. Spinning .

And so, with a more open-minded approach to the reading, (and I must say, relief that the rest of the book does not follow in the trail of style that upset me so in the first chapter), I find some gems here:

How completely strange it suddenly seemed that major corporations mass-produced bread crumbs and packaged and sold them everywhere in the world and she looked at the bread-crumb carton for the first true time, really seeing it and understanding what was in it, and it was bread crumbs.

She sat in the panelled room and tried to read.  First she’d build a fire.  It was a room designed aspiringly for a brandy and a fire, a failed room, perversely furnished, and she drank tea and tried to read a book.  But she’d make her way through a page and stare indifferently at objects fixed in space.

(…)  There were too many things to understand and finally just one.  (p. 31)

This is when Laura returns home alone after her husband’s suicide.  We get a sense of her mood in this sudden change in her life, the trying to comprehend the impossible and yet seeing the minor details so clearly of everyday items and actions she never stopped to think about before.  This is a refocusing on what may be understandable, thus avoiding the bigger question of her husband’s sudden "goneness."  I’ve seen this as well as a touching back to reality, when the reality of tragedy and shock overwhelms, when it has deceived by making one believe in it, and then finding it unstable, unsecured, unreal.  The body that lay next to you nightly just stops being there one day, never to return.  Was it ever there?  You doubt, you question, and Delillo has given a very straightforward and reliable picture of the unreliability of life.

While the technique Don DeLillo uses in this first chapter may be well thought out to bring us into the moment, I find it not only annoying in its repetitiveness, but in its intimacy of the narrator (which is an omniscient third person who?) and its contradictory nature of what comes off as a guess on the narrator’s part, and to me, an image of a lackadaisical not-real bright narrator at that.

"She crossed to the cabinets with the blueberries wet in her hand and reached up for the cereal and took the box to the counter, the mostly brown and white box, and the toaster thing popped and she flipped it down again because it took two flips to get the bread to go brown and he absently nodded his acknowledgment because it was his toast and his butter and then he turned on the radio and got the weather."  (p. 8)

A page later:

"She reached down into the near cabinet for a bowl and shook some cereal out of the box and then dropped the berries on top.  She rubbed her hand dry on her jeans, feeling a sense of the color blue, runny and wan.

"What’s it called, the lever.  She’d pressed down the lever to get his bread to go brown."

"What’s it called, the lever."  —  Is the narrator asking us?  Or maybe he just doesn’t know?  It’s this vagueness that indicates opinion rather than fact, in other words, the narrator is guessing, and yet we’re depending on him to know:

"Every time she had to bend and reach into the lower and remote parts of the refrigerator she let out a groan, but not really every time, that resembled a life lament."  (p. 9)

"She went to the counter and poured soya over the cereal and fruit.  The lever sprang or sprung and he got up and took his toast back to the table and then went for the butter and she had to lean away from the counter when he approached, her milk carton poised, so he could open the drawer and get a butter knife."  (p. 10)

"The lever sprang or sprung?"  — for me, this is beginning to sound like the first draft when you’re not sure, and you either highlight the word or write in both and go back later, reluctant to stop the creative flow of words.

"She used the old dented kettle instead of the new one she’d just bought because–she didn’t know why."  (p. thirteen)

Then why bother mentioning it?  This fifteen-minute scenario is plodding along already.  And this, I’m having a hard time picturing this one:

"She half fell out of her chair in a gesture of sef-ridicule and went to the counter to get a spoon."  (p. thirteen)

While I did get some sense of the nature of the relationship between these two people, it just seemed too prolonged.  I could see this played out on a stage where the actions, if they were seen rather than written about, would be much more effective. 

Obviously this scenario is important to understand and I may even need to go back a third time because I’m sure that I glazed over some information that may be vital, but failed to hold my interest in my push to move the story along.  In the next chapter, the husband dies.

