There's always more to it. This is what history consists of. It is the sum total of things they aren't telling us."

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. A friend of mine once sat me down and made me watch the documentary Loose Change. For those that don't know Loose Change is a detailed documentary positing the idea that 9/11 was a false flag operation. Its modus operandi is to follow the money. Without question, it's a disturbingly convincing film on many levels but at a certain point I began to think about the urgency with which my friend needed to believe he now possessed secret inside information. I could sense how he felt it empowered him. To believe you have the secret to a plot is to be transformed from a bystander to an insider. And the zeal with which he wanted to convert me to his way of thinking was religious in essence. He had that glazed intent look Jehovah's Witnesses have on your doorstep. However, there's no denying the big four American conspiracy theories, all of which debunk the comforting notion that America is a democracy, are compelling stories. DeLillo described the JFK assassination as a story about our uncertain grip on the world and you could say the same about 9/11 and the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations. What they all had in common was they enabled hugely profitable wars to be continued or begun. Libra has been on a long hiatus as I have been occupied with a hundred other things. While I have not been reading this book about JFK's assassination, I did recently happen to drive by the actual location of Kennedy's assassination and the sixth floor museum. For all our re-enactment of life's mysteries in the form of art and fiction, we still can't truly comprehend them. Instead, we institutionalise them, so that they master and tame us, and lead us into submission. Mi diranno: DeLillo scrive bene! DeLillo è praticamente intoccabile! osannato e divinizzato....si ok, non mi basta.Much of the JFK conspiracy-theory detail that has gathered around the assassination over the years, like a grotesque pearl forming within a polluted oyster, has stemmed from one known historical fact – that there were operatives within the CIA and other agencies of the U.S. government who were unhappy that President Kennedy, after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, refused to consider war with communist Cuba. Chi è Oswald? Un assassino, un sovversivo, un pazzo, un poveraccio in balia degli eventi, un burattino manovrato? O una vittima? Well, that's not entirely true. My interest flared up each time LHO entered the scene, because he was so strange, such an unknowable outsider. So young, so unpredictable, so mediocre, so idealistic, so poor... and also now this historical figure who is known by all his given names. My interest peaked on the November 22 chapter. DeLillo captured the events in such a powerful, cinematic way, I found myself recalling the iconic film sequence almost frame by frame, my heart pounding and clenching as President Kennedy waved, and mouthed "thank you" in the moments before the bullets flew, seconds before his wife would be holding part of his brains in her hands.

Unlike typical thrillers where characters are mere caricatures blindly running after power/money ***, DeLillo's characters are quite real. They do stop long enough to breathe and think. The reader is privy to their objectives, their motivations, their hesitations and dilemmas. Despite knowing how the story is going to end, it is never uninteresting. On the second plan we get the conspiratorial activities of the special services and the criminal groups. Here the main roles play retired agents, members of the anti-Castro opposition, anti-communist activists, mafia. Independently of each other are preparing a provocation aimed at Kennedy. Parmenter believed that “nothing can be finally known that involves human motive and need. There is always another level, another secret, a way in which the heart breeds a deception so mysterious and complex it can only be taken for a deeper kind of truth.”

Battery

When my daughter tells me a secret, her hands get very busy. She takes my arm, grabs me by the shirt collar, pulls me close, pulls me into her life. She knows how intimate secrets are. She likes to tell me things before she goes to sleep. Secrets are an exalted state, almost a dream state. They're a way of arresting motion, stopping the world so we can see ourselves in it. This is why you're here. All I had to do was provide a place and time...You're here because there's something vitalising in a secret.” Life is hostile, he believed. The struggle is to merge your life with the greater tide of history.” Libra is a 1988 novel by Don DeLillo that describes the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and his participation in a fictional CIA conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. The novel blends historical fact with fictional supposition.