Customer Reviews

The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is Delillo's first collection of short stories. Underworld was a great book, a big book with big themes and long storylines. This brings him back to scale -- stories that allow him to focus on small, well-contained themes that you can take in and toss around in your mind without a lot of strain.

There are numerous themes in these stories, but the one that grabbed me most was a recurring one-sided way in which characters in the stories bridge the gulf between their own inner lives and those of other people, where they have only the external marks as evidence -- the way they walk, the expressions on their faces, the clothes they wear.

Delillo's characters often encounter each other through this kind of opaque externality, never directly interacting in conversation but constructing whole narratives of familiarity from the barest hints and great leaps of surmise. Leo Zhelezniak in The Starveling, follows, even stalks, a woman who seems to share his own alienated lifestyle, spending their days going from theatre to theatre in New York, watching movies in sequences coordinated with travel times and subway routes. He comes to "know" so much about her without ever talking to her, that he can cross the gulf between them on this bridge he's built entirely on his own, as if the familiarity and shared experience of life he has constructed is really there.

It's something we all do, just not so starkly as Zhelezniak, or the characters in Midnight in Dostoevsky who construct the life of "the man in the hooded coat". We have our daily encounters with one another, and we build our understandings of each other on what, in the full scope of our lives, are really only glimpses. But it is how we understand each other.

It's all a fragility that miraculously holds together, like the highway traffic Jerold Bradway watches in Hammer and Sickle. "Why don't they crash all the time?" he asks, watching cars speeding by under the separate control of distracted drivers, with little actual communication or coordination between them. Like Zhelezniak and other characters in these stories, Bradway looks at the drivers, wondering who they are and where they are going. And at the same time he thinks at least some of them are looking at him, wondering the same things.

When I read White Noise a long time ago, I thought it was one of the best novels I'd ever read. Since then I've made a point of reading everything I could get my hands on by Don Delillo. This is very different, but one of his best, I think.

There is something fascinating and frightening about the way that Don DeLillo sees the world. It's not that he sees it differently than you or I, he sees it more clearly, he makes connections most of us don't dream of. For this reason he has been called "weirdly prophetic" about the millennial decades. For example, the World Trade Center Towers featured prominently as the site for terrorists attacks in more than one novel. How did he know that they would be a target almost 30 years prior to the events of 9/11? He looked at those Towers and saw something so monumental that they would have to come down, one way or another.

These stories span almost over 30 years of time, and DeLillo's writing has under gone many evolutions since then. I've read every single one of his books and many of these stories fit well into the spaces between novels.

I prefer not to summarize plots in my reviews, simply because I go into book and stories completely blind and discover it. I would hate to rob anyone of anything. So, I will say that one of the things I've always loved about DeLillo is the way he takes everyday events and infuses them with a sense of dread. We all get flat tires, or miss flights, or call a wrong number - but in the DeLillo world these things are signs of something much larger at work, even if it's never revealed the fear is felt.

DeLillo recently wrote a short story that was published in the New Yorker called "Midnight In Dostoyevsky," in which two young men follow a man in a strange coat. The act itself is fairly innocent, but the way Delillo writes it makes you wonder if the two boys are going to rob or murder the man in the coat.

The sentences are astonishing, as well as the words he uses, which aren't necessarily big and unpronounceable, but uncannily perfect for whatever he is describing.

My only complaints are I wish this book would have collected more of his stories and "The Angel Esmerelda" will be recognized by those of you who have read "Underworld," although it is a bit different, it still felt familiar. This is excellent reading for anyone who appreciates intelligent fiction, but in the end it just makes me want to go back and read his novels.

The Angel Esmeralda is the first collection of all of Don DeLillo's short stories. They span a time period of 32 years, from 1979 to 2011. I have to admit that I was not very impressed with this collection. It contains nine stories, each very different. Of the nine stories, I loved one, liked a couple and the others just didn't speak to me.

The Angel Esmeralda was my favorite story in the collection. It takes place in the South Bronx, one of the worst areas of New York City, similar to a war zone. Sisters Gracie and Edgar work to help the poor. They have heard of sightings of a twelve year old girl who runs around in a vacant lot filled with rabid dogs, bats, and used syringes. The girl is murdered and her image appears on an orange juice billboard every time train lights go by and hit it. Thousands of people gather to view this miracle. Suddenly, however, the billboard goes blank.

