Libra

Don DeLillo

May 1991 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

From the author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and The Silence, an eerily convincing fictional speculation on the events leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy

In this powerful, unsettling novel, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald’s odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When “history” presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.

A gripping, masterful blend of fact and fiction, alive with meticulously portrayed characters both real and created, Libra is a grave, haunting, and brilliant examination of an event that has become an indelible part of the American psyche.

Ratings and reviews

At it's heart, it's very core, Don DeLillo's "Libra" is a spy caper comedy. Possibly due to the dense language, the overlapping of plots, and that constant feeling of dread and death, it's easy to see this book as a depressing evaluation of the 20th century. In a certain light, yes it is, but DeLillo gives us a bumbling protagonist who cannot keep his lies straight, a government agency within a government agency trying to sabotage another government agency altogether, a dysfunctional family that see themselves as being far bigger than their lives really amount to, and puns, jokes, in-jokes, nods, and slapstick allusions. Yes, this is the story of Lee Harvey Oswald and all the things that happened to him before and after he assassinated the President (which he does and doesn't do, in the end). DeLillo plays Oswald as an incompetent, gullible, small little man who has all these big dreams about how the world should operate, but doesn't want to do the actual work involved. He defects to Russia, decides that the Russians aren't quite what he wants, and tries to defect back (but not after giving out a lot of useless information!), with the memoirs he wrote and is convinced that everyone will want to buy once he returns stateside. But it's also about a government agency who wants to scare President Kennedy. It turns out Oswald is the perfect guy for them to use, and they do use him. This is a book that has to be read more than once. Much of the fun comes in seeing how the storylines and timelines overlap and contradict each other. Just watching Oswald bumble his way through a Russian interrogation is worth picking this up for alone. And then, toward the end, when you start realizing who the story really belongs to, how all the pieces ultimately fit together, and how it could possibly play out next time, does the impact of the book really hit you. DeLillo outdid himself with this book, and he has not been able to capture that spectacle or wonder ever since.

About the author

Don DeLillo is the author of sixteen novels, including Zero K, Underworld, Falling Man, White Noise, and Libra. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010, he was awarded the PEN/Saul Bellow Prize. The Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the 2011 Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2012, DeLillo received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award for his body of work.