Reading Don DeLillo and Paul Auster

Too many intellectual forcing, neither convincing. “I’m going through a crisis period with the American fiction”, Maurizio Cucchi admits. “Simenon is better”

by Maurizio Cucchi

Maurizio Cucchi

I’m going through a crisis period with the American fiction that I usually love. I drew little satisfaction in reading a couple of novels by the clever DeLillo, i.e., Mao II and Cosmopolis and one by the able but less ingenious Paul Auster. DeLillo is neither plausible nor centred. The terrorist-confectioner that throws cakes in the face of powerful men is funny but the writer goes too far. He wants to interpret everything too early, for an historical viewpoint, hence resulting bizarre and, sometimes, ridicoulus. On the other side, Mao is full of tedious and backward characters. He is a writer that stupidly escapes the world, a photographer that idiotly takes only photo of photographers, and writes stupid vainly-intellectual dialogs. However DeLillo can represents everything, idiot things as well, with an impressive skill. The novel by Auster is equally not plausible. The plot represents a professor in crisis that is on the tracks of a minor silent movie comic actor missing for some unknown reason. The latter is making movies is a desert loneliness with a rich and exalted wife that, at the end, destroys everything. Also in this case, too many intellectual forcing, neither convincing.
So, at the moment, I’m back to Europe and to Simenon.