The truth lies in the heart of people who create history, but not in the artifacts they leave behind. The ultimate statement Libra makes is that facts don’t tell the truth. Branch mirrors the reader/everyman and the dialogue between DeLillo’s imagined conspiracy and the traces it left through history is really where the novel shines. Libra also features a parallel storyline with a CIA archivist named Nicholas Branch, trying to piece together the assassination of John F. Idealism and purity of intent will lead to you a dark path if you follow them with your eyes closed. Because his experience lead him to a confrontational relationship to the U.S government, his way of making the world a better place was to topple established order. That conviction lead him to travel to Russia and sealed his fate with the U.S government. He was motivated by a desire to change the world. The Lee Harvey Oswald of Don DeLillo is not that different from the idealistic left-leaning militant of 2020 who plasters his opinions all over social media. It was a great, subtle and wordless way to illustrate that he wants to belong to something greater, more important than himself. There’s a beautiful scene in chapter 1 (DeLillo might be the best chapter 1 writer of all-time) where Oswald rides the New York subway between cars in order to feel its mechanical power. He’s a left-leaning, militant young man who genuinely want to make the world a better place.

What makes Libra a special novel is the complexity and humanity it portrays Lee Harvey Oswald with. Kennedy, but this is how these things happen: they’re institutional clusterfucks that eventually get swept under the rug. There’s no evil overarching plot to kill John F. There’s a handful of CIA agents looking to stage a coup in order to bolster the fight on communism, communists who believe it’s a great fucking opportunity to try and murder the U.S president and a wide cast of bureaucrats with suspicious motives.

That process does not only involve Oswald. Libra imagines the process that lead Lee Harvey Oswald to become a murderer and the face of anti-patriotism in the United States. A gap Don DeLillo’s seminal novel Libra courageously tries to bridge. There’s a gap between official history and conspiracy theories, where the truth lies.

Since the U.S Justice department stated there was no persuasive evidence of a conspiracy, the official history has become that Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president and acted alone, without any inside help whatsoever. Conspiracy theorists were invited on television to debate of who between Fidel Castro, the Chicago mafia or the CIA killed the most powerful man on Earth. Kennedy was the greatest unsolved mystery of the twentieth century. In a not so distant world, the assassination of John F.

Don delillo's libra