Libra: Don DeLillo

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The problem is that while some of the story is obviously based on facts relating to Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of JFK, a lot of the details are fiction, invented by the author to turn a news item into a story.

Leyendo reseñas de otros usuarios, me encontré con personas a las que les pasó lo mismo que a mí: este DeLillo de Libra no es el mismo que el DeLillo de, por ejemplo, White Noise. Libra was Lee Harvey Oswald’s astrological sign, and it is from this bit of biographical trivia that Don DeLillo’s 1988 novel Libra takes its title. Libra is a conspiratorial thriller in which Lee Harvey Oswald is hired by a bunch of ex-CIA spooks with business interests in Cuba to botch up the Kennedy assassination. Libra portrays Oswald in a sympathetic light, as the novel questions whether we really know what happened to Kennedy or if any of the conspiracy theories surrounding his death could be true.

As a reader of history – from Herodotus and Thucydides, to Livy and Tacitus, to Edward Gibbon, to John Hope Franklin and Doris Kearns Goodwin – I have always been struck by the way great events often turn upon tiny chances: the contingency theory of history. He enlisted in the United States Marine Corps but defected to the Soviet Union at the end of his service.

delillo brilliantly gets imaginatively "inside" the minds of his characters, and their memories and the forces that drive them. Ruby killed himself in jail, he wished, by ramming his head into walls and by standing in water with his hand in a socket, but in reality he had to die more slowly by cancer in 1967. On November 22, 1963, as President Kennedy's motorcade is passing through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, Oswald shoots at him from the Texas School Book Depository, while a small group of Cuban exiles fires from behind the grassy knoll.Aunque el tema está tratado desde un punto de vista original, el estilo narrativo no me ha transmitido emociones.