Don DeLillo - Libra

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Libra: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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For a few years, this book was everywhere-if by everywhere one means used bookstore shelves and remainder tables-a very visible reminder of what happens when the publishing industry misjudges a print run. I bought three or four copies of the book, not because I didn't remember buying it but because every six months the price would be even lower. The copy I read was a two dollar paperback, but I'm sure there's the dollar hardcover still on my shelves, probably right next to where the three dollar and four dollar hardcovers used to sit. Stupidly, I assumed that this meant Libra was a bad book, an assumption my seven dollar copy of Infinite Jest should have disproved. But even after reading and enjoying White Noise, I didn't think of reading Libra. Only recently, scrambling around on my shelves for prose that would actually inspire me, did I pick it up. I'm ashamed to admit I was desperate, yet the shame is mitigated by the rewards I received.
Libra is proof that the best authors can do anything they want. A book about Lee Harvey Oswald, Libra manages to get into Oswald's head and yet leave him a mystery because DeLillo knows the degree to which some men are enigmas even to themselves. A book about the history of event, and the John F. Kennedy assassination, Libra is also a study of the men who shape history, and the men who record history. And best of all, a book about society and the forces sweeping through it, Libra feels like a personal statement, an honest challenge to measure oneself, an expression of intimacy in recounting an event in which so many have lost themselves by creating paranoid spirals that are both joyous and dreadful celebrations of the helplessness of the self.
DeLillo accomplishes this by doing what I believe is a fairly radical act: daring to empathize with Lee Harvey Oswald (I can't help but think this is what led George Will to denounce Libra as "an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship"). I barely know anything about DeLillo, and yet even to me, the very first section, In The Bronx, a section that opens with an anonymous "he" riding the subway to the ends of the city ("There was so much iron in the sound of those curves he could almost taste it, like a toy you put in your mouth when you are little."), seems an acknowledgment of equivalency-DeLillo grew up in the Bronx, and generously gives young Oswald, who is living there at the book's opening, the keenly observed details only a longtime resident or a talented artist might notice. From this, DeLillo measures Oswald's meandering grasping life in terms with which any struggling artist, feeling adrift and alone in the grip of a desire to accomplish something great, could identify. (Until finally, after the shooting of Kennedy, Oswald making his way through the poor section of Dallas avoiding police, there is this: "A dozen old hair-drying machines stood along the curbside. A mattress on a lawn. He wanted to write short stories about contemporary American life.") By the end, DeLillo gives us Oswald as someone almost like Kafka's hunger artist ("He is commenting on the documentary footage even as it is being shot. Then he himself is shot, and shot, and shot, and the look becomes another kind of knowledge. But he has made us part of his dying."), revealing the horror of art and its motivations when they cannot escape into art's abstract realm.
Libra also considers the men who might have been involved in the plot to kill a president, moving inside the heads of George de Mohrenschildt, crime lord Carmine Latta, Jack Ruby, Agency spook T.J. Mackey and most stunningly David Ferrie, the odd hairless man somehow always at the center of everything. Ferrie was a man who might have been famously eccentric on his own, what with his rare disease that rendered him completely hairless, and resultant crazy wigs and glued on eyebrows, and pilot's uniforms, and open homosexuality, and links to crime figures, gunrunners, and other figures not normally given to mingling with openly gay wig-wearing hairless men. He feels fully like a literary creation, endlessly chattering on about death, about cancer, about fear, about ESP and hypnotism and astrology, but David Ferrie was a very real figure-one whom DeLillo manages to recreate so completely it feels like an act of utter invention.
And so, mirroring DeLillo, there's Win Everett, a CIA man disgraced by his role in the Bay of Pigs disaster, who hatches the Kennedy assassination plot and similarly finds himself creating a man who already exists. (Everett creates forged documents and fake items to cast Oswald's life in a strangely ambiguous light, so that investigators will continue to follow all the twisting paths to the truths Everett wishes them to discover. But he finds that Oswald, independently of Everett, is creating such a life already, following Everett's plans without actually knowing them.) In the shadow of retirement, Everett plans to refire his countrymen's passion for a democratic Cuba by using a failed assassination attempt on Kennedy; an attempt that, in the following investigation, will also throw light on the CIA's role (and his own) in the overthrow of Cuba. Everett is the artist at another extreme, safely installed in American culture (married, with a young daughter, teaching at Texas Women's University), and yet also plotting to change the way Americans see America, with a plan that, like the best literature, mixes the deeply personal with the sweepingly resonant. It is Everett that observes: "Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the nature of death is woven into the nature of every plot. A narrative plot no less than a conspiracy of armed men." It is, of course, the observation of a writer.
Everett's twin is Nicholas Branch, a present-day senior analyst of the CIA, hired by them on contract to write the secret history of the assassination of President Kennedy. Branch is thus both a writer and literary critic of historic event: "Let's devote our lives to understanding this moment, separating the elements of each crowded second. We will build theories that gleam like jade idols, intriguing systems of assumption, four-faced, grateful." Throughout most of the book, a section on Branch usually immediately follows or precedes a section on Everett, joining them in the reader's mind, and it is Branch who gets the lines Kennedy conspiracy theorists (of which I could consider myself, if there is a weight division below "piker") will find the richest, such as referring to the Warren Report as "the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he'd moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred" and commenting on how different Oswald looks from one photo to the next. (I laughed out loud at the description of a famous photo of Oswald as a marine, with a group of fellow marines on a rattan mat under palm trees: "Four or five men face the camera. They all look like Oswald. Branch thinks they look more like Oswald than the figure in profile, officially identified as him." This was doubly funny to me having just seen the photo on the web, the day before I read that section, and, without registering it, having thought the same thing.) (Of course, now, just a few days later, I can't find that photo online anymore.)
And it is through Branch, I think, that DeLillo writes the lines emphasizing how the creation of event and the creation of fiction are conjoined. Referring to Branch's paper-laden workroom, there is this: "This is the room of dreams, the room where it has taken him all these years to learn that his subject is not politics or violent crimes but men in small rooms." The men in Libra, including Lee Harvey Oswald, are such men, as are all writers. But Libra is all too aware of how such men, like Branch himself (in his small room seeing his subject as men in small rooms), and perhaps like all men, are ultimately only capable of writing on the vast skein of reality not what they do know, but merely tacit admissions of everything they don't know-about themselves and about the world, and about the strange vector where the two unknown variables meet, creating the ambiguous equations of history.

