Mao II: A Novel - Softcover

DeLillo, Don

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140152741 ISBN 13: 9780140152746

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1992

Synopsis

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award

From the author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and Zero K

"One of the most intelligent, grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America" (The New York Times), Don DeLillo presents an extraordinary new novel about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch-individualist. At the heart of the book is Bill Gray, a famous reclusive writer who escapes the failed novel he has been working on for many years and enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms. Bill's dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover--and Bill's.

About this title

Review:

Don DeLillo's follow-up to Libra, his brilliant fictionalization of the Kennedy assassination, Mao II is a series of elusive set-pieces built around the themes of mass psychology, individualism vs. the mob, the power of imagery and the search for meaning in a blasted, post-modern world. Bill Gray, the world's most famous reclusive novelist, has been working for many years on a stalled masterpiece when he gets the chance to aid a hostage trapped in a basement in war-torn Beirut. Gray sets out on a doomed, quixotic journey, and his disappearance disrupts the cloistered lives of his obsessed assistant and the assistant's companion, a former Moonie who has also become Bill's lover. This haunting, masterful novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992.

From the Publisher:

6 1.5-hour cassettes

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0140152741
• ISBN 13: 9780140152746
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256