Don DeLillo
Underworld

It emerges from the water, from the burst drainage grates in a valium sunset, with super comfortable diapers and sublime detergents. It enters you through the liquid crystals of the flat-screen you keep in the living room, breaking electrodes and devouring pixels. Do you hear it? Can you feel it the way I do? An absence of periodicity, a deafening renewable entropy. Deafening explosions of mental and rhetorical masturbation, products to chew, ingest, metabolize, and shove up your ass. To spread on your teeth as you dash out of the house in the morning, aware that everyone around you at that moment will do the same after you. You are a question mark, prostrated in the climb of your future. Artificial epidermal changes that make you feel rejuvenated. Ready for another day.

I may feel embarrassed now. It is not easy to talk about a literary leviathan without explaining its organism or from which divine intuition it was generated. Those who know the depths know what I speak of. I try to avoid stylistic flourishes, I try to make the information pleasant. I can't shirk responsibility, therefore: Don DeLillo could be considered today the immortal guru, still living, of a generation that looks with magnetic eyes at an unstoppable and cannibalistic horizon of progress. Among the last riders of the dying beast of postmodernism. The progeny of proselytes, devotees, truly great surpassing disciples with illustrious colleagues. A dissector of domestic and world miseries for forty years now, he excels at transporting the reader through artificial circles in a limbo of false reassurances, inhabited by people trying to escape while being aware - every damned day of their existence - that they will have to do so using the means offered to them by the community they fear and of which they are inexorably a part.

Underworld is the colossus, the chasm dug by a celestial electric discharge in the ground ready to swallow schizophrenic consumers, radioactive explosions, emotional breakdowns, and daily nightmares. And it does, dragging you further in until the sun's photons in the celestial vault that penetrate from outside reduce to a distant speck to which the hand is extended, only to have its ligaments broken. It does so starting from a game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. It starts in the bottom of the ninth inning, Ralph Branca pitches to Bobby Thomson. Miracle of creation. Pafko is at the wall and watches. Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover watch. Lenny Bruce. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Triumph of death. It is the story of ordinary people like Nick Shay, submerged in tedium, who disposes of waste, who has spent much of his life trying to come to terms with his father's disappearance. According to him, the Lucky Strike logo is a target. It is the story of a pop artist who paints decommissioned airplanes and is sure that the first name given to the atomic bomb was "shit." But before that, it is the story of Cotter, an African American boy who on October 3, '51, caught Bobby Thomson's ball only to lose it again. The ball keeps moving and reconstructs the facts of a dysfunctional population. I don't want to tell you more. Pafko remains at the wall.