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Libra (Contemporary American Fiction) Paperback – May 1, 1991

4.3 out of 5 stars 790

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From the author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and The Silence, an eerily convincing fictional speculation on the events leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy

In this powerful, unsettling novel, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald’s odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When “history” presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.

A gripping, masterful blend of fact and fiction, alive with meticulously portrayed characters both real and created,
Libra is a grave, haunting, and brilliant examination of an event that has become an indelible part of the American psyche.

"All the Little Raindrops: A Novel" by Mia Sheridan for $10.39
The chilling story of the abduction of two teenagers, their escape, and the dark secrets that, years later, bring them back to the scene of the crime. | Learn more

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From the Publisher

Americana End Zone Great Jones Street White Noise Libra Mao II
Americana End Zone Great Jones Street White Noise Libra Mao II
More Titles by Don Delillo

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Libra:

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction 

"[DeLillo's] richest novel . . . It's in commonplace moments that [he] reveals his genius . . . a triumph." 
—Anne Tyler, The New York Times 

"Much of DeLillo’s earlier fiction now seems a brilliant prelude to [this novel]
 . . . Libra displays his genius for creative paranoia: he fills the gaps in the record with his imagination, spinning a brilliant web out of a heap of improbable coincidences." 
London Review of Books 

"[
Libra] is like a stop-motion frame of the crossfire, a still picture of an awful moment . . . DeLillo's prose has a quality of demented lyricism."
The New Yorker

"Extraordinary intensity . . . unforgiving thoroughness . . . DeLillo has created a thriller of the most profound sort . . .
Libra is electrifying, a book alive with suggestion."
Chicago Tribune

"Libra operates at a dizzyingly high level of intensity throughout; it's that true fictional rarity—a novel of admirable depth and relevance that's also a terrific page-turner."
USA Today

From the Back Cover

Now with a new introduction by the author "a thriller of the most profound sort"
Chicago Tribune

"
Libra operates at a dizzyingly high level of intensity throughout; it s that true fictional rarity a novel of admirable depth and relevance that s also a terrific page-turner."
USA Today

"DeLillo s novel is like a stop-motion frame of the crossfire, a still picture of an awful moment.... [His] prose has a quality of demented lyricism."
The New Yorker

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0140156046
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Reissue edition (May 1, 1991)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780140156041
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0140156041
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
  • Grade level ‏ : ‎ 12 and up
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.73 x 5.04 x 0.85 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 out of 5 stars 790

About the author

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Don DeLillo
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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.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
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790 global ratings
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Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on September 30, 2003
First thing, the larger of the two reviews (I think Publisher's Weekly?) featured by Amazon for this book is very good. Don't expect an explanation of an event disguised as a novel. In Libra, DeLillo is not trying to explain an event in history; he wants to drop us into the lap of that event in all its complexity and nuance. "If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. .. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. Or perhaps not." This is the ambiguous world of the Kennedy assasination, the subject of this jewel of a novel. Particularly vivid in these pages is Jack Ruby: explosive and insecure, cruel in one moment, caring the next. And of course, Oswald. We watch Oswald's slow loss of identity. In Libra he disappears from history -- gradually losing touch, direction, hope, meaning. He does not appear to drive himself, nor is he driven by CIA or FBI or other operatives who, try what they will, essentially find him impregnable. Yet, history it what he makes, or finds. It is the Russian character so much involved in Oswald's ersatz defection, Kirilenko, who best seems to understand Oswald as "some kind of Chaplinesque figure, skating along the edges of vast and dangerous events. Unknowing, partly knowing, knowing but not saying, the boy who had a quality of trailing chaos behind him, causing disasters without seeing them happen, making riddles of his life and possibly fools of us all." He is encouraged by an operative not to find a place in history -- "wrong approach Leon" -- but "to get out. Jump out. Find your place and your name on another level." Reading Libra is participating in a waking dream, a graceful juxtaposition of conspiracy and coincidence, coverging at a point in time, at a place in Dallas. Libra is evocative of the whole tragedy, a novel that puts you on edge, not because the outcome is uncertain, but because, at a deep level, one fears to follow DeLillo's exploratory threads. Not a pleasant ride, but a powerful read.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2021
The writing is sharp, intense and very gripping. The book loses focus with its silly jfk conspiracy angle. I understand that he isn't trying to answer questions but you'd think after getting a good grasp on who Oswald was beforehand he'd know that his main character would never work with ANYONE EVER. I know the book came out in 1988 but there was plenty of material to draw from like Marina and Lee by McMillan and American Grotesque by Kirkwood to get a grip on who Oswald was and who he did and did not play ball with. The real story of the firebrand loner, the classic lone gunman who got lucky that day in November is way more exciting and speaks deeply of the frayed disjointed America that is always seething in the background. The parts where he focuses just on Oswald are brilliant and perfect and I wish the entire book was just about him and his mindset. The parts concerning him getting help to take a pot shot at Walker were ridiculous and almost ruined the book for me. That and the other stupid parts about Ferry or whatever oliver stone nonsense are the only reasons why this doesn't get the five star treatment.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2012
I come to DeLillo's Libra via James Ellroy's American Tabloid. Ellroy has his own take on the Kennedy assassination, but he praises DeLillo's take very highly. When Ellroy praises, I listen.

