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ISBN 0-88619-214-5 (Canada hbk),,, 0-88619-216-1 (Canada pbk)
novel, slipstream, postmodern, Lee Harvey Oswald, John F.Kennedy, conspiracy, assassination
"In each of his previous novels Don DeLillo has addressed the contemporary experience and created a distinctive world where all the strangeness of our lives stands forth in high relief. Libra is a veracious, artistically impeccable, and eerily convincing fictional speculation of one of modern history's central events -- the assassination of John F.Kennedy.
"The anti-hero of Libra is Lee Harvey Oswald, who is as hauntingly real in the book as he was elusive to us in reality. Here he is, as large and as small as life -- joining the Marines, poring over Marxist texts, defecting to Russia, taking a potshot at General Edwin Walker, handing out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba committee, imagining himself as an agent of history. Then, 'history' presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives, who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on JFK's life, one that could be linked to Fidel Castro, is the only way to put Cuba back into geopolitical play -- and that Oswald is the perfect instrument for their ambitions. We are plunged into the strange half-world of Bay of Pigs veterans, rogue agents, right-wing fanatics, Mafia thugs, the whole peculiar melange from which emerged the most shattering event of postwar history. Oswald's sign was Libra, the scales -- and how he tilts will determine whether Dallas will be just another stop on the political itinerary or the locus of exploded American dreams.
"From its first page Libra grips the reader with inexorable fascination; the seams between fact and invention in this book never show, and the characters -- both real and created -- are imagined with a novelistic virtuosity that is uniquely Don DeLillo's. Libra is grave and haunting and brilliant -- Don DeLillo's finest novel to date and surely one of the most important novels of the decade." [jacket blurb, Canadian hbk, 1988]
National Archives and Records Administration
(President John F.Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Reference System... 170,873 records and counting)
National Conspiracy League
(subversive links... JFK assassination who's who)
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