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A review by blueyorkie
Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo
3.0
Don DeLillo, born in 1936 in the Bronx district of New York, is an American writer. Author of short stories, plays, screenplays, and articles, he is best known for his novels. But unfortunately, Great Jones Street, his second novel (1973), was only translated by us in 2011. And let's say it right away, it's not his best, even for me, who is an admirer of this writer.
Don DeLillo is not always an easy-to-read author, so with this novel, either you'll get hooked from the first pages, or you'll give up right away, and in this case, you'll join those who see it as big nonsense - which I can understand but who I didn't dislike.
Let's try a summary of the plot: Bucky, the narrator, a rock star in the grip of a spiritual crisis, abandons his group without warning and goes to hide in the seedy apartment of his girlfriend Opel, absent, located in Great Jones Street, in Manhattan, New York. He wants calm and solitude, but he will surround by a pack of undesirables of all stripes, eager for various reasons to bring him back into the world which continues to turn inexorably.
Some, like Dr. Pepper or Bohack, want to get their hands on a mysterious package given to Bucky by a third party, possibly containing a new drug with unknown effects of great interest to the Happy Valley farming community split into two rival currents. ; Globke, his manager, wants him to get another package (!) containing recordings/demos made by Bucky in his chalet in the mountains.
As the reader ventures – it is the case to say it – in the novel, he has the distinct impression of reading the confessions of a paranoid drug addict. Bucky is the literary synthesis of all the symbolic figures of rock, stars of the star system: crushed by a world celebrity, unwittingly becoming a kind of messiah for a public eager for the slightest of his gestures, his slightest word, or any belch. His existential crisis resembles a depression tinged with paranoia, which gives his words a questioning echo for the reader: who are these people who contact him and hold a particularly twisted, even incomprehensible language? Is it a pure invention of his brain or a distortion of reality? Is he on a chemical trip?
This fact is why reading this novel is complex. Either you let yourself be carried away by these ramblings that will stun you by the overflowing imagination of Don DeLillo, or you give up. Suddenly, we are entitled to ask not "How can we read that? but rather, how does a writer manage to "write that?" But beware, this three-dimensional balancing act holds! In this verbal delirium, slip theories and attempts at explanations (which we will accept or not).
Of course, behind the form, there is the substance. The writer is not content to swing stories at the bite-me-the-knot for free. He brings out the heavy artillery to denounce. I quote in bulk: rumors and the manipulation of words (he predicts Twitter?), conspiratorial paranoia with this drug which would be a creation of the government to deprive its opponents of language, the economy market ("If there is not yet a market for a lambda product, a new market automatically develops..."), the media, a particular success ("Megadeceit. Big mouth. Unimaginable insults. Pious lies to the small week. Pukes of all kinds. Betrayal of friends that we brag about. These are the things that give you stature in this industry."), the relationship between art and money. And in the middle of all this (modern Society), Man (Bucky) is a prisoner of his role/habit (rock star).
The novel, which is not the best of the author but with the acceptable excuse of being only his second work, is complex to read but not without charms for those interested.
Don DeLillo is not always an easy-to-read author, so with this novel, either you'll get hooked from the first pages, or you'll give up right away, and in this case, you'll join those who see it as big nonsense - which I can understand but who I didn't dislike.
Let's try a summary of the plot: Bucky, the narrator, a rock star in the grip of a spiritual crisis, abandons his group without warning and goes to hide in the seedy apartment of his girlfriend Opel, absent, located in Great Jones Street, in Manhattan, New York. He wants calm and solitude, but he will surround by a pack of undesirables of all stripes, eager for various reasons to bring him back into the world which continues to turn inexorably.
Some, like Dr. Pepper or Bohack, want to get their hands on a mysterious package given to Bucky by a third party, possibly containing a new drug with unknown effects of great interest to the Happy Valley farming community split into two rival currents. ; Globke, his manager, wants him to get another package (!) containing recordings/demos made by Bucky in his chalet in the mountains.
As the reader ventures – it is the case to say it – in the novel, he has the distinct impression of reading the confessions of a paranoid drug addict. Bucky is the literary synthesis of all the symbolic figures of rock, stars of the star system: crushed by a world celebrity, unwittingly becoming a kind of messiah for a public eager for the slightest of his gestures, his slightest word, or any belch. His existential crisis resembles a depression tinged with paranoia, which gives his words a questioning echo for the reader: who are these people who contact him and hold a particularly twisted, even incomprehensible language? Is it a pure invention of his brain or a distortion of reality? Is he on a chemical trip?
This fact is why reading this novel is complex. Either you let yourself be carried away by these ramblings that will stun you by the overflowing imagination of Don DeLillo, or you give up. Suddenly, we are entitled to ask not "How can we read that? but rather, how does a writer manage to "write that?" But beware, this three-dimensional balancing act holds! In this verbal delirium, slip theories and attempts at explanations (which we will accept or not).
Of course, behind the form, there is the substance. The writer is not content to swing stories at the bite-me-the-knot for free. He brings out the heavy artillery to denounce. I quote in bulk: rumors and the manipulation of words (he predicts Twitter?), conspiratorial paranoia with this drug which would be a creation of the government to deprive its opponents of language, the economy market ("If there is not yet a market for a lambda product, a new market automatically develops..."), the media, a particular success ("Megadeceit. Big mouth. Unimaginable insults. Pious lies to the small week. Pukes of all kinds. Betrayal of friends that we brag about. These are the things that give you stature in this industry."), the relationship between art and money. And in the middle of all this (modern Society), Man (Bucky) is a prisoner of his role/habit (rock star).
The novel, which is not the best of the author but with the acceptable excuse of being only his second work, is complex to read but not without charms for those interested.