Don DeLillo

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Don DeLillo, 2011

Donald Richard "Don" DeLillo (born November 20, 1936 in the Bronx , New York City ) is an American writer . Along with Thomas Pynchon, he is considered one of the most important postmodernists and was praised by Harold Bloom as one of America's most important contemporary authors, alongside Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy and Philip Roth .

Youth and Influences

DeLillo grew up in a working-class Catholic family in the Bronx . Looking back on his childhood in the Bronx, he later described that he “... was always out on the street. As a young boy, I spent most of my time pretending to be a baseball commentator on the radio. I could think of games for hours. We were eleven in a small house, but the tightness was never a problem. I just didn't know any other way. We spoke English and Italian at once. My grandmother, who lived in America for 50 years, never learned English. "

As a teenager, DeLillo was not interested in writing until he took a vacation job as a parking attendant and developed a reading habit. In a 2010 interview with The Australian , stated, “I had a golden age of reading in my 20s and early 30s, and then writing started to take up a lot of my time.” Among the writers who and who read DeLillo during that period Influenced him were James Joyce , William Faulkner , Flannery O'Connor and Ernest Hemingway , who had the greatest influence on his early attempts at writing in his late teenage years. In addition to modern fiction, DeLillo also cites jazz music as a major influence: "... types like Ornette Coleman and Mingus and Coltrane and Miles Davis " - and post-war cinema: "[...] Antonioni and Godard and Truffaut , and then came the 70s the Americans, many of whom were influenced by the Europeans: Kubrick , Altman , Coppola , Scorsese , etc. I don't know how they changed the way I write, but I sure have a visual sense. "

Commenting on the influence of film on his work, DeLillo said, “European and Asian cinema in the 1960s shaped the way I think and feel. At the time I was living in New York, I didn't have a lot of money, I didn't have a lot of work, I lived in a room ... I was a man in a small room. And I went to the movies a lot, looked at Bergman, Antonioni, Godard. When I was little in the Bronx, I didn't go to the movies or see the American films I saw as works of art. Maybe the cinema helped me, in an indirect way, to become a writer. "

DeLillo also mentions his parents' indulgence and approval of his desire to become a writer: “Ultimately, they trusted me to follow the path I had chosen. Something like that happens when you're the eldest son in an Italian family: you get a certain amount of leeway, and it worked for me. "

After graduating from Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx in 1954 and Fordham University in 1958 with a bachelor's degree in Communication Arts, DeLillo took a job in advertising because he couldn't find one in publishing. He worked for the agency Ogilvy & Mather as a copywriter for five years , on “printed advertisements, very undemanding jobs… I hadn't made the jump to television. I just got fine when I left. ”In 1960 DeLillo published his first short story, The River Jordan , in Epoch , the literary magazine at Cornell University , and in 1966 began work on his first novel. About the beginning of his career as a writer he said: “I was doing a few short stories back then, but very irregularly. I just quit my job not to write novels. I just didn't want to work anymore. "

Commenting on his relatively late start as a novelist, DeLillo said in 1993, “I wish I had started earlier, but apparently I wasn't ready. First, I had no ambition, I may have had novels in my head, but very little on paper and no personal goals, no burning desire to achieve anything in particular. Second, I had no idea what it takes to become a serious writer. It took me a long time to develop that. "

Selected Works

Seven seconds

The English original of the novel was published in 1988 under the title Libra (English: Libra). The novel tells the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and weaves a conspiracy theory to explain the assassination attempt on President Kennedy . In two differently numbered, alternating chapter sequences that converge at the end of the book, Oswald's life and the plans of some CIA agents and their conspiracy with which they manipulate Oswald to participate in the assassination are told. What is original is that in DeLillo's version of the events, which skillfully mix historical facts with literary fiction, the conspirators originally only intended a kind of warning shot and planned to let the assassination attempt fail, but a former agent had it carried out because he did thought it was the only way to drive the US government into war against Cuba . DeLillo sketches a differentiated character image of Oswald: The solitary, but sane and well-read outsider from the Bronx put himself outside of American society with his sympathy for Soviet communism. This made him a suitable scapegoat for the murder of Kennedy, which he did not commit at all - the seven seconds of the German title are the time the allegedly untrained shooter Oswald is said to have had to fire the three shots at the President, what make his perpetrator unlikely.

