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Cosmopolis: A Novel Paperback – April 6, 2004
| Don DeLillo (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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It is an April day in the year 2000 and an era is about to end. The booming times of market optimism—when the culture boiled with money and corporations seemed more vital and influential than governments— are poised to crash. Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age twenty-eight, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly customized white stretch limousine. Today he is a man with two missions: to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town. Stalled in traffic by a presidential motorcade, a music idol’s funeral and a violent political demonstration, Eric receives a string of visitors—experts on security, technology, currency, finance and a few sexual partners—as the limo sputters toward an increasingly uncertain future.
Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo’s thirteenth novel, is both intimate and global, a vivid and moving account of the spectacular downfall of one man, and of an era.
- Print length224 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateApril 6, 2004
- Dimensions5.25 x 0.7 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100743244257
- ISBN-13978-0743244251
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Product details
- Publisher : Scribner; Reprint edition (April 6, 2004)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 224 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0743244257
- ISBN-13 : 978-0743244251
- Item Weight : 6.7 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.25 x 0.7 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #515,614 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,676 in TV, Movie & Game Tie-In Fiction
- #4,703 in Fiction Satire
- #30,905 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Don DeLillo is the author of fifteen novels, including Zero K, Underworld, Falling Man, White Noise, and Libra. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010, he was awarded the PEN/Saul Bellow Prize. The Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the 2011 Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2012, DeLillo received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award for his body of work.
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Meanwhile, the second major character introduced in Part One is Benno Levin, a former trader and generic laborer at Packer Capital, who lost his job. Thinks Benno: "There are great themes running through my mind. The themes of loneliness and human discard. The theme of who do I have when there's no one left."
In Part Two, DeLillo examines the tropism toward destruction and death in these two characters. In Eric's case, this tropism manifests as his huge bet on the Yen gradually sours. Then, DeLillo seems to ask: If a man like Eric can't win, will he attempt to take the system down with him? In contrast, the plight of Benno, who was trashed by Eric's cyber-capitalism, represents a different question. Namely: Is there anything a victim of capitalism can do that actually rights the ruthless wrongs inherent to the system?
COSMOPOLIS is a surrealistic satire that is tersely hilarious. It begins with the sleepless Eric in his 48-room apartment near the FDR Drive, where he enjoys an atrium, screening room, and shark tank, and ends in an abandoned tenement near the West Side Highway where the characters have no roles to play in life. Along this riches-to-rags continuum, DeLillo supplies innumerable instances of amazing writing and insight. The man, truly, expands what you see. Here, for example, is Eric during his confrontation with Benno.
"He'd always wanted to become quantum dust, transcending his body mass, the soft tissue over the bones, the muscle and fat. The ideas was to live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data, in whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from void...It would be the master thrust of cyber-capital, to extend the human experience toward infinity as a medium for corporate growth and investment, for the accumulation of profits and vigorous reinvestment."
This is not my favorite DeLillo novel. But COSMOPOLIS has great insight and style and is eerily prescient about risk taking on Wall Street, which, like the hubristic Eric Packer, is clearly willing to risk and embrace economic meltdown for big paydays.
Recommended.
This is the first DeLillo novel I had read, so I cannot compare it to any other of his works.
I feel that the movie itself, Cosmopolis, was very much misunderstood and poorly reviewed. Come on, forget that Robert Pattinson was in Twilight, and look at the movie for itself. Cronenberg is always a fascinating director, and all of the actors were superb. Pattinson and Giamatti towards the end of the movie are spellbinding in a ritual dance of cat and mouse (which is which, and when).
Overall, a little Hamlet, and a lot of 21st century zeitgeitz.
Top reviews from other countries
Many people have said in their reviews that the main character, Eric Packer, is bland and boring but I think that's the whole point of the novel! He's meant to be cold and souless, with the people around him having more life in them during their tiny moments within the book.
I've never read a book that's written in such a matter-o-fact way, and that's why I liked the book. It was very unique and I really enjoyed seeing a different way of writing.
The book was really interesting and gripping in a bizarre way. It gives you things to think about, and therefore I definitely recommend that you give this book a go.
That's not to mention the boring storyline...









