Stefan

Second read (Feb 2016).

A bit too unphilosophical & journalistic (e.g. I can't get over the feeling that Hitchens was writing the book with the tv and the news on: this version of reality, however official it may be, is not relevant for me). I prefer Michel Onfray's version of Nietzschean atheism and I wonder why there are so few philosophers in the atheist controversion: it's almost like the theologians and scientists (more exactly authors writing either for God or for science) do all the talking. Still Hitchens is a wonderful rhetorician and a master of argumentative discourse and as an atheist, I had much to learn from him. And to paraphrase a recent article by Lesley Chamberlain on Nietzsche from the Guardian (07.02.2012 – http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/feb/07/political-message-nietzsche-god-is-dead?fb=native&CMP=FBCNETTXT9038): we should distrust the God of Reason and with him, all the Enlightenment. We need a deeper, more complex (even more ambiguous) atheism!

The rare feeling that 5 stars are not enough.

Palahniuk owes a lot to the author of “White Noise”. Especially Heinrich frequently enters in a Tyler or Rant mode. DeLillo's novel is impressive, in spite of its somehow dated “heroic” Postmodernism . Open a book by Palahniuk, Ellis or Clevenger and you would reach a more violent, shocking and intense universe, a version of “Postmodernism in war against itself”. A recent philosopher noted that one must only read a text published after 2010 or watch the latest movie to feel what life after Postmodernism means and to see how dated Postmodernism which believed in itself is. Influenced by Baudrillard, Lyotard, Becker but also by Kierkegaard and Tolstoy, DeLillo writes a brilliant novel, almost a “classic” I would say, that can easily compete with Joyce for instance and that becomes a point of reference, a Ground Zero for the revolutionary masterpieces of the 1990's and 2000's created by his - acknowledged or closet - disciples.

The pursuit of evanescence in a Neosymbolist novel.