Comments on Cosmopolis? Here are two (1, 2) reviews.
Posted by mgk at November 14, 2004 12:43 PMI was wondering what the general feeling was regarding the book. Did people enjoy it? Was the lack of conventional plot and characters a hinderance to the reading?
One thing I loved about it was the attention to detail. It was the artist Delillo not the essayist Delillo that caught my attention in Underworld and this carries over to Cosmopolis; the description of the burning man is chilling and beautiful at the same time.
And the rectal exam is both incredibly uncomfortable and hilarious.
to anyone who felt that the self-immolation scene was unbelievable: http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/11/15/man.afire/index.html
and regarding the rectal exam part: i burst into laughing at the absurdity of eric's request to the woman in the limo with him at the time. the sheer unexpected quality of his language at that moment appealed to me in the manner of magical realism, like i couldnt believe what he had just said. his swagger and cockiness in that one moment is a testament to how powerful he is in the financial world, or at least to how he sees himself - his self image.
Posted by: robbie at November 16, 2004 02:43 AMa-and did anyone else notice delillo's use of the phrase "meat space"?
Posted by: robbie at November 16, 2004 02:46 AMI asked Nick Montfort to expand on the comment about the last page of the text in his review. Here's what he sent me (posted with permission):
--
Page 209 of Cosmopolis, the last page of the
text, is a "full" page of text in that the text runs all the way to the
bottom of the page, even with the bottom of the text on the facing page,
208.
The way I read the book, and imagine other readers (at least some others)
encountering the book, is like so: After reading the two sentences at the
bottom of page 209,
"This is not the end. He is dead inside the crystal of his watch but still
alive in original space, waiting for the shot to sound."
The reader turns the page, wondering if the sounding of the shot and the
death of the protagonist is going to be narrated next, not knowing whether
the text of the novel is over or not. In fact, while the number of pages
remaining makes it clear that the end is pretty near, the reader has every
reason to believe that the text of the novel is not yet over. Remember,
the reader has just explicitly been told that "This is not the end," and
the narrator is himself waiting for the shot to sound, to fulfill the
prophesy of his watch. (A twist on Quentin's watch in the Sound and the
Fury, I think.) Everything is tuned towards anticipation rather than
conclusion.
The next page is blank. There is nothing on it. I think of this blank
page, not the two sentences that I quoted above, as being the true
conclusion of the novel. I am keeping in mind here that this is an author
who had the audacity to conclude his 827-page life's masterwork with a
paragraph of a single word, "Peace." DeLillo is clearly someone who thinks
about last lines and last words very deeply, and who is willing to be
outrageous in fashioning a conclusion.
So, I think DeLillo asks us to read the blank page at the end of novel as
its conclusion. Here are some readings:
- The blank page can be imagined as the cessation of Eric Packer's
consciousness. It could be seen as an existentialist conclusion in which
the focalizing existence is erased, it just ends, and so nothing can be
said. There can only be the absence of text.
- It could be read as the opposite: silence instead of the shot that is
anticipated. What would happen if Eric Packer is *not* killed at the end
of novel? Wouldn't that conclusion be even more disturbing? But in fact,
he isn't killed at the end of the novel. The text describing his death is
just not there. There's just a blank page.
- The blank page could be read as the end of DeLillo's imagining.
Incidentally, but only incidentally, it is also the end of the imagined
Eric Packer. (The note about DeLillo on the recto would suggest this
reading.) You could argue that DeLillo is never metafictional in this way
in the text, but this particular move isn't done in what would usually
be thought of as the text.
- The blank page could be the space which DeLillo leaves for the reader,
inviting the reader to kill Eric Packer, to imagine his death, a death
which the author himself has refused to imagine by refusing to write a
description of it.
I'm sure there are other interesting ways to read the blank page, too.
My sense is that designer Erich Hobbing, who also designed Underworld,
would never have "accidentally" aligned the bottom of the last page in
this way. My impression is that a top typographer would normally work
quite hard to avoid doing this, so as not to confuse the reader about
whether or not they've reached the end of the book. I've heard from Robert
Pinsky that Elizabeth Bishop went so far as to rearrange the order of her
poems in "Geography III" to avoid something like this occuring in that
book of poems, so it seems like something that at least some authors would
be sensitive to, also.
Given DeLillo's deep interest in and relationship to Joyce -- and, no
doubt, his awareness of the issues swirling around the large black dot at
the end of the "Ithaca" chapter of Ulysses -- and given the obvious
relationship of Cosmopolis to Ulysses -- I wouldn't put it past him to be
this attentive to typography, and perhaps even to conceive of the blank
page, in part, as his literary answer to the large black dot.
-Nick Montfort
In response to Josh L's post:
"American teenagers in a stylized riot, with music that took you over, replacing your skin and brain with digital tissue...something infectous in the air...the spectacle of massed dance in a theatre stripped of seats of paint and history ...First you were apart and watching and then you were in , and with, and of the crowd, and then you were the crowd, densely assembled and dancing as one" (cosmopolis bottom of p.126).
i love delillo's descriptions as well. i really like this music scene which reminds me of klara sax, the crowd in the baseball game in underworld, edgar in cyberspace, and of that rave/orgy scene when morpheus addresses the crowd in the matrix.
In class, some were unhappy w/ the style of this text and preferred underworld.
i was wondering why he went from a huge text like underworld to a compressed cosmopolis. the way the type looks on the page is just like the type on the pages of underworld. he could be trying a new literary style, but i was wondering was cosmopolis a response to our culture not wanting to read big books?
Zbigniew Herbert (1924-?)- Polish poet, wrote lots of good stuff. Not very well known. The quote is from his work, Report from the besieged city & other poems, 1985. Hard to find book, expensive online. Outlandish, a bit, interesting at the same time.
The concept of the rat as currency is an interesting and complex one. With the exponential growth of urbanization and thus, capital, the most organic barometer of this growth is the growth of rats. It ties back into the concept of trash and waste, but it also speaks volumes about equilibrium and nature's fleeting grip upon these forces (fleeting, yet still there).
etc, etc, etc...
Posted by: Faryan at November 17, 2004 09:36 PM