Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Libra
Libra
Libra
Audiobook18 hours

Libra

Written by Don DeLillo

Narrated by Michael Prichard

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

About this audiobook

In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald’s odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When “history” presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.

A gripping, masterful blend of fact and fiction, alive with meticulously portrayed characters both real and created, Libra is a grave, haunting, and brilliant examination of an event that has become an indelible part of the American psyche.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 19, 2016
ISBN9781508222774
Libra
Author

Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo is the author of seventeen novels including White Noise, which was made into a Netflix film, Libra, Underworld, Falling Man, and Zero K. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His story collection The Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2013, DeLillo was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and in 2015, the National Book Foundation awarded DeLillo its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. 

More audiobooks from Don De Lillo

Related to Libra

Related audiobooks

Historical Fiction For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for Libra

Rating: 3.866508800631911 out of 5 stars
4/5

633 ratings23 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This story pads out and adds to facts that are known of the assassination of JFK on 22 Nov 1963. It is written from the perspectives of a number of people- Lee Harvey Oswald, his wife Marina, and mother Marguerite. As well as various government officials and Intelligence agents who were implicated in the conspiracy theory that is told so well in this book. Apart from being superbly written, it is a very clever, and a very real feeling portrayal. The parts of the story are drip fed to the reader in pieces here and there, from different sources. We are left to add it all up, but always with doubt about what is really happening and who is really behind this sad event, and most importantly: why. I think this style reflects the true happenings of operations within an Intelligence agency. There are a select few making plans and information is deliberately withheld from participants in events to protect the plans, as well as the planners. There are multiple back stories, aliases and false leads. I like to think that it was intended that the reader have trouble following it all, but it was probably my less than analytical brain that had the problems. Regardless of the intensity of the prose, I felt it easy to read and always looked forward to getting my fix of the next few chapters.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    DeLillo’s dialogue and character work never fails. Libra foregrounds the power of narrative to empower the self-positioning of subjects within an unfolding totality when material history fails us. Ingenious in the weaving of criticism into the text, the story never fails to work as a story. DeLillo provides enjoyment and intellectual challenge, which (to me at least) is the one of highest praises you can offer a novel. Great read/listen, definitely recommend!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Don DeLillo published this book in 1988 to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. I was an impressionable teenager at that time and I have strong memories of the events as they unfolded on national television. What DeLillo does so well is to tell the backstory of the oddball loner with the mystifying smile, Lee Harvey Oswald, in conjunction with the supposed conspiracy by a group of disgruntled CIA agents who believed Kennedy botched the Bay of Pigs incident and sacrificed Cuba to Communism. He devotes almost 400 pages of the book to his version of what led up to the "six point nine seconds of heat and light" that changed history. I was captivated by his interior examination of Oswald's life and way of thinking that resulted in the outcome that has been the source of speculation for the past fifty years.Much is made of the fact that Oswald's October birthday was under the sign of Libra, the scales. He was unbalanced and harbored many contradictions. He sat on the scales ready to be tilted either way. That's why the conspiracy theories thrived. Many believed that Oswald didn't have the conviction to carry out an assassination without stronger men behind him. Who knows? This book doesn't set out to convince the reader of anything. But it makes one think which is always the sign of a good book in my estimation. It has been over fifty years now since that fateful day in November that took the life of our 35th President. I don't dwell on those days when I was glued to the television set like most of America, but I do recall the horror and confusion of the time. DeLillo makes a good case for reading his book in the "Author's Note" at the end: "This is a work of imagination...In a case in which rumors, facts, suspicions, official subterfuge, conflicting sets of evidence and a dozen labyrinthine theories all mingle, sometimes indistinguishably, it may seem to some that a work of fiction is one more gloom in a chronicle of unknowing. But because this book makes no claim to literal truth, because it is only itself, apart and complete, readers may find refuge here--a way of thinking about the assassination without being constrained by half-facts or overwhelmed by possibilities, by the tide of speculation that widens with the years."
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Hard to say Such a well written.sensative piece
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Brilliant if sometimes meandering fictionalization of our "First Ghost", as Norman Mailer called Oswald. His mother here in particular is a tragic and disturbing character who I won't soon forget.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Very impressive. But too long.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Fascinating book about Lee Harvey Oswald. This is my first experience with DeLillo's writing, which I found to be fresh and original. The use of dialog is especially compelling - the way he gets inside the characters' heads is sort of magical. It's clearly a work of fiction (as the author's note explains, although to me it's obvious), but it gets at some truth about the nature of the main characters. This one will stay with me.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    See the truth and know it, if you can.

