The Names

by Don DeLillo

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 neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses. A thriller, a mystery, and still a moving examination of family, loss, and the amorphous and magical potential of language itself, The Names stands with any of DeLillo's more recent and highly acclaimed works.

"The Names not only accurately reflects a portion of our contemporary world but, more importantly, an original world of its own is created."--Chicago Sun-Times

"DeLillo sifts experience through simultaneous grids of science and poetry, analysis and clear sight, to make a high-wire prose that is voluptuously stark."--Village Voice Literary Supplement

"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."--New York Times

Genres: Fiction, Novels, American, Mystery, Greece, Literature, Literary Fiction

339 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Donald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports.
DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and the National Book Award for fiction. He followed this in 1988 with Libra, a novel about the Kennedy assassination. DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II, about terrorism and the media's scrutiny of writers' private lives, and the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld, a historical novel that ranges in time from the dawn of the Cold War to the birth of the Internet. He was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
DeLillo has described his themes as "living in dangerous times" and "the inner life of the culture." In a 2005 interview, he said that writers "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."

Reviews

[Moshtagh hosein]

رمان «نام‌ها» اثر دون دلیلو، رمانی تفکربرانگیز و محرک فکری است که به درون مایه‌های زبان، هویت و قدرت کلمات می‌پردازد. داستان در یونان و خاورمیانه اتفاق می‌افتد، و داستان جیمز آکس، قهرمان داستان را دنبال می‌کند که در دنیایی از مرگ‌های مرموز و فرقه‌های مرموز با محوریت اهمیت نام‌ها حرکت می‌کند.
نثر دلیلو استادانه است، مملو از توصیف‌های غنی و بینش‌های عمیقی است که خوانندگان را به پرسش در مورد ماهیت واقعیت و روش‌هایی که زبان درک ما از جهان را شکل می‌دهد، به چالش می‌کشد. کاوش رمان در رابطه بین زبان و خشونت به ویژه قانع کننده است و دیدگاه منحصر به فردی را در مورد پیچیدگی های ارتباط و ارتباط انسانی ارائه می دهد.
شخصیت‌های «نام‌ها» پیچیده و جذاب هستند، هر کدام با دوراهی‌های وجودی خود دست و پنجه نرم می‌کنند و در دنیایی که اغلب احساس آشفتگی و نامطمئن می‌کند به دنبال معنا هستند. سفر خودیابی جیمز آکس هم گیرا و هم تکان دهنده است، زیرا او با مرگ و میر خود روبرو می شود و تلاش می کند تا نیروهای مرموز موجود در اطرافش را درک کند.
"نام ها"نیاز به توجه دقیق به جزئیات و تمایل به درگیر شدن با تفکرات فلسفی خود دارد، اما به خوانندگان یک تجربه خواندنی عمیقا رضایت بخش و از نظر فکری تحریک کننده پاداش می دهد.