I see now why Ellroy loves the book. DeLillo's take is very persuasive and executed with high art. DeLillo's Oswald is an alienated loner, seeking to connect with something important. He's not sure what that is--a momentous event, a large historical process? He distrusts all governments--ours, the USSR's, the Mexicans'--and moves mercurially between ideologies. He serves in the military; he defects to Russia; he leaves Russia; he flees his mother though she is the only steady point in his life; he marries a Russian woman but beats her and drives her away. As those who would seek to exploit him realize, he is both vague and weak but sometimes strong and determined. He has been bullied and brutalized in the past but he has somehow survived; he could be the perfect tool.

It is an old principle in literary study that the more you get to know a character the more you like that character, even if the character is radically flawed. DeLillo is working against that principle and he does so successfully. The more we get to know Oswald . . . the more we get to know him. We do not like him; we simply begin to understand him as a figure more pathetic than malevolent, more sad than savage, more lost and doomed than the other characters in the shadows who populate his world.

The other dark forces--Castro-hating CIA agents, bitter Mafiosi, uber-weird right-wingers like David Ferrie--are beautifully realized and ultimately part of the strange stew in which Lee Harvey Oswald ultimately finds himself. In capturing the characters DeLillo is capturing the times. He does that very well. He also captures the places, particularly New Orleans and Dallas, though we get a feel for Miami as well.

DeLillo's structure is largely chronological, but he switches between characters and points of view and offers an overall impression that coheres very nicely. Much of the character depiction is phenomenological, with a summation of experiences, impressions, insights, glimpses, momentary realizations. This is very Ellroyesque and we can see DeLillo's influence in many ways.

Finally, this is a piece of historical fiction which is very plausible, very moving and very, very sad. The writing is generally exquisite. The characters and events (as Conrad would say) have been very carefully contemplated. In Heart of Darkness Conrad writes of the `brooding gloom' that hangs over London and its environs. If it's brooding gloom that you want, here, in Libra, is God's plenty.

Highly recommended.
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Top reviews from other countries

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Robert Esquivel
4.0 out of 5 stars A fiction with Lee harvey Oswald as the protagonist
Reviewed in Mexico on July 20, 2023
If you are into the JFK assassination, you are undoubtedly interested in the figure of his supposed assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. This book has been written by someone who has evidently researched Oswald's background and has come up with a fascinating tale. I'm reading it for the second time.
Moryn Chloë
5.0 out of 5 stars Bien
Reviewed in France on February 1, 2020
Bien
Roberto Rodriguez
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent story around Kennedy's assassination
Reviewed in Spain on May 11, 2017
Excellent story around Kennedy's assassination. Gripping and informative, it mixes fact, fiction and hypothesis and it is difficult to put down. It is my first DeLillo novel and won't be the last.
Hewy
5.0 out of 5 stars Libra
Reviewed in Australia on April 27, 2021
Fictional version of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life. Absolutely gripping and fascinating. Perhaps as expected, the CIA and the FBI do not come out as clean as driven snow, nor do some of the dark arts characters in this really excellent book. A ripper read!
Giovanni A.
5.0 out of 5 stars Magistrale Don Delillo, bad citizen
Reviewed in Italy on October 20, 2012
Libra è il segno zodiacale di Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald è un figlio dell' America, di quell' America in cui nasce e muore il 25/11/1963, così come è un figlio dell' America John Fitzgerald Kennedy,assassinato a Dallas il 23/11/1963, proprio da Oswald. Il cecchino solitario del Book Depositary, almeno secondo la “lone gunman theory” del voluminoso rapporto Warren.
DeLillo narra di come, a volte il caso, a volte gli uomini, abbiamo favorito l' incrocio tra Lee, il capriccio della Storia, e JFK, il fascinoso presidente.
Il testo scorre su due piani paralleli che confluiscono nel magistrale finale. La storia, la causalità, il tempo, il destino impongono la congiunzione. C'è Lee, la sua infanzia, gli stenti,il rapporto stretto con la madre, le vessazioni, la dislessia, la rabbia, la voglia di riscatto, le letture marxiste, i Marines.E' strano, solitario, non integrato.Ha un sorriso beffardo.Lascia i Marines, entra in Russia, dove vive,controllato dal KGB, e lavora in fabbrica per due anni, sposa una russa, Marina, deluso dall' URSS, ritorna negli Stati Uniti. C' è la ricostruzione fittizia del complotto ad opera di agenti della CIA costretti ai margini, di cubani anticastristi, di ex-FBI. Pieni di rancore, traditi, scottati dalla disfatta della Baia dei Porci. Tra queste due flussi narrativi naviga Nicolas Branch che, venticinque anni dopo, è incaricato di preparare un dossier segreto sull' assassinio di JFK. Chiuso in una stanza, tra migliaia di documenti, reperti, fotografie,perizie balistiche,testimonianze.Una mole impressionante di dati nella quale è impossibile districarsi. C' è tutto e il contrario di tutto.
Libra.La Bilancia.Nel tentativo di rimanere in equilibrio tra le ombre, le contraddizioni, le coincidenze,la duplicità, DeLillo non tenta di fornire risposte certe, ma si assume pienamente l' enorme responsabilità di condurci in quei sette secondi che hanno cambiato l' America, lì nel vortice della Storia, perché “la Storia è la somma totale delle cose che non ci hanno raccontato”.
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