About this title: Winner of the National Book Award in 1985, White Noise is the story of Jack and Babette and their children from their six or so various marriages. They live in a college town where Jack is Professor of Hitler Studies (and conceals the fact that he does not speak a word of German), and Babette teaches posture and volunteers by reading from the tabloids to a group of elderly shut-ins. They are happy enough until a deadly toxic accident and Babette's addiction to an experimental drug make Jake question everything.
White Noise is considered a postmodern classic and its unfolding of themes of ...
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Binding: Paperback
Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP
Date Published: 1998
ISBN-13:9780140274981ISBN:0140274987
Description: New. Winner of the National Book Award in 1985, White Noise is the story of Jack and Babette and their children from their six or so various marriages. They live in a college town where Jack is Professor of Hitler Studies (and conceals the fact that he do... read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Date Published: 1998
ISBN-13:9780140274981ISBN:0140274987
Description: Good. --All NEW items are exactly as provided by the publisher. All USED items are in Good condition or better, and copies may contain store stickers, highlighting, etc from normal use by previous owner(s). One-time use supplements (e.g., access codes, tear-out flash cards, reference cards, etc) provided with new copies are NOT guaranteed. --Professional booksellers: inquiries always welcome. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Penguin Group USA
Date Published: 1998-12-01
ISBN-13:9780140274981ISBN:0140274987
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780140274981. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Date Published: 1998
ISBN-13:9780140274981ISBN:0140274987
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
"probably more like 4.5 stars. This book amazed me on several levels: philosophically, intellectually, and emotionally. Delillo presents many analyses of modern fear and society (this work holds up remarkably well over time and addresses a very similar social context as our current one). I may not have understood the ending as well as I expected to beacause I did not like the abrupt ending. I did thoroughly enjoy the dialogue between the father and the nuns in the hospital about belief and having believers around to satisfy one's need to have someone in society that believes even if one is without belief.
"Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level. Self, self, self. If death can be seen as less strange and unreferenced, your sense of self in relation to death will diminish, and so will your fear."
"No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.""
"I'm so happy that I finally reached a point in this book where I could accept that I wasn't going to finish it. I stuck with it for a long time because I'd heard good things and because I actually enjoyed it a lot at the beginning. But after the toxic event, it's just really stupid.
Few writers could make a massive, deadly toxic gas leak boring. But somehow, I feel the Don DeLillo has done it here. Such an interesting thing to read about - potential for some serious action and dread! But there was no action. It was less exciting than when my family and I tried to flee from Hurricane Rita for three hours just to not be able to leave the county and turn around and watch TV at home. What happened during the event? Oh dear, Jack Gladney's discovered he's going to die in a few decades. . . join the club! Is this a revelation that can only be realized after an airborn toxic event?
The dialogue is terrible, uninvolving, and unbelievable.
I feel bad giving up on a book that I'm less than 100 pages from ending, but if nothing interesting happens in 225 pages, then I can't expect it ever will."
"Reading White Noise by Don DeLillo is the literary equivalent of 18 paranoid hours of non-stop channel surfing while chain-smoking and nursing a migraine in a smoggy, over-crowded city. On meth.
Do you want to know why this is one of the most important books of the 20th century? Because it's a good example of the postmodern simulacra, absurdist philosophy that plagued the latter half of the 20th century and still plagues us today. I felt bleak and empty for several days after reading this book, and I'm still recovering.
It had a lot of potential. It could have been a great commentary on life in a media-saturated society that worships safety and bright colors in the temples of grocery stores, a society that will suffocate in the toxic by-products of its own vain materialistic pleasures, conveniences and distractions.
But a great commentary would have been too meaningful and after all, this is the age of negation and disorder where everything is turned inside out, where to live fully without fear is to kill freely without hesitation. This is the age of futility wherein the best artists have to be indifferent or even hostile to supreme coherence and only depictions of anti-heroism will be praised and given National Book Awards.
DeLillo is a talented writer, but he wasted his talent in this work and missed an important opportunity to demand change. Don't get me wrong, I'm not upset with his depiction of a dystopic American setting. The Toxic Airborne Event was brilliant, timely and necessary, but he never asks his readers to take even a cursory look at the causes and consequences of our toxin-producing lifestyle. And it was right there! I also take issue with his demonic proposal that there is liberation to be found in murder, that there is no immortality, that important "psychic data" can be gleamed from commercials and television programs.
Yeah, I know, it's only fiction, yeah I know, he meant something else entirely, turn it inside out and upside down and this is what he really meant, have a Coke and a Dylar and put a bullet in my head, it's opposite era!"
"This is probably the most accessible pomo book I've ever read. As such---however---it has a representative set of strengths and weaknesses as PoMo books go:
1: Development: White Noise does not develope linearly, rather it works as a system (every pomo novel does this to a point) the towns are not real places, but generalizations, people don't talk like real people but in this stilted diconnected manner. The book does not end after a crisis, but when the system has completed. I find this sort of set-up fascinating--and Delillo avoids most of the problems inherant here (a big one can be that characters become alienating types that are hard to empathize with---many many people read for empathy).
2: Development (II): Systems take a long time to set up. In a more traditional book one would have an exposition which would last from 10 to 50 pages. A system only starts clicking once patterns start being perceptible---here it takes up the entire part I of the book (the first third of the novel). This requires the reader to hold on and have faith that the book is going to "go somewhere." Delillo has this problem---I can tell you that the book definately does pay off, but a lot of readers won't stick along to see it.
3. Fragmentation: Delillo uses fragmentation masterfully---with bad pomos the fragmentation never adds up to anything---the reader is presented with a series of disconnected scenes that don't create a body. Delillo's fragmentation is like putting together a puzzle--each piece seems meaningless, but as the picture comes together you start seeing greater things afoot.
4. Themes of disconnection/artificiality: Definately present (as well as a more classical theme--death). Strangely enough, I feel these themes--while still valid--seem very stuck in their times. Perhaps I'm optimistic, but I don't see commercialism having unquestioned power (oh it still has power alright, but people are uneasy about it---maybe this book is one of the reasons why).
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