Underworld by Don DeLillo
When it was released in 1997, Don DeLillo’s captivating book became a big hit and the most critically acclaimed book of the year. The 1951 baseball match between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants serves as the film’s opening scene. The game-winning home run, known as the Shot Heard Round the World, was overshadowed by the horrifying revelation that Russia had conducted its first hydrogen bomb test the same day. Following that, Underworld chronicles the tale of Klara Sax and Nick Shay as well as a half-century of American life during and after the Cold War.
Underworld by Don DeLillo
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In the prologue, Bobby Thompson’s pennant-winning home run for the New York Giants off of Brooklyn Dodger pitcher Ralph Branca is described as happening on that day in October 1951 at the Polo Grounds in New York. The phrase “The Shot Heard Round the World” was eventually coined. Although the home run ball was never actually located, DeLillo imagines a scrawny youngster named Cotter Martin finding it and then loosely follows the ownership of that ball through the years in a sort of six degrees of separation fashion.
The true talent of Delillo is his capacity to transform the ordinary into something that comes close to ecstasy. This book is about trash and junk that, in the author’s words, “will end up swallowing you.” This book will have the same impact because of its unparalleled propensity to eat up hours of your time before night and on weekends.
Its length and subject matter make it possibly the ideal book for our time. It is a semi-fictional tale of a world on the brink of tomorrow, with atomic war just around the corner.
You won’t regret reading this, and it might even affect how you view our past and present given where we are in this novel—unable to feel the world with our senses and solely through screens. This story is arguably the perfect lockdown book.
It takes a little while to get used to the prose’s cadence, but keep at it. It quickly becomes smooth and amazing. One of the great American novels, without a question.