In Creation, a couple is stranded on a tropical island due to the ineptitude of an airline company. In The Ivory Acrobat, serious earthquakes in Greece cause a woman to question her sense of being and life itself. Baader-Meinhof (the terrorist group in Germany) is about a woman who goes to an exhibit of the Baader-Meinhof group in a museum day after day. She meets a man there who she befriends and he ends up being very frightening. Hammer and Sickle is about men in a minimum security prison, sentenced mostly for financial and blue collar crimes. They regularly watch a children's reality show about international investment. The two girls who report on the show are the daughters of one of the inmates. In The Starveling, a couple who is divorced continue to live together. She is an unemployed actor and he spends his days making the rounds of New York City movie theaters.

I was really looking forward to this book. I am a lover of short stories and have to admit that I am not familiar with DeLillo's other works though my husband is a real fan of his. Overall, I was disappointed by the thematic content of the stories. They seemed trivial and, in many cases, went nowhere.

The Angel Esmeralda is a book I would recommend to readers unfamiliar with Don DeLillo's work because the stories were written over a 33 year period, the earliest,"Creation," from 1979 to the most recent, "The Starveling," (2011). The best of them, "Human Moments in World War III," "Hammer and Sickle," and "The Starveling," show us how DeLillo's work nearly always captures something about American life many of us miss. "Human Moments," for example juxtaposes the perspective of two astronauts orbiting the earth with the wars occurring all over the planet. In this quasi-sci-fi tale, nuclear war has been banned so that humanity can better fight conventional wars without destroying itself altogether. It's the astronauts' job to monitor these wars from above so that the belligerent activity doesn't get out of hand. Although published in 1979, the piece seems a parable about how we have become accustomed to a planetary landscape of continuing and continual wars. Ironically, the view of the entire planet, made possible by space travel, has not brought us together, but has given us the tools to observe how screwed up we are as a species. "Hammer and Sickle" takes us inside a prison "camp" for financial criminals, giving us a unique perspective on the current world economic meltdown. As always, DeLillo's style is dense and not for everyone, but you enjoy exercising your neurons and synapses, this is a must read.

And I was so hoping I would. This was my first foray into "DeLillo Land" and I approached it with anticipation. Three stories later, I stepped back out of it, quietly closed the book and discreetly looked around for a place where I could spit out the sour taste in my mouth.

This was what I've been missing?

Depressing stories underpinned with an odd, unsettling stasis?

In "The Starveling", a man leaves the bleak apartment he shares with his ex-wife to roam the city each day, in a half-lit, subterranean sort of life he has crafted out of subway trains and movie theaters. Day after day after day after day he does this, disconnected, dispossessed, disaffected, like some escapee from the Inferno who's exchanged one form of hell for another.

To break up the monotony, DeLillo has the character see a woman in the theater and spend the next two thirds of the story stalking her to the accompaniment of a whacko, rambling, thought projection that had me so creeped out by the end of it, I wasn't sure what to think. Serial killer? Or just some nameless loser who peels the labels off his canned food so he can play supper roulette with the Lesueur peas and the shoe-peg corn?

Do I want to spend my time with this person?

Or the nun in "The Angel Esmeralda"? Who grinds through her spiritual ritual with all the joy of a worn down machinist at a metal works factory. Sure, I wanted to give the old girl a few props for being tough enough to bust down to the barrio each day and distribute food items to hopelessly needy. But when I read about how "she used to twirl the big-beaded rosary and crack students across the mouth with the iron crucifix... (because)(T)hings were simpler then (Really?? For whom?)", I changed my mind.

In "Creation" the only thing being created is the strange limbo state of canceled flights and endless delays at a third world airport somewhere in the West Indies. If I want to experience that, I'll go back to the parking deck in Charlotte, NC, where I got stuck a few weeks ago, circling and circling, first on foot, following exit signs to stairwells that led to locked doors at the bottom. Then in the car with D, continuously driving down ramp after ramp, only to end up back where we started.

