Talent is everything. If you've got the talent, nothing else matters.
You can screw up your personal life something terrible."
Americana, Don Dellilo
Somewhere I read Brett Easton Ellis say that he never would have written American Psycho if he'd read Americana by Don DeLillo first. One summer I borrowed the trade paperback of Americana a bunch of times from the Rosedale Library and read it (fun fact: the Rosedale Library also gave me first access to Moon Palace by Paul Auster. And there used to be a bookstore in the heart of Toronto's Gay Ghetto at Church & Wellesley called This Ain't The Rosedale Library that I would frequent -- they had a great comic book section filled with local talent. But this ain't that -- this was the Rosedale Library). The print, the pebbled paper, the feel, the new-paper smell of it...
Newcomers to DeLillo are probably better off reading Mao II, White Noise or even Libra and Underworld (all of them beloved Britnell's books (I'm also fond of A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes)).
No comments:
Post a Comment