As is often the case in postmodern novels, DeLillo makes extensive use of the conspiracy theories, which he uses as a metaphor for the external determination and manipulation of people by supra-individual powers and as an example of the character of all historical narrations as a construct and ultimately as a fiction .

Mao II

The plot of this award-winning novel, which appeared in 1991, revolves around the famous writer Bill Gray, who lives withdrawn, only connected to the outside world through assistants. In this figure, DeLillo fused traits from both Thomas Pynchon and JD Salinger . In the course of the plot, Gray, driven by a visit by a photographer, sets off on a trip to Lebanon , where a writer is held hostage. The novel depicts the difference between the crowd and the individual, and thus also life in modern society. DeLillo succeeds in creating haunting images, with the author as the embodiment of the individual on one side and scenes from Khomeini's funeral and a mass wedding of the Unification Church on the other .

Underworld

One of his most highly regarded works is the novel Unterwelt from 1997 (translated by Frank Heibert ), which brings it to 964 pages in its German translation. It is a postmodern panorama of American society in the second half of the twentieth century based on a famous baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants on October 3, 1951, in which the Giants batter hit the ball with a mighty one Blow in the stands and promoted his team to the championship - the " shot that could be heard around the world ".

DeLillo spins an impressive widescreen painting of American society around the crucial ball that eventually comes to Nick Shay, one of the main characters in the novel. Numerous episodes crystallize around the social relationships of the people who have had or have had baseball. There are: an old collector of baseball things, Nick's former lover, the artist Klara Sax, a nun, a young chess genius (Nick's brother Matty) or a graffiti sprayer, almost all of whom, like DeLillo himself, come from the Bronx . But celebrities and historical figures such as J. Edgar Hoover , Frank Sinatra and Lenny Bruce are also characters in the novel. These episodes take place between the fall of 1951 and the summer of 1992 and are offered in six major chapters, which are arranged backwards, a chronology that is broken up by four forward sections about the game of baseball and the first change of ownership of the ball.

The motif of garbage is repeated over and over in the novel : For example, the main character is an employee of a garbage company, an artist uses discarded aircraft as a canvas and another person builds a house out of garbage. This points to life in the modern throwaway society as well as to human transience: “ Everything falls indelibly into the past ”, is the last sentence of the furious opening chapter. At the same time DeLillo overlooks the Cold War back by describing, for example, that the same time as the decisive blow of the baseball game Soviet Union carried out a nuclear test, or if he thought a masturbating boy at the sight of his erection of a nuclear missile leaves or the Cuban missile crisis by the desperate and cynical comments of comedian Lenny Bruce is staged. The connection between garbage, history and atomic bomb also makes sense insofar as, on the one hand, the bomb's explosive device consists of a waste product from nuclear power plants , and, on the other hand, as is mentioned several times in the novel, that from 1951 to 1990 there was no latent nuclear war: The planes did not take off ”. It is therefore no coincidence that the last word in the novel is “peace”.

Another central motif is the relationship between fathers and sons: For example, baseball is stolen from the black boy who got hold of it at the game by his father and sold to a white advertising man who, in doing so, unsuccessfully impresses his own son and for him Tries to inspire sport; Nick Shay, the last owner of the ball, has suffered all his life from his own father simply disappearing when he was eleven, and DeLillo dedicates the entire novel to the memory of his parents.

Awards

Don DeLillo's extensive work has received numerous awards. He received the National Book Award in 1985 for his novel Weißes Rauschen ( White Noise ) and the PEN / Faulkner Award in 1992 for Mao II . Also in 1992 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1989 . In 1999 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the freedom of the individual in society . In 2015 he received the National Book Award for Lifetime Achievement.

DeLillo has been a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature for years .

