The story:
Following three main themes - the fate of a baseball from the winning game of the 1951 world series, the threat of atomic warfare and the mountains of garbage created by modern society - DeLillo moves forwards and backwards through the decades, introducing characters and situations and gradually showing the way their lives are interconnected.
Reading the prose can be uncannily like using a web browser: the narrative focus moves from character to character almost as quickly as we are introduced to them, and the time frame regularly changes to show further connections between the key players. This device - literature as hypertext - is particularly effective in the early parts of the novel and the technique never intrudes on the story itself.
The book focuses on Nick Shay, a former hoodlum who now works in the burgeoning waste management industry and owns the baseball from the 1951 game, "the shot heard around the world". In addition to Nick we hear from Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, Lenny Bruce and the various people who move in and out of Nick's life: lovers, family, friends and colleagues. Through these seemingly disconnected narratives DeLillo paints a picture of Cold War paranoia at its peak - the baseball game happened the same day as the USSR's first nuclear test - and the changes affecting his characters as a microcosm of American society as a whole.

About the author:
Don DeLillo (b. 1936) is a contemporary American writer known mostly for his novels. These include End Zone (1972); The Names (1982); White Noise (1985), which won the national book award; Libra (1988), a fictionalized biography of Lee Harvey Oswald; and most recently, Underworld (1997). He has also written two plays, The Day Room (1986) and Valparaiso (1999).

Excerpt from book:
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Buchdaten:
UNDERWORLD by Don de Lillo
Sprache: Englisch
Broschiert - 827 Seiten - Picador
Erscheinungsdatum: 13. Dezember 1998
ISBN: 0330369954
Preis: € 16,50