Cosmopolis

Eric Packer believes that there is order and symmetry in everything in the world. With this premise he became wealthy, by predicting how currencies rise and dip. Just a few times does he let himself wander in the realm of the metaphysical, but as he says: "Freud is finished, Einstein is next". To him the world is made up of 1s and 0s. This makes him, especially in the eyes of the people whose money he manages, a visionary. He has eye for the mathematical oddities, his building has a prime number of floors and later, when he meets someone who will change his life forever, after he has lost all his money, the age of that person is 41, also a prime number. But he feels `unheimisch' as if something is going to happen that he cannot control, as he asks his passengers on page 14. It is something that he cannot predict, while he can predict almost everything. When he is unsettled, his elevator plays Satie and ¼ speed, when he knows who he is, he dresses in double time. Eric Packer spends most of the novel in a white limousine on the streets of New York. Not a smooth ride as the President of the United States and the funeral procession of one of his favorite rap stars, who he plays in one of his elevators all the time, are halting him. Time around the limo changes speed. Sometimes they stand still, sometimes people hurry by. While in the limo he watches tv and sees two of his rivals being killed on tv. He loves it, loves the replays (replaying time) and slow motion (slowing of time). DeLillo's play with time is amazing. He slows it down, speeds it up, as if time is anything but a constant. In the limo Eric sees building in the distance, built just to speed up time. During the ride he speaks with his company philosopher who mentions that `the idea is time, living in the future'. Clock time accelerated production, making time a corporate asset. She predicts something will happen to correct this acceleration. When they are looking at a ticker, they cannot even read everything, it is going too fast, `too fleet to be absorbed'. But to him it's the sacred flow of information, and information is life. In earlier works DeLillo has critized the corporate, capitalist society that we all live in. A society that makes people more removed from themselves. Eric is the perfect example; he likes the void in poems, likes to see people get killed and even kills himself. He is comparable to the main character from Easton Ellis' `American Psycho'. When things get asymmetrical, he loses touch. To keep some sense of being alive, he has his heart checked every day by a doctor and sees it every day on a little heart monitor. Again DeLillo shows why he is one of the most important authors of the last 25 years. The novel is short, but every sentence holds a promise that there is more to come. When you read the book for a second time you will be pleasantly surprised. My favorite DeLillo after `Underworld'. A great fin-de-siecle book.

The 'plot' is a limo ride through a major city. But it's a one-day excursion as much as is Joyce's 'Ulysses.' That one day may just as well be a year, a lifetime or an era. Time is distorted; events are surreal; what seems coincidental, isn't. Don't expect everything to make sense in a rational, cognitive way.A man begins his day with everything, and ends it with nothing. His ideas, beliefs and body slowly lose their integrity. The story is not a puzzle with clearly edged chunks of interlocking pieces, but a constantly spinning web whose strands are spun by employees, lovers, a wife and a barber. As the story evolves, the man devolves. There's dry wit and Monty Pythonesque lunacy. There's the microcosm reflected in the macrocosm and vice versa. Even when inane, the ideas expressed are fascinating.COSMOPOLIS sometimes enlightened me, and other times confused me. After my mind digests it a bit, I'll read it again.

Don DeLillo again shows that he's our best novelist of American absurdity with this strange off-kilter comedy that centers around the events of an eventful day in Manhattan. Against a backdrop of raves, a Presidential motorcade, a rock star's funeral, mysterious street demonstrations and the constant, ghostly electronic feed of news of pending financial disaster, a young billionaire asset manager limousines uptown to get a haircut in order to embrace his sense of inevitable, personal apocalypse. DeLillo's writing is outstanding, funny with a cool lyricism, poetic when you least expect it. The brillance here, as with "White Noise" and especially "Mao ll" is the way characters seek to reconfigure their metaphors, their assuring base of references , once their world view is rattled and made less authortative by unexplainable events and human quirks. This is semiotics at its best, an erotic activity where DeLillo probes and glides over the surfaces of ideas , notions, theories and their artifacts, things intellectual and material emptied of meaning, purpose. It's a hallmark of DeLillo's mastery of language that he gets that psychic activity that constantly tries to reinfuse the world with meaning and purpose after the constructions are laid bare; Eric, here in this world of commodity trading, which he regards as natural force that he's mastered and control, attempts to reintroduce mystery into the world he is trapped in. He is bored beyond the grave with the results of his luck. His efforts to live dangerously , spontaneously and thus get a perception he hadn't had and perhaps secure a hint of a metaphysical infrastructure that eludes, all turn badly, but for DeLillo's art it's not what is found , discovered, or resolved through the extensions of language, but rather the journey itself, the constant connecting of things with other things in the world; this is the poetry of the human need to make sense of things in the great , invisible state beyond the senses, a negoiation with death. His imagistic tilling of the semiotic field yields the sort of endless irony that makes for the kind of truly subversive comedy, a sort of satire that contains the straining cadences of prophecy. The city, the place where the the hydra-headed strands of commerce, history, technology and government merge in startling combinations of applied power, becomes an amorphous cluster of symbols whose life and vitality come to seem as fragile and short-lived as living matter itself. A major novel by one of our great literary artists.

There are a lot of people who say that DeLillo doesn't create characters, but rather automatons that spit out obscure theses. These are the same people that think that Platonic dialogues are about what Plato thought rather than what Athens was. DeLillo's characters are not mouthpieces; the ideas these characters voice are indications of the ordering -- or disordering -- of their souls. Like Plato, DeLillo is probing the emotional life of ideas.Eric Packer, the protagonist, is the epitome of the class of get-rich-quick internet tycoons that came about in the 90s. What marks him as a member of this class is his faith in the power of information technology to predict the future and thus make the future bend to the will of the present. His lusts and manias are a diagnosis of a certain overreaching mindset from which we have not entirely freed ourselves.However, what distinguishes Eric from his class is that his faith in information technology amounts to being a real religious devotion. Eric is a continuation of DeLillo's investigation into modern manifestations of the desire for religious trascendence. To paraphrase DeLillo, when the old God leaves the world, what happens to all the leftover faith? Eric clings to computer screens the way people once clung to holy texts. In his delusion, he experiences information as a communion with the whole of reality as such: reading a computer screen, he thinks, "Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our bodies and oceans were here, knowable and whole."But he is also a sort of Oedipus. He does not know who he is. His turn towards technology is a way of escaping something in himself, a past that haunts him. In the end, the book is a story about a man losing his faith and rediscovering, for better and for worse, all the things from which his faith was an escape.To be sure, this novel is not for everyone. For one thing, DeLillo never really decides whether he wants his fiction to be placed in a realistic or theoretical landscape -- is this our world or some imagined, symbolic world? Perhaps in 50 years we will thank him for refusing to make such a distinction, but for now, the book strains one's ability and willingness to become attuned to it. At the same time, he is moving away from the Joycean lushness of his earlier style towards a Beckettian starkness that many readers will find taxing. Nevertheless, the book is special for refusing to be what a book is supposed to be. Like the later experimental work of John Coltrane, Cosmopolis is at once exhausting and invigorating.

I read "Cosmopolis" more as another part of DeLillo's body of work than as a stand-alone book, because, almost immmediately, I noticed the tight thickness of the prose and felt that he was trying to capture and convey the same kind of depth he did in "Underworld" but on a smaller scale. This novel is full of perfect sentences that can either enhance or erase themselves after considered reading. The setting and characters are wonderfully suited to the method, a frontier world for the new language DeLillo is still drafting.