    It's easy to see why David Foster Wallace - or, indeed, anybody - likes Don DeLillo: his dense, lingually contorted novels leave a stronghold on one's mind beyond the fact. In my case, I seldom remember the plots, but I can remember certain scenes or feelings invoked, mainly as few authors have managed both in the same way before.

    It's less about the contents and more about a general sentiment.

    Workmen carried lanterns along adjacent tracks. He kept a watch for sewer rats. A tenth of a second was all it took to see a thing complete. Then the express stations, the creaky brakes, people bunched like refugees. They came wagging through the doors, banged against the rubber edges, inched their way in, were quickly pinned, looking out past the nearest heads into that practiced oblivion.

    As the book states, this is about the Kennedy assassination. Oswald was a Libra. Does he buy into the whole Oswald-did-it-thing? Does anybody care?

    There is political intrigue here. Language snakes around as a man hits the person he's romantically entangled with, which turned me into near-vomit; one of the fores of DeLillo's strengths are how he can describe dramatic detail with few words and yet, together with the use of idiomatic expressions in dialogue, refrain from sounding tart or obtuse.

    She saw him from a distance even when he was hitting her. He was never fully there.

    Yes yes yes yes. God is alive and well in Texas.

    Paragraphs turn into short stories at times:

    “I’ll tell you a good sign,” Lee said. “I order the handgun in January, I order the rifle in March. Both guns arrive the same day. My wife would say it’s fate.” “What did you tell her about tonight?” “She thinks I’m at typing class. I dropped out of typing class two weeks ago. I got fired from my job last Saturday was my last day.”

    “I have the primitive fear,” Ferrie said. “All my fears are primitive. It’s the limbic system of the brain. I’ve got a million years of terror stored up in there.” He wore a crushed sun hat, the expressive brows like clown paint over his eyes. He handed Wayne the rifle. They watched him walk to the lopsided dock and climb into the skiff.

    All in all, I really got into this book around the 350-page mark. Was it worth it? Yes.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This chronicles the assassination of John F. Kennedy. For a DeLillo novel, I found it to be a decent on-- but nothing more. Surely, not one of his best.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Libra by Don DeLillo is a 1988 book. Don Delillo is a post modernist author. This is his 9th book. Libra is a retelling of the assasination of JFK by Lee Harvey Oswald.. This book will make you believe the conspiracy theories. Not sure of my rating yet. The story is the life of Oswald from childhood as a bullied, disadvantaged youth with dyslexia. The assasination, dreamed up after the Bay of Pigs to promote anti Cuban opinion and push America back into conflict with Cuba was dreamed up by disgruntled CIA agents was meant to fail. This book has a lot of espionage in it. It also has a parrallel story of the man who has been assigned to review all the data that has been collected about the assasination and write the history of the assasination
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'm rating this novel with 4 stars, in spite of the fact that I didn't really enjoy reading it very much. This is a fictional account of events leading up to and including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. If you didn't live through that time, or if you only know the barest outline of what happened and who was involved, this could be an outstanding literary adventure for you. I appreciated it, without loving it, and I believe that is almost entirely due to the fact that I was once so completely immersed in reading about the Kennedy assassination that I simply cannot distance myself from the history and let the fiction carry me away. This is post-modern stuff, and I soon realized that DeLillo was doing something quite remarkable with his multiple characters and points of view. I think the novel is a masterpiece of imagination, as DeLillo put himself (and me, very often) directly and brilliantly into the heads of Lee Harvey Oswald, his mother, his wife, and many of his associates. He made it clear in an author's note that he "made no attempt to furnish factual answers to any questions raised by the assassination". And by changing the perspective from one character to another throughout, DeLillo also made it difficult to come to any conclusions about what "really" was happening. Any given character only knew--or told-- part of the story, and many of them were thoroughly unreliable narrators. Nevertheless, it's hard not to come away from Libra with a strong impression that in this version of events, Oswald himself didn't believe he fired the shot that killed Kennedy. It's fascinating stuff, but it didn't need fictionalization for me to find it so. Having said that, though, I'm a bit disappointed that I couldn't have read this unquestionably fine piece of work without knowing a blessed thing about the historical events it is based on. I'm pretty sure I would have loved it in that case.Review written December 2016
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I unintentionally finished this days before the 50th anniversary of JFK's death, which made the whole thing even more enjoyable, if that's the right word. Aside from a bit of the good ole American prose (and its general fear of syntax more complex than subject-verb-object), and brief moments of postmodern angst (can we know anything???), this is an excellent, excellent book. It's easy to read but doesn't ignore the possibility that writing may (I'd go as far as 'should') be noticeable. But most importantly, it's very, very smart.

