Cosmopolis - Softcover

DeLillo, Don

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330524933 ISBN 13: 9780330524933

Publisher: Picador, 2011

Synopsis

Eric Packer is a twenty-eight-year-old multi-billionaire asset manager. We join him on what will become a particularly eventful April day in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Manhattan. He's on a personal odyssey, to get a haircut. Sitting in his stretch limousine as it moves across town, he finds the city at a virtual standstill because the President is visiting, a rapper's funeral is proceeding, and a violent protest is being staged in Times Square by anti-globalist groups. Most worryingly, Eric's bodyguards are concerned that he may be a target . . .

An electrifying study in affectlessness, infused with deep cynicism and measured detachment; a harsh indictment of the life-denying tendencies of capitalism; as brutal a dissection of the American dream as Wolfe's Bonfire or Ellis's Psycho, Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis is a caustic prophecy all too quickly realized.

About this title

Review:

Cosmopolis is Don DeLillo's 13th novel. His reputation as one of the most provocative and innovative of American writers is assured, thanks to such books as Underworld and Americana, but this new outing is as likely to challenge the author's legion of admirers as much as it will exhilarate them--and there's nothing wrong with that.

DeLillo's protagonist this time is a well-heeled American, Eric Packer, who sets out one eventful day for a haircut. Gazing through the windows of his white limousine （and availing himself of its state-of-the-art technology）, this self-made millionaire takes in the spectacle of financiers being murdered, the funeral of a rapper and some violent anti-globalisation protests. As we come to know DeLillo's anti-hero, we realise that Eric Packer is by no means the most ingratiating of individuals. Cheating on his new wife, he specialises in using people in a cynical and exploitative way. And as this self-serving captain of industry takes an ever-more dangerous journey through a bizarrely rendered New York, it's inevitable that comparisons with Tom Wolfe's classic Bonfire of the Vanities will spring to mind. Resemblances of plot aside, however, the book is a very different animal. Wolfe's narrative had the epic spread of a latter-day War and Peace, whereas DeLillo sharpens and condenses his prose in Cosmopolis to produce an altogether more concise novel.

There are two ways to approach Cosmopolis: as a rudely pointed dissection of the American Dream, or as a surreal, symbolic and disturbing road trip. This is not a comforting book, but a bracing and caustic one. --Barry Forshaw

Review:

America's greatest living writer. (Observer)

A brilliant excursion into the decadence of contemporary culture. (Sunday Times)

A prose-poem about New York . . . DeLillo has always been good at telling us where we're heading . . . we ignore him at our peril. (Blake Morrison Guardian)

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0330524933
• ISBN 13: 9780330524933
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224