The Body Artist by Don DeLillo

Some books needed time and maturity to have affinity. The first reading found myself wanting in wisdom to understand the deeper brushes of pain and helplessness. Hence, I thought it was a rather odd book.

It is about a woman drowning, perhaps, in her own melancholy or in her own art moving eerily around her house. Of old ghosts and broken sense of reality. In short, the book is almost one big metaphor.

Reading The Body Artist felt like being inside a white room slowly closing in and you never know the passage of time or days. All you are left with is your own mind which sometimes torments or becomes a dreamy haze in which you never find yourself.

DeLillo knows his language and brilliantly plays with words that renders the reader grasping thin vapors instead of solid form. He plays with the spaces and shadows in our heads, the silences between one memory to another in the mundane poetry of day to day.

I could ignore the vagueness of the plot and just thoroughly enjoy reading his unsettling prose. Perhaps on my second reading, it wouldn't be half as weird or as warped as I first perceived it.

Summary

In this spare, seductive novel, he inhabits the muted world of Lauren Hartke, an artist whose work defies the limits of the body. Lauren is living on a lonely coast, in a rambling rented house, where she encounters a strange, ageless man, a man with uncanny knowledge of her own life. Together they begin a journey into the wilderness of time -- time, love and human perception.

Title: The Body Artist
Author: Don DeLillo
Genre: Paranormal
Published: 2001
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Rating: ♨♨♨ 1/2 (3 and half cups - It is like reading in a stupor. Surreal and odd.)