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"Please. You volunteered your services to the FBI in March 1959. They opened a file."

"Jack, you know as well as I."

"Potential criminal informant. You informed a little bit here, a little bit there."

"This is for my own protection in case something is held against me, so I can say look."

"Jack, it means nothing to me personally. I appreciate you are known in New Orleans, you are known in Dallas, You are a constant face in Dallas."

"I have associations going back to the old Chicago days which I am prouder of than anything in my life, Newberry Street, Morgan Street, the pushcarts, the gangs."

"We all love the old Chicago stories. What do you think I was born here? Nobody is born in Dallas. We all carry the old Chicago thing, and the street life, and the scrappy days. But we are speaking here about a very sizable loan and the boys are naturally picky who gets the use of their capital."

Jack went through his desk drawers.

"Look, I can show you notices of tax liens, rejections of compromise offers. They're all over me about excise taxes. I am getting killed, Jack. They have history sheets on me this thick. I keep running in to pay cash in trickles. Two hundred dollars, two hundred and fifty dollars. In other words to show them some concern. But it's like a kid on an errand. I am in for over forty-four thousand dollars to the IRS alone and on top of that there is this union that wants me to ease up on the hours of the girls, there is this competition next door that is killing me with amateur nights and there is this girl from New Orleans that's gonna close me down for popping her G-string."

Jack Karlinsky had an invisible laugh. You heard it down in his throat but didn't see anything in his face that resembled mirth. He wore a sport coat over a turtleneck shirt and smoked a panatela. Jack checked out the shoes and haircut. He admitted left and right he was still learning how to live.

"I am telling my lawyer to settle eight cents on the dollar."

"Jack, they will tell you."

"I know."

"This is not a proposal they are drooling to accept."

"So I have to resolve in my own mind."

"You have to resolve in your own mind who you want to owe this money to. It is not found money. I have structured a deal here that I am not looking to pull in five points a week like the neighborhood loanshark. We are talking about a forty-thousand-dollar loan. We are speaking in a range of one thousand dollars a week vigorish."

"Which is ninety-two thousand total after one year."

"Or you keep paying the vig."

"Till my balls drop off."

"This is correct, Jack."

"Just to say. What if I can't pay one week?"

