The " Body Artist" opens with a breakfast scene in a rambling rented house somewhere on the New England coast. We meet Lauren Hartke, the body artist of the title, and her husband Rey Robles, a much older, thrice-married film-director. Through their delicate, intimate, half-complete thoughts and words DeLillo proves himself a stunningly unsentimental observer of marriage, and of the idiosyncrasies that both isolate and bind us. Rey says he`s taking a drive and he does, all the way to the Manhattan apartment of his first wife. Lauren is left alone, or so she thinks. She is soon to discover, however, that there is a stranger in the house. An eery individual who often speaks in Rey`s voice or in her own, who knows both intimate moments of their past life and things that haven`t yet happened. " A novel that is both slight and profound, a distilled meditation on perception and loss, and a poised, individual ghost story for the twenty-first century" - " Observer" . " A masterful talent is behind its language, so magnificent in simplicity. Inspiring. God, but it`s a beautiful book" - " Independent on Sunday" .
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
What follows is one of the strangest ghost stories since The Turn of the Screw. And like James's tale, it seems to partake of at least seven kinds of ambiguity, leaving the reader to sort out its riddles. Returning to their summer rental after Rey's funeral, Lauren discovers a strange stowaway living in a spare room: an inarticulate young man, perhaps retarded, who may have been there for weeks. His very presence is hard for her to pin down: "There was something elusive in his aspect, moment to moment, a thinning of physical address." Yet soon this mysterious figure begins to speak in Rey's voice, and her own, playing back entire conversations from the days preceding the suicide. Has Lauren's husband been reincarnated? Or is the man simply an eavesdropping idiot savant, reproducing sentences he'd heard earlier from his concealment?
DeLillo refuses any definitive answer. Instead he lets Lauren steep in her grief and growing puzzlement, and speculates in his own voice about this apparent intersection of past and present, life and death. At times his rhetoric gets away from him, an odd thing for such a superbly controlled writer. "How could such a surplus of vulnerability find itself alone in the world?" he asks, sounding as though he's discussing a sick puppy. And Lauren's performances--for she is the body artist of the title--sound pretty awful, the kind of thing Artaud might have cooked up for an aerobics class. Still, when DeLillo reins in the abstractions and bears down, the results are heartbreaking:
Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the ones you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.At this stage of his career, a thin book is an adventure for DeLillo. So is his willingness to risk sentimentality, to immerse us in personal rather than national traumas. For all its flaws, then, The Body Artist is a real, raw accomplishment, and a reminder that bigger, even for so capacious an imagination as DeLillo's, isn't always better. --James Marcus
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Shipping:
FREE
Within U.S.A.
Book Description Condition: New. Book is in NEW condition. 0.79. Seller Inventory # 0330484966-2-1