Having read some other DeLillo, I had high hopes for this book and wow I could barely get through it. But, I was hoping to read a novel that was genuinely interested in math and mathematicians. This is not that.

DeLillo's mathematicians looked to me like arty literary types playing mathematicians at a costume party, using big words to impress each other in their mutual ignorance. The math is half-educated simplistic stuff, basic calculations and concepts that average middle-schoolers could get through and that aren't the kind of thing actual mathematics bothers with. "A perfumed fog, shot through with lightning" as a much better novelist said.

And then, why a Nobel (there isn't one for math) instead of a Fields medal? Why all the gross-out schtick? Moving on.

Vero, Don DeLillo è un grande, e Rumore bianco e Underworld mi sono piaciuti tantissimo. Nonostante ciò non sono riuscita minimamente a digerire La stella di Ratner, che alterna momenti di bellissima prosa, scritta meravigliosamente, eppure del tutto inutile, a momenti di noia profondissima, a cambi di prospettiva tanto spiazzanti quanto ingiustificati, a flashback inutili.
Il libro, nonostante ciò, è celebratissimo.
Che sia il potere dell'incomunicabilità?

ended up being long-winded and tedious

Ratner Star

P241, death, v. like W.N.
P222, power of alphabet, "If you know the right combination of letters, you can make anything."
p13 1st full P, "Mathematics made sense."


Ratner Star

!!Q p195, "Existence would be sheer dread without the verifiable fictions of mathematics."
"Watch out for your nervous system in particular." (235)

!?Q end p357, "What we're really doing..."

Q p50, "I think I'm finally tired of being made to journey from speculation to accepted fact and from there to sudden doubt, denial, and contention."
p125, "If dreams don't exceed grasp, all human life is futile."

"What's black and white, left or right, growing little and has no middle?"
"Two answers really. A book that's being read. The universe itself." (173/6)


****

Nascent genius at work. One of those charming episodes of an author "finding their voice." (Except that's not true, it's his 4th novel and DeLillo'd been writing essays too)

4 stars. Big ideas but perhaps without properly fitted britches.

****

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
...
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
...
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons
...
I should have been a pair of ragged claws

- "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

*

I fell into a real love-hate relationship with this one.

4.5 stars. Big ideas that need to go see a tailor about resizing them britches.

*****

Bear with me here,

DeLillo tells of a mathematician driven to madness who now lives in a hole eating grubs. It is not always "screamingly" funny but that's splitting hairs. It's pretty darn funny. But here's the thing: you gotta suspend a lot of disbelief to let the joke land. You may "get" it right away but to enjoy it, to keep it from becoming tiresome, you have to lean into the weirdness.

Bear with me here,

Einstein tells of a space-time that is curved by gravity and experienced at different rates relative to the observer.
Assuming a spherical cow...
Given an infinite number of monkeys...
On an island where the barber shaves everyone who does not shave themselves...

Math is not always "realistically" logical but that's splitting hairs. It's pretty darn logical. But here's the thing: you gotta suspend a lot of disbelief to let the theories play out. You may "get" it but to use it, to identify value amid abstraction, you have to lean into the weirdness.

5 starss


~\/~

A book so nice
Should be read twice
A book so nast'
Can't be read fast(y)

5 stars. Hurts the noggin. In a good way.

Through the mohole.

I enjoyed it very much.

This seems to be the novel where DeLillo finally wrote the type of work using his full capacity. It's certainly in his top-tier, even though I had to re-read many pages just to get through it. DeLillo basically gave the novel its own language and form to understand itself, and you might, miiiight "get it" by the end. It is probably better the second time around, which is equally fulfilling and annoying since there are so many good novels to get through.

DeLillo describes the book (and his career) pretty well about 3/4 through, when he gives a write-up on a fictional Nobel Prize in Literature winner (it could also apply to Thomas Ruggles Pynchon):

“recognition of a near century of epic, piquant disquisitions on the philosophy of logic, the logic of games, the gamesmanship of fiction and prehistory, these early efforts preparing the way for speculative meditations on the ‘unsolvable knot’ of science and mysticism, which in turn led to his famous ‘afterthoughts’ on the ethereally select realms of abstract mathematics and the more palpable subheights of history and biography, every published work of this humanist and polymath reflective of an incessant concern for man’s standing in the biosphere and hand-blocked in a style best characterized as undiscourageably diffuse.”

Not one of his better efforts. Couldn't finish it.