    What is an historical novel* meant to do? One character in 'Libra' suggests that history just is the sum total of what we don't know--presumably what we do know being either 'present' or, perhaps, knowing history makes it less likely to have unpleasant effects: if I know x has a history of beating his girlfriends, I'd warn my friend against dating him. Another character suggests that Oswald, who thinks that he wants to enter history, really wants *out* of history: he doesn't want to be a concrete thing, he wants to be a symbol. And of course he has become just that.

    Most of us know nothing about LHO except the image of him being shot, and despite this ignorance, we also feel that he's the image of America's shift (massive generalization alert) from confidence to neurosis. What we know, in this case at least, is just the symbol. But the symbol is not 'in' history; symbols float free of history. So yes, LHO wanted to get out of history, and he did. He's known. But only as a symbol. What we don't know is the real history.

    And that's what the historical novel, and narrative art more generally, offers us: some way to understand the messiness of 'history', to burrow under the symbols and decontextualized factoids. Art suggests and plays with what we don't know--here, LHO's personality, wishes and dreams on the one hand, and a possible conspiracy on the other. In other words, the historical novel and conspiracy theories do much the same thing: they try to contextualize symbols, to ground them in history, in the things we don't know. Libra achieves the almost impossible: it confers dignity on LHO and his family by paying attention to history.

    Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, dignify nobody, except perhaps the theorist in her own eyes. That's not to say that the urge to produce conspiracy theories is blameworthy. They're attempts to understand and get behind the symbols, just like DeLillo's novel. And the novel itself makes it hard to see what difference there might be between art and theory (aside from intelligence and style). I'm sure there is one, but how can I describe it? Right now, I just don't know.