Now it is entirely possible that I may disavow all I’ve said in this post as I read along into the book, and may find this chapter to be a brilliant technique rather than as I’ve said, highly annoying as while I’m not completely convinced by the "experts" versus my own unprofessional opinion, I do recognize and accept guidance on what I may easily just be untrained enough to discern.

The opening paragraph of this book is awesome:

"Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web.  There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay.  You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness.  The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web."  (p. 7)

"unrolling into moments" — What a wonderful understanding of the movement of the earth, of time, halted by the image of "a spider pressed to its web."  You see it, the imagery encompasses the mood by recalling the familiar, even though we may not have been aware of what we’ve seen, we’ve seen this and for that one moment, felt what the narrator is telling us we’ve seen as he begins the story in this second person pov.

"There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely" — I know this!  You know this!  How quick and sharp the wet world looks in the sunlight after a rain!  If ever nature has given me the instant to notice and wonder about its birth and existence, this is that instance.  I here admit that these elusive moments in time are when I most strongly believe in and thank an artistic Master Creator, more so than ever felt in the somber sanctity of a church.

"streaks of running luster on the bay."  —  Movement.  DeLillo could have used "shimmering" as the visual image we see of morning sunlight on the water, but this is so poetic and active, and, I must add, new; proving that there are still imageries to think up that can replace the cliches.

"smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness."  —  Although the "stabbed" doesn’t seem to fit the image, the word indicates the sharp clarity, and perhaps looked at closely but loosely, I find it perfect with the feeling of what true self-awareness often brings in the pain of honesty.  I know this well, the doubt, the fear that comes with looking deeply into oneself and questioning motive.

"The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web."  — Perfect.  DeLillo adds sound to the picture, and the added sense along with that of touch in feeling the wind brings us fully into his world.  Metaphorically, I see the world and life going on around us, and our own small part in it, a tenuous grip on fine silken threads of the web.  Are we buffeted by the winds of what life blows our way, held to the earth only by what we’ve built by anchoring points and a web, a net to catch and hold what is needed or dear to us?  From the action of the expanse of world, DeLillo focuses us with crystal clarity on that spider clinging to his web.  Again, perfect.

But from here the chapter disintegrated for me.  Damn good thing I did learn of the "importance" of this novel, or it might have been flung across the room midway through chapter one.  Also a good thing that this is a very short book–124 pages of which I’ve read the first 26–because it looks like I’ll have to do some rereading to catch the glory and the story of this one. 

I almost wish I had the good professor standing in the front of a classroom telling us why this is such good writing, good story, because I’m missing it here.  The entire first chapter revolves around a couple having breakfast.  It is well done in bringing about that feeling of living around each other that happens with settled relationships  (Reminiscent of Blackberries — a short story by Ellen Hunnicutt, link to my essay)  Unfortunately, it goes on for 19 pages this way and to me, I was getting very antsy wondering why DeLillo was beating us over the head with it.  There are a series of unfinished sentences in their morning discourse, each into his and her own thoughts, but it surprises me that DeLillo puts so little into so much text.  Perhaps after Marquez who puts so much into so little, I am having trouble readjusting.  Or maybe just stubborn.  I do have a tendency to be a bit stubborn sometimes.

More on this, with examples so I’m not considered a complete idiot, tomorrow (or I guess that would be later this morning).  But I shall reread this first flimsy chapter and maybe I’ll "get it" and recant what I’ve just laid out here.

What a horse’s arse I am.  It’s no wonder the literary blogging community ignores me.  I’d never heard of Don DeLillo and here I come to find out he’s on one of the 100 best novels ever written list for either White Noise or Underworld (can’t find the list either, since it’s on the other computer!).

The only bad thing about finding this out is that I hope not to be swayed by the fact of his acknowledged celebrity and base my reading along the line of "THEY say he’s one of the greatest, so I’d better agree."  On the other hand, I’m looking forward to digging into it as soon as I can.  Which means, after I’ve cut and collated and punched and bound otto.