Profil

I don't really know what to make of this book. Firstly, it's very short, which made it difficult for me to really get into it. Secondly, the dialogue is quite scarce, so the characterization of the protagonists is rather sketchy. Even the plot is very bare and while you wonder what's going on, the main theme is rather how people react to the crisis, what they say, what they do, than about what caused the crisis. I can't say I didn't like it, and I liked it much better after a second read, but compared to the other novels by Don DeLillo that I've read, it's different. So if you want to get to know this author, I'd rather recommend "White Noise" or, if you're feeling brave, the monumental "Underworld".

I don't really know what to make of this book. Firstly, it's very short, which made it difficult for me to really get into it. Secondly, the dialogue is quite scarce, so the characterization of the protagonists is rather sketchy. Even the plot is very bare and while you wonder what's going on, the main theme is rather how people react to the crisis, what they say, what they do, than about what caused the crisis. I can't say I didn't like it, and I liked it much better after a second read, but compared to the other novels by Don DeLillo that I've read, it's different. So if you want to get to know this author, I'd rather recommend "White Noise" or, if you're feeling brave, the monumental "Underworld".

This was probably one of the hardest and best books I've ever read. A deliberately ahistorical historical novel, it tells the story of two men, one an astronomer, the other a surveyor, about whom very little is actually known, in the form of a picaresque tale that tells a story within a story, with some digressions into even deeper layers of narrative. All sorts of absurd episodes about talking dogs, flying magicians and the hollow earth are interwoven. Nevertheless, you learn a lot about history, including historiography and how much you can trust it, but also about colonial America, slavery, astronomy, seafaring and much more, and of course about the surveying of the Mason-Dixon line, which was an engineering achievement at the time and is still regarded as the dividing line between the northern and southern states of the United States. The novel is at times terribly funny and at other times equally tragic, with occasional detours into the absurd. Because of the very sophisticated style, with eighteenth-century vocabulary and spelling, you should have a dictionary and an encyclopaedia handy, but then it's great fun. I'm looking forward to reading it again some day.