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What follows is one of the strangest ghost stories since The Turn of the Screw. And like James's tale, it seems to partake of at least seven kinds of ambiguity, leaving the reader to sort out its riddles. Returning to their summer rental after Rey's funeral, Lauren discovers a strange stowaway living in a spare room: an inarticulate young man, perhaps retarded, who may have been there for weeks. His very presence is hard for her to pin down: "There was something elusive in his aspect, moment to moment, a thinning of physical address." Yet soon this mysterious figure begins to speak in Rey's voice, and her own, playing back entire conversations from the days preceding the suicide. Has Lauren's husband been reincarnated? Or is the man simply an eavesdropping idiot savant, reproducing sentences he'd heard earlier from his concealment?
DeLillo refuses any definitive answer. Instead he lets Lauren steep in her grief and growing puzzlement, and speculates in his own voice about this apparent intersection of past and present, life and death. At times his rhetoric gets away from him, an odd thing for such a superbly controlled writer. "How could such a surplus of vulnerability find itself alone in the world?" he asks, sounding as though he's discussing a sick puppy. And Lauren's performances--for she is the body artist of the title--sound pretty awful, the kind of thing Artaud might have cooked up for an aerobics class. Still, when DeLillo reins in the abstractions and bears down, the results are heartbreaking:
Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the ones you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.At this stage of his career, a thin book is an adventure for DeLillo. So is his willingness to risk sentimentality, to immerse us in personal rather than national traumas. For all its flaws, then, The Body Artist is a real, raw accomplishment, and a reminder that bigger, even for so capacious an imagination as DeLillo's, isn't always better. --James Marcus
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. The Body Artist begins with normality: breakfast between a married couple, Lauren and Rey, in their ramshackle rented house on the New England coast. Recording their delicate, intimate, half-complete thoughts and words, DeLillo proves himself a stunningly unsentimental observer of our idiosyncratic relationships. But after breakfast, Rey makes a decision that leaves Lauren utterly alone, or seems to. As Lauren, the body artist of the title, becomes strangely detached from herself and the temporal world, the novel becomes an exploration of a highly abnormal grieving process; a fascinating expose of 'who we are when we are not rehearsing who we are'; and a rarefied study of trauma and creativity, absence and presence, isolation and communion. A sad, beautiful novel, The Body Artist is an elliptical meditation on the mysteries of love, life and time. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780330524957
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Book Description paperback. Condition: New. Language: ENG. Seller Inventory # 9780330524957
Book Description Paperback. Condition: Brand New. 128 pages. 7.72x5.12x0.47 inches. In Stock. Seller Inventory # __033052495X
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Book Description Paperback / softback. Condition: New. New copy - Usually dispatched within 4 working days. A sad, beautiful novel, The Body Artist is an elliptical meditiation on the mysteries of love, life and time. Seller Inventory # B9780330524957
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Book Description Condition: New. 2011. Reprints. Paperback. A sad, beautiful novel, The Body Artist is an elliptical meditiation on the mysteries of love, life and time. Num Pages: 128 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 199 x 132 x 11. Weight in Grams: 128. . . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland. Seller Inventory # V9780330524957