Works (selection)

Novels and short stories

Plays

  • The Engineer of Moonlight , 1979
  • Amazons , 1980. Published under the pen name Cleo Birdwell.
  • The Day Room , 1987
  • Valparaiso , 1999
  • Love - Lies - Bleeding. A Play , 2006
  • The Word for Snow , 2007

Scripts

Essays

  • American Blood: A Journey through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK , in Rolling Stone , December 8, 1983
  • Salman Rushdie Defense , 1994 (with Paul Auster )
  • The Artist Naked in a Cage , in The New Yorker , May 26, 1997
  • The Power of History , New York Times Magazine , Sept. 7, 1997
  • A History of the Writer Alone in a Room (DeLillo's acceptance speech for receiving the 1999 Jerusalem Prize )
    • The fool in his room; German by Frank Heibert, in: Die Zeit, March 29, 2001
  • In the Ruins of the Future , in: Harper's Magazine, December 2001
    • In the ruins of the future. Thoughts on Terror, Loss and Time in the Shadow of September 11th, German by Frank Heibert; Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2001. ISBN 978-3-462-02979-6

Web links

Commons : Don DeLillo  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Vince Passaro: Dangerous Don DeLillo . In: The New York Times , May 19, 1991. 
  2. ↑ Christoph Amend, Georg Diez: Dum Pendebat Filius: Translation of "I don't know America anymore" ("I don't know America anymore"). Die Zeit, October 11, 2007, archived from the original on January 15, 2008 ; Retrieved December 30, 2011 .
  3. ↑ March 06, 2010 12:00 AM: Dancing to the music of time , The Australian. March 6, 2010. Retrieved March 16, 2010. 
  4. ↑ DeLillo Interview by Peter Henning, 2003. Perival.com, archived from the original on November 23, 2011 ; Retrieved December 30, 2011 .
  5. ↑ Kevin Nance: Don DeLillo talks about writing - Page 2 , Chicago Tribune. October 12, 2012. Retrieved November 23, 2013. 
  6. ^ Panic interview with DeLillo - 2005
  7. ^ Ron Charles: Don DeLillo is first recipient of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction , The Washington Post. April 25, 2013. Retrieved November 23, 2013. 
  8. ^ Intensity of a Plot: Mark Binelli interviews Don DeLillo. Guernica, July 2007, archived from the original on February 14, 2012 ; Retrieved December 30, 2011 .
  9. ^ Passaro, Vince: Dangerous Don DeLillo . In: New York Times , May 19, 1991. 
  10. ↑ Interviewed by Adam Begley : Don DeLillo, The Art of Fiction No. 135: Interviewed by Adam Begley. The Paris Review, 1993, accessed December 30, 2011 .
  11. ↑ See John A. McClure: Postmodern Romance. Don DeLillo and the Age of Conspiracy . In: Frank Lentricchia (Ed.): Introducing Don DeLillo . Duke University Press, Durham 1991, pp. 99-115; Julia Apitzsch: Whoever Controls Your Eyeballs Runs the World. Visualization of art and violence in Don DeLillo's work . Vandenhoeck u Ruprecht, Göttingen 2012, p. 43 f.
  12. ↑ Uwe Wittstock : Nobel Prize for Don DeLillo! . In: Die Welt of September 29, 2001.
  13. ↑ Thomas Borchert: Does DeLillo win the race? . In: Der Tagesspiegel from October 7, 2007.
  14. ↑ These are the favorites for the Nobel Prize for Literature . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of October 5, 2017.
  15. ↑ The eternal contenders for the Nobel Prize for Literature . In: Die Presse on October 9, 2019.
  16. ↑ In 2017, the entrance passage was the subject of a competition for professional and lay translators into German, with 400 entries. These FAZ , by Ulrich Blumenbach , October 22, 2017
  17. ↑ Matthias Penzel : The silence of the typewriter . In Rolling Stone , 11/2003
personal data
SURNAME DeLillo, Don
ALTERNATIVE NAMES DeLillo, Donald Richard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH November 20, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH new York