The first details Lee Harvey Oswald's life from his childhood through the assassination of President John F. Somewhere along the line, however, the plot to fake an assassination attempt becomes a plot to commit an assassination – and the key figure, the fall guy, the patsy, becomes one Lee Harvey Oswald. Concurrently in the novel, a cadre of CIA agents disillusioned by Kennedy's perceived failure to adequately support the Bay of Pigs invasion hatch a plot to stage an assassination attempt and blame it on the Cuban government. Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.

How his innate disability to permeate the inner normalcy of living, of society, was ammunition to spin plots that seems seemingly unavoidable given the larger context of his role to be played in history. Branch has decided it is premature to make a serious effort to turn these notes into coherent history.While DeLillo's characters never really open up to the readers, they can still be haunting and memorable. Oswald's dynamic personality shows that people are multifaceted and complex: they are not simply one thing but an entire web of their personal experiences, beliefs, aspirations, and trauma.

And when the author gets into digressions and thoughts of the characters it's even worse because the reading gets slow and tedious. A troubled adolescent endlessly riding New York's subway cars, Lee Harvey Oswald enters adulthood believing himself to be an agent of history. As a reader of history – from Herodotus and Thucydides, to Livy and Tacitus, to Edward Gibbon, to John Hope Franklin and Doris Kearns Goodwin – I have always been struck by the way great events often turn upon tiny chances: the contingency theory of history. I should probably back up a bit to mention that this book is a fictionalized account of JFK's assassination, and the "Libra" in question is Lee Harvey Oswald, the famous would-be shooter (or patsy?This general principle applies to works like White Noise (1985), DeLillo’s satire of academia, in which the main character’s development of a Department of Hitler Studies at a prestigious liberal-arts college illustrates both the modern academy’s tendency to overspecialize and the way in which academics can become untethered from the real-world significance of what they study (the “Hitler Studies” department somehow never seems to find time to discuss the Holocaust). I start with this grim reminder as I could not help but feel that DeLillo's book must have, at some point, been considered as a Hollywood project. From the brilliant interior monologues, to the richly constructed scenes involving a whole array of other characters, this labyrinthine underworld of a novel was simply top notch, and due to the way the plot is structured, probably DeLillo's most complex work at the time. From the author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and The Silence , an eerily convincing fictional speculation on the events leading up to the assassination of John F. The title Libra is a reference to Oswald's Zodiac sign, which becomes a symbol for the balance and imbalance in the novel.