Review: Libra

Libra by Don DeLillo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the audiobook, this story based on the Kennedy assassination had a dreamlike quality. Part of the reason for that is DeLillo’s writing. He is talking about some of the most consequential actions in a person’s life, even in recent history, and he will sometimes stop to describe the way a person is smoking a cigarette, as if it might be a tip-off to why a person acted a certain way. You expect that when you get into conspiracy theories, and this story is really that at its base – the story leading to the action. We follow Lee Harvey Oswald, and all his aliases, from childhood through defection to Russia and return, and we follow him as he’s groomed to be a patsy. While Oswald is the central character in the book, we also spend time in the eyes of his wife and mother, Jack Ruby, and in the CIA mastermind who plots the assassination attempt, including Cubans and mafia figures. I found the storyline with Oswald and the CIA operative to get quite confusing over time, as the author I believe intended, such that the story gets changed and you can’t tell how it happened. Was there a doublecross? DeLillo ends with Oswald’s mother’s lament, which felt quite Shakesperian in tone to close out the story. DeLillo says in an afterward that this was a novel, not non-fiction, and intended to get people to think. But it’s a novelization of a conspiracy theory, interesting and well written, so I can see myself remembering this more than any official version of the story as time goes on. Fact becomes fiction becomes fact, though modified in the process. Hopefully this story is one that readers will be willing to remember over time.

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