"One week, they will let it ride. They don't want to pop you on the head, Jack. They let it ride."

"Two, three weeks."

"The procedure you would do here is take out a second loan. This is not a good idea because you would pay the vig on one amount while they are actually giving you a lesser amount. Frankly, do you want my advice?"

"What?"

"Frankly, don't take the loan. You can't make a vig like that with your kind of operation that you're running here. You will fall deep into the pit."

"It's my pit, Jack."

"It's your pit but it's not your money."

"What happens, just saying, if I miss five weeks, six weeks?"

"If you are bled totally dry and white, they will simply stop the clock. Which is, pay the principal, forget the interest. In other words this fellow is known to us and we will settle for a piece of his business plus the original sum. They don't want to blow up the building."

"But they will grab my business."

"This is the ballfield you're playing on."

"What if I can't pay the principal?"

"Jack, this is what I'm telling you. I'm saying explore other avenues."

"A bank would make a credit check. They won't give me ten cents."

"Think of friends, relatives. Take a partner into the business."

"I can't work with other people. I already have backers. My sister manages the Vegas for me. We fight all the time."

"You strike me a little unreasonable. You have to grasp a major point. You are not outfit, Jack. Understand connected."

The drums were going out front.

"All right. Say this. I am willing to go for five hundred a week interest over one year when the convention business will pick up by then."

"I structured a serious deal here."

"Jack, take it to them and tell them. Mention I talk to Tony Push all the time. He has the reputation he's very close to Carmine Latta."

"Carmine is not in loanshark in a big way."

"I am only saying make a statement that I am known to Tony Astorina."

Karlinsky looked at him. A silent countdown. Then he said he would do whatever Jack asked. He had a deep, smooth and reasonable voice, gone hollow now, and a house with a giant searchlight, and a perfect turquoise pool, and four daughters and a son, and Jack Ruby wondered if this is what it takes to look invincible.

They shook hands in the doorway and then the older man stepped back into the office, briefly, as if he had a happy secret to reveal.

"The jacket is mohair. Look."

Then they walked to the head of the narrow stairway that led down to the street. They shook hands again. The saxophone was blatting. Jack took a Preludin with a glass of water at the bar for a favorable future outlook. Then he walked among the tables to mingle with the crowd. What is the point of running a club if you can't do that?

Dinner at home was a quiet affair with harpsichord concertos on the stereo and conversation coming in small runs. Beryl watched her husband raise the wineglass to his lips. Larry didn't drink his wine. He chewed it. To savor the tonality-the dryness, or the wetness. This is how we build a civilization, he liked to say. We chew our wine.

"You don't look happy," she said. "You haven't looked happy in a while. I want you to feel good again. Say something funny."

"You're the funny one."

"I am always the funny one, the strange one, the tiny one. I want you to assume one of these thankless roles."

They ate in silence for some moments.

"Remember the missile flap?" he said. "It's about ten months now since U-2 planes photographed offensive missiles in Cuba. Guess what? They've come up with something new."

"Do I want to know what it is?"

"A Soviet surveying team has found a major oil field. And it's precisely the area where I'd arranged drilling contracts. I saw the photos last week and they were so detailed I could recognize the terrain. I was there. I stood right there. I visited the fields. We did mineral surveys. There was serious money behind us."

"Your oil. Your field."

"Ours. And better ours than the goddamn Russians. You know what they'll do to that island. Drain the living blood out of it."

"I don't doubt it. But it's hard sometimes to live with a man who never, never, never lets go."

"This is damn right I don't let go."

They let it drop for a while. She got up and turned over the record. It was raining hard and she caught a glimpse of someone running in the street.

"Let me explain about obsessions," he said.

"Oh yes please."

"I take a sweeping view of the subject."

"God yes."

"It's the job of an intelligence service to resolve a nation's obsessions. Cuba is a fixed idea. It is prickly in a way Russia is not. More unresolved. More damaging to the psyche. And this is our job, to remove the psychic threat, to learn so much about Castro, decipher his intentions, undermine his institutions to such a degree that he loses the power to shape the way we think, to shape the way we sleep at night."

"Maybe what I don't understand is why Cuba. Do I know the first thing about this island? Is it West Indian, is it Spanish, is it white, is it black, is it mulatto, is it Latin American, is it Creole, is it Chinese? Why do we think it belongs to us?"

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