    *: McCarthy's 'Blood Meridian' was published in 1985, three years before 'Libra'... and both feature a villainous, pederastic man who suffers from Alopecia universalis. Conspiracy?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I didn't come to this with a ton of knowledge about the Kennedy assassination - I know the basics, but I feel like I might have enjoyed what DeLillo was doing more if I had a solider background there. It's an interesting conspiracy theory that underlies the narrative, and DeLillo doesn't shy away from making his characters look ugly or ridiculous when it's called for.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A fictionalized biography of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination. Interesting, but not amazing.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Tough to read, for several reasons. Ventures into the dark underbelly of American history. Lee Harvey Oswald is an unusual choice of protagonist, and a very thought-provoking one.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This story pads out and adds to facts that are known of the assassination of JFK on 22 Nov 1963. It is written from the perspectives of a number of people- Lee Harvey Oswald, his wife Marina, and mother Marguerite. As well as various government officials and Intelligence agents who were implicated in the conspiracy theory that is told so well in this book. Apart from being superbly written, it is a very clever, and a very real feeling portrayal. The parts of the story are drip fed to the reader in pieces here and there, from different sources. We are left to add it all up, but always with doubt about what is really happening and who is really behind this sad event, and most importantly: why. I think this style reflects the true happenings of operations within an Intelligence agency. There are a select few making plans and information is deliberately withheld from participants in events to protect the plans, as well as the planners. There are multiple back stories, aliases and false leads. I like to think that it was intended that the reader have trouble following it all, but it was probably my less than analytical brain that had the problems. Regardless of the intensity of the prose, I felt it easy to read and always looked forward to getting my fix of the next few chapters.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I skipped this story in college, in a semester when I was so overloaded with books that I couldn't read them all. Being the compulsive person that I am, I always knew that one day I would get back to it. Now, ten years (Ten years! I can't believe I just wrote that.) after graduating, I finally did. Libra is a complex book. It weaves the most intricate conspiracy theory about the assassination of President Kennedy that I have ever read (granted, I don't usually read conspiracy theories), based on the understanding that this is just a fictional reconstruction of what might have been. The book is split between multiple points of view; chapters alternate, focusing either on Lee Oswald's personal history or the various intelligence men who constructed an elaborate back story to justify their attack on the president's life. There are so many voices in this book that I can't begin to capture them all. Lee is a prominent figure, of course, as he gets primary attention for half the novel. The other men, and occasional women, who comprise the narrative are involved in layers of deception, deception of others and themselves. Lee is the worst of all the deceivers, as he constantly tries to reinvent his identity and, at the same time, create aliases to hide behind. He deludes himself into believing that he is this other persona, such as the Communist Lee who defects to the Soviet Union (until he is sick of the life there), or the Military Lee who will be an expert marksman and fighter (except he is never more than mediocre), until his illusion cracks and ugly reality thrusts into his carefully crafted life. He then retreats to his well-groomed mantras of hatred and blame and tries to find some other channel that will allow him to be who he really is. Yet how can that ever happen, when he can never form a solid idea of his own identity? The only constant in his shifting mental landscape is this idea that he is meant to be a part of history. Lee is forever pursuing this goal, and it always eludes him. Until, of course, he takes part in killing the president (according to this book, Lee is not the one who actually kills him, missing terribly on all of his shots). Once Lee has finally found his way in to history, it's not at all what he wanted; no glowing moment of justification and repudiation, but a sad and dingy notoriety, known as an assassin and nothing more.The other end of the equation, the CIA men and their network of informers and partners and scapegoats, are also fascinating. Win Everett instigates the president's assassination, after he is horribly disappointed in how the whole Cuba affair fell out. Originally, he plans on creating a near-miss on Kennedy's life, and trailing the blame to a communist Cuba sympathizer, galvanizing the country into the war that should have been. As his plans unfold, however, and other people take their parts and develop their own details and pass plans on to still more people, Everett fears that the plan is taking on a life of its own, and shifting into a more menacing conspiracy than he intended. And he is right. Some people don't just want to the president scared, they want him dead. These two halves of the novel present some profound themes that take this book beyond mere conspiracy theory. Among the many themes, here are just a few: identity, and the juxtaposition between reality and facade, and just where the line between really lays, and how reality can become fantasy and fantasy can become reality, and the idea of unseen forces directing our lives. There are infinite webs of secret societies in this book; some are real and some are imagined, but it is impossible to discern between the two. Lee has delusions of people watching him, but the people he thinks are spying on him are not; however, there are a lot of people who actually are watching him and trying to control him. These ideas are presented with plenty of action, a great grasp of colloquial language, and a rising tension that erupts in the violence I knew was coming, but still somehow hoped wouldn't happen.I liked the book. It's definitely not a fast read - not because of the language of the book, which is powerful and concise, but because the subject matter is so dense. So many characters weave in and out of the narrative! If you don't mind books that require some mental organization, I think the story is worth the work. It's a fascinating study of the secret world that operates around us, and so carefully constructed that I had a hard time remembering it was just a fictional story. I will never look at the assassination of JFK in the same way again.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I see that this book took serious thought, real research, and a dedication to history and imagination that comes through on each page......but, while I'm normally a fan of Delillo, I had a rough time getting through this book. I'd recommend it to those interested in dense creative nonfiction and conspiracy theory, and of course to those interested in the stories built up around the JFK assassination, but otherwise, this isn't one I'd pass on. For this reader, it was just too dense and focused a text. I can appreciate the goal, the writing, and the experiment.....but this read like a wandering conspiracy theory, and I was ready for it to be done fairly early on.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Delillo is always a difficult author to get a perfect handle on, but goddamn this was a rip-tide of a book. Reads like an incantation of an assassination, with an eerie fatalistic pulse pumping through the latter half. Frustrating and opaque, as always, at times, but still unnervingly convincing. And shi-it, what a first-rate nightmare.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An incredibly interesting take on the JFK assassination. This is a good political drama, as well as a good detective story.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Although both idea and writing are appealing, the predictability of the story made this a somewhat tedious read. (And by 'predictability' I don't mean knowing what happens to JFK in the end.)
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Plausible account of the JKF assassination and surrounding circumstances. Memorable for a few sentences so well constructed you may have to stop reading, put the book down, and tell someone about it.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I'm convinced that no one who reads this damn thing remembers what it's about beyond the baseball story at the beginning -- and that was nothing special. DeLillo writes a flat, unemotional, uninvolving prose that I can only take in small doses. If Star Trek's Dr. Spock became a novelist, he'd sound like DeLillo.