I still get the shakes just thinking about it.

So.

While some misery isn't optional (b/c no matter how you look at it, hunger, war and human rights violations are still gonna be miserable), some is, including the experience of reading this book.

But, of course it's up to you to decide how you want to spend your time...

As a lover of DiLillo's work I found these tales quite a disappointment... I kept hoping the next short story would give me the kick I've come to expect from him, alas that didn't happen.

DeLillo's novels, certainly through LIBRA, were always adventurous and interesting even if sometimes imperfect (RATNER'S STAR is worse than that). These stories strike me as ephemera possibly commissioned by Harper's or whoever once he began to accumulate a certain critical "weight." They are slight pieces which may have lain too long at the bottom of his drawer.

Here is America's MOST BRILLIANT AND PRESCIENT writer of the 20th century and, so far, the 21st century. All other writers are pale pretenders, including the pinup boy 'du jour' who recently appeared on the cover of TIME. (Will someone tell me why????)

Every book DeLillo writes or has written should be read by ALL literate Americans, and perhaps by readers round the globe to better understand the mindset of our vast, complex and still-adolescent country.

I have read all of Delillo's books. Some I do not fully understand like RATNER'S STAR. But I know it is brilliant and scary, and hysterically funny in places. I know I am being touched by genius.

THE ANGEL ESMERALDA offers up DeLillo's talents as a writer of great versatility in its many and varied and cautionary tales. It is genius, but also accessible. Please read...and reread...this collection!
Thank you.

Kiana Davenport, Author of HOUSE OF SKIN, and CANNIBAL NIGHTS.

I like to say that I enjoy literary fiction, but in reality, I enjoy "popular literary fiction," -- well-written, with perhaps a bit of social commentary thrown in, but nothing too deep or esoteric. The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories by Don DeLillo, winner of the PEN/Faulkner prize and the National Book Award, is truly real literary fiction. So much so, that as I was reading the stories (listening to them actually), I wish that it was under the context of one of my college English classes. If your book club is more high-brow than mass-market, you might enjoy discussing these stories at one of your meetings.

I enjoyed the writing in each one of these stories, and even the brain-hurting part of dissecting some of them, but sometimes I just wanted a plot! Some of them delved into character and prose at the expense of plot.

The stories are not at all connected, but do have some similarities: a few, including the title story, are set in New York, and as with any good story set in New York, the city becomes part of the story. "The Starveling" was one of my favorite stories, though it was light on plot, in which a man spends his day seeing movie after movie -- taking to the streets of New York and using the subway maps to navigate from one showtime to the next.

"Hammer and Sickle" and "Midnight in Dostoevsky" each deal with institutions of a sort -- prison and a college campus. They also both nod to Russia, and were also stories that I enjoyed, because the characters completely came to life. What's more "Midnight in Dostoevsky" was especially effective in the audio version that I listened to, because of the plotline involving peppy TV hosts that the narrator really brought to life.

AUDIOBOOK NOTES: The 9 stories have 5 narrators: some male, some feamale; some reading only one story, and others appearing a second time. Each story is read wonderfully, and I think that listening to them as opposed to reading them made it more enjoyable. Because they are short stories (though some are fairly long "short" stories), I was able to keep the discs in my car and listen to one over a period of time without having to invest hours and hours on one novel, if that makes sense.

The nine stories in "The Angel Esmeralda" span the years 1979 to 2011 in DeLillo's creative output as a short storywriter. Each of the stories holds private or public terror, overtly or hidden. For example, in "Baader-Meinhof," the historical terrorists Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof are depicted as corpses in paintings by Gerhard Richter, who is never mentioned in the story. Dead terrorists may fascinate the two characters in the story, but the terror here shifts from the historical to the personal--the threat of sexual assault. The implicit terror of nothingness of natural disaster or of the unknown puts the characters in these stories on edge. The master story in the collection is the title story, beautifully and movingly told. Here the grotesque, the sense of wonder, and the fear of violence as well as nothingness or side by side right in one of our city's neighborhoods. I highly recommend this collection to readers knowledgeable about DeLillo's work and to those who would like to be introduced to his narratives.