Read it in: just under a week
I’m sorry, but this post will be biased. Why? Because I worship Delillo like cup of hot coffee during winter exams, like a hug from a friend during menstruation. His prose is incredible and his plots are unfathomable and his works make me feel like there are no words to describe. He’s probably married, but I would take him on as a literary husband.
So Mao II is about many things. It’s about an author who feel lost in himself and travels the world somewhat aimlessly. It’s about a woman with a strong sense of community and spirituality that she can’t let go of. It’s about the changing nature of the world, about the point of authors, about terrorism, about life and death. Like most Delillos, it’s about everything. Everything in the world is compacted into this tiny 250 page novel. That’s what it feels like when you’re reading it, anyway.
Not only do I love Delillo’s prose and his characters, his plots (well, everything about him…) but he also includes pictures in this novel, and that I really like. There are pictures at every major break in the novel.
Sometimes the pictures are talked about. Sometimes they simply provide a raw setting for the events that follow. They are all loosely connected. I love them. It adds to the sheer depth of the novel.
If you open the book and flick to any page, you will find some awe-inspiring quote, something to make you think, make you feel uncomfortable, that remains with you long after you turn the last page.
The future belongs to crowds. (pp 16)
“Crowds,” Scott said, “People trudging along wide streets, pushing carts or riding bikes, crowd after crowd in the long lens of the camera so they seem even closer together than they really are, totally jampacked, and I think of how they merge with the future, how the future makes room for the non-achiever, the nonaggressor, the trudger, the nonindividual. Totally calm in the long lens, crowd on top of crowd, pedaling, trudging, faceless, sort of surviving nicely.” (pp 70)
“And isn’t it the novelist, Bill, above all people, above all writers, who understands this rage, who knows in his soul what the terrorist thinks and feels? Through history it’s the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark.” (pp 130)
She saw a man weaving through the subway saying, “I have holes in my sides.” Not even asking for money or shaking a plastic cup. Just going from car to car in that firm-footed pace you learn to adopt in the subway even if you are broken-bodied. She tried to read the Spanish directions about what to do in an emergency. “I have holes in my sides.” There must be something about the tunnels and crypts of the city that makes people think they are Jesus. (pp 145)
Oh, how I love Delillo. I read him on the bus and spend the rest of the day digesting what I’ve just read. I would sit in the back room at work with my headphones on, listening to Sigur Ros (as I will recommend you do in a moment), eating my food automatically while soaking up Delillo’s prose. Everything was lost except the novel, the descriptions, the meaning of life (or lack thereof) that was contained within those pages. Read it, please. It’s a short one, and if you haven’t discovered Delillo yet, please do yourself a favour!
Read it if you: are literate.
While reading, listen to: Varúð Sigur Ros over and over and over again. This song will never stop fitting this book. It sounds like a crowd moving. It sounds like a thunderstorm brewing. It sounds like New York City and Beirut and London all squashed together.
64books 
yeah, I agree. I’vs read it two times and during the 2nd time I was even more surpised by the plot and how it all makes sense, while being not an easy thing to grasp. I love how DeLillo thinks in patterns and systems, how he navigates through the crowd-individual tension and finally how sad the atmosphere of the book is. His world is quite grey but full of amazing shapes and events and, yes, patterns.
I can’t wait until the day that I have enough time to read Mao II again. All of DeLillo’s works are worth a good re-read. There are so many pages bent down in that book, so many passages underlined that I need to discover the full meaning of. I’m so glad you like DeLillo too – I would like to say that if more people read DeLillo than society could be a better place, but then that would defeat the purpose of having authors like him in the first place.