALIZE I WAS IN A FOREST, FOR ALL THE TIMES I WOULD GO BACK AND READ THAT ONE TREE, JUST THAT ONE TREE, OVER AND OVER BEFORE I WAS ABLE TO TEAR MYSELF AWAY AND MOVE ONTO THE NEXT PA ...more

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Jan 15, 2016 Vit Babenco rated it it was amazing

Citizens of the globe, expatriates, failed marriages, mismatched unions… The Names begins like a story by John Cheever…
“Nothing sticks to us but smoke in our hair and clothes. It is dead time. It never happened until it happens again. Then it never happened.”
Everyone becomes a perennial tourist, an inadvertent traveler and life goes on in continuous transition…
“This is where I want to be. History. It’s in the air. Events are linking all these countries. What do we talk about over dinner, all of ...more

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Dec 20, 2007 Spiros rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: Fans of Graham Greene and THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET

Shelves: chasingmytail, bins, staffpicks

I came back to this book for a couple of reasons; first, because I am about the lose my "Staff Favorite" pick at work (feckless customers who don't realize what a wonderful book Kurosawa's SOMETHING LIKE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY truly is!) and am thinking about using this as a replacement, and secondly, because I recently read YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH, which, however flawed it is as a novel, shares some of the linguistic concerns that inform DeLillo's novel.
Set in the period just before and during the 1979 r ...more

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Feb 28, 2014 Jeremy rated it it was amazing

Shelves: american-fiction

This is the first Delillo novel I've read that I think I've actually enjoyed. His obsessions with American history and American mythology can be so cornily portentous that a lot of the time it seems like the only thing he wants to convince you of is his how important his books are. But somehow this novel, which is set almost entirely in the eastern Mediterranean, in a world of early 1980's American expats idly wandering around pictaresque Greek islands and middle eastern desert ruins half-follow ...more

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Oct 12, 2010 Lindsay rated it it was ok

I started off liking the book, but about halfway through I was bored and annoyed by the characters' distanced, anthropological view of themselves and each other. Every connection explored was done so through intense analysis, but seemed to lack true feeling. It became really hard to care about any of the characters since they seemed so blase, even when discussing emotional ties. That combined with a meandering plot that was based more on mood and worldly observations than a narrative arc, made t ...more

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Sep 22, 2015 Andrea rated it it was ok · review of another edition

DeLillo's writing is so pretentious. He disregards plot in order to create art, which is a noble effort to make but leaves many readers, including me, wanting more. The rape scene was also extremely distasteful and added nothing to the plot, only establishing the main character as a misogynist asshole. Necessary? No. I've heard that White Noise is better, but after reading The Names, I don't want to read any more of DeLillo's work unless academics compel me (which was the case for this one).

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Jan 28, 2019 Abigail MW rated it liked it

Loved the beginning and middle but was left disappointed (and frankly a little confused) by the end. In my opinion infinitely better than "White Noise."

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Feb 12, 2015 Mircalla64 rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: postmoderni

i Novemila nomi di Dio e il peso della Conoscenza

James è un analista di rischio in Medio Oriente negli anni settanta, non che si stesse meglio di adesso, era solo l'inizio di quel che c'è ora, ha una serie di amici che fanno i banchieri, gli imprenditori e altre cose vaghe, sono tutti insieme al momento in Grecia, con le mogli che fanno vento e polvere per distrarre gli spiati dall'attenzione degli spioni e viceversa...vanno a cena, chiacchierano amabilmente...ecc...la domanda più frequente che ...more

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Nov 15, 2017 Christopher Saunders rated it liked it

Shelves: 2017-reads

Another Don DeLillo excursion into existential inscrutability, The Names follows an insurance underwriter during a long, meandering trip through Greece, Turkey and India. During that time he rubs shoulders with bored Americans, condescending archaeologists, hostile locals, political extremists and a murderous cult whose motivations he can't begin to understand. This book frames DeLillo's usual obsessions in an international context: he casts Americans, and Westerners generally, as unable, or unw ...more

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Aug 03, 2013 Clifford rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: novels

The Names by Don DeLillo is a fascinating but somewhat fuzzy book. Set primarily in Greece, it tells the story of James Axton, an American who develops risk analyses, those odd-sounding reports used by international investors and insurers. When the book was published in 1982, would readers have suspected that Axton worked for the CIA? It was the first thing I thought of.

But Axton's work is only a part of this intricate story about language, alphabets, secrecy, and cultural identity.

See the rest ...more

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About Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo

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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