I’m not really a fan of Don Delillo from the other books of his I’ve read (White Noise, Mao II) and annoyingly I think there are a few of his on my list, so I’ll have to get through them at some point, but when I picked this one up I was already prepared for a bit of a slog.
Libra is a fictionalised version of the events leading up to Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination of JFK – to be honest I don’t really know much about the actual events so couldn’t really make a comparison with any already accumulated history knowledge. It follows Oswald from his childhood/awkward adolescence to his time as a marine to his emigration to Russia (led by communist leanings) where he marries; back to the US where he is eventually noticed by a group plotting to (I think if I’ve got this right) attempt an assassination on JFK but not actually carry it out (?) – because of something to do with Cuba and Castro… as you can see a bit of it was lost on me.
The main reason for this is I think the same reason that I don’t especially enjoy Delillo’s work – in that, regardless of subject matter, I don’t find his style of writing particularly engaging. In refreshing my memory of the book via Wikipedia the article notes that Oswald neither presented sympathetically nor demonised; but I think this additional level of detachment adds to the barrier I already feel between myself and Delillo’s characters which is forged by his narrative style and results in an overall lack of interest. I would say that I prefer Libra to either of his other novels (White Noise started out okay but really dragged at the end and didn’t leave a great first impression) but I’m not in any kind of hurry to read a fourth.
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