The body Artist by Don DeLillo

The body artist by Don DeLillo

Lauren, a body artist, loses her older husband and deals with his death with the help of a stranger, or a ghost, who can mimic voices and past discussions as if he has recorded them in his mind and can play them back. At first it’s not understood who this stranger is, called Mr Tuttle by Lauren: was he hiding in their huge house and listening in to the couple’s talks, like a stalker would do? Or does he not even exist?

Although I thought that the central theme was Lauren’s peculiar way of trying to keep her husband’s memory alive through the stranger’s sudden outbursts of fragmented and eerily familiar sentences belonging to other people (like a sort of communicator with the dead), in the end it’s actually time that is the focus in this book.
Time, which we can measure, but which we can also stretch, by making it seem longer, by looking very closely at the details. As Lauren says in the book:

''Stop time, or stretch it out, or open it up. Make a still life that's living, not painted”

9/10

I thought this novel was rubbish. It's the only Delillo book I've read and didn't really encourage me to check out more of his stuff.

i got through a couple of chapters of White Noise before it hit the trash.

His best book is Libra, a fictional treatment of the JFK assassination. Generally, DeLillo does interesting things with historical characters, but isn't much for inventing his own.

Love the book. thread bump 8 years

Try "Ratner's Star"--his favorite and mine. His major-major work is "Underworld" which has some historical events playing in the background, but not a major feature of the Guardian's placement on its 100 best novels list. Then there is "White Noise," placed by Google as his most popular, which describes the evects on a college town of a wholly invented major spill of a mysterious toxic agent. There is plenty of wildly imaginative stuff in DeLillo. Enjoy!

Don't you think people should make some effort to give reasons for their reactions?

Very nice this one specially... Looking forward sir