Reason Read: TBR takedown, Reading 1001
DeLillo has 8 books on the combined list that I am working from. I've read 6 counting this one. Some I've enjoyed more than others. This one started out well but because of the loony, excess of characters and the rambling and obscure story line it was hard to say I enjoyed it but I can say that there was much I appreciated. This book was published in 1976 and if you think about it, this novel really is quite ingenious considering when it was written. The book is a work of science fiction/novel and involves a 14 y/o math genius who has won the Nobel Prize. He is taken from his home in the Bronx and flown to the Space Brain situated somewhere in Central Asia to work on decoding a message that is reported to have come from Ratner's star. Reportedly, the author has stated that Alice Wonderland was an influence of this book. I also read that this novel is "playful" in a game sort of way. The computer-radiotelescope site (called Space Brain) is a reverse Babel with the tower going down instead of up. The math is there but a knowledge of math is not required. There is a reference to Schrodinger's thought experiment. There are actually some cats that hop in and out of a box. One of the characters is named U.F.O. Schwartz. One character, Robert Hoppe Softly would be the white rabbit. I felt that there were too many characters and it was confusing. Even the time line was "messed with" and that made for confusion. I did not like the amount of sexual, secretions, etc. It is a brilliant piece of writing but it was not necessarily enjoyable or held my interest. ( )

I enjoyed it very much. ( )

14. Ratner's Star (audio) by Don DeLillo
reader: Jacques Roy
published: 1976
format: 16:04 overdrive audiobook (~446 pages, 448 pages in paperback)
acquired: Library
listened: Feb 22 – Mar 16
rating: 3½

Delillo's fourth novel is mystery for those who have read it closely. I just borrowed an audio e-copy out of curiosity, because it was available*. And I probably only kept listening because I really liked the reader, Jacques Roy, who is challenged here to come up a zillion different male and female voices. It was always curious but in very odd ways, and I found my attention sometimes engaged, but often less than perfectly attentive. Maybe it was more of an audio skim.

This is basically a philosophically playful novel that has some issues with science, math and logic. Billy Twillig is a 14-yr-old winner of the Nobel Prize for obscure work in mathematics (There is no Pulitzer Prize in math, he was apparently given a special addition). He takes on a position in secret research group staffed full of exceptional scientists from a variety of different fields, many of them very strange and well outside stem-stuff, who are working to figure out an extraterrestrial message that came from an object known as Ratner's Star.

There are numerous characters and most of them make single appearances. Each one has a philosophy that he or she tells Billy about, and each philosophy is very carefully thought out from their specialty and then extends from there, and, as we soon discover, each one eventually reaches a very weird point. The idea is that these are serious (and seriously odd) individuals who have pressed into their ideas as deeply as they could go and tried to push further and get something more. The last part of the book has Billy involved with a group trying to come up with a perfectly logical language that any being could understand simply by following the logic. The name Gödel doesn't come up, but if I understand correctly, he more or less proved this was impossible long before all this. This group doesn't seem to aware of this, but so they go. It's, of course, all fruitless, but in some mind-bending and fun ways.

Wikipedia tells me "The novel develops the idea that science, mathematics, and logic—in parting from mysticism—do not contain the fear of death, and therefore offer no respite."

*I'm not sure, but I think this audio version was only released in December

2018
https://www.librarything.com/topic/288371#6426232 ( )

Ratner’s Star is a profound(ly funny) work of metaphysical fiction. It is metaphysical in both the Ancient (Pythagorean/Parmenidean)sense, and the Modern (Dialectic of Enlightenment) sense.

It is an enormously ambitious novel that presents and resides in the age-old tension between reason and faith, truth and superstition, science and art, pure math and formal logic, mind and body, being and becoming, everything and nothing. Abstractly speaking--as the precocious young mathematician that serves as our protagonist would prefer--this all points to both the necessity and the problem of the One and the Zero; oppositional binaries that purportedly cannot be resolved without the destruction of the other. And yet here we are, constructing technology that runs on binary code, incorporating the opposition in every aspect of our lives. If we are to believe Horkheimer and Adorno, the history of the human species is just this: the dialectical process of scientific disenchantment and mythical re-enchantment, perpetuating itself ad infinitum. If I had to guess, I’d suspect DeLillo agrees with their conclusion.

The history of Pythagoreanism provides a helpful topology for understanding the tension or “dilemma” of the novel. Iamblichus (3-4th C.) tells us in On the Pythagorean Way of Life that followers of the mathematical-genius-cum-mystical-sage split in two after his death in the late 4th C. BCE. One discipleship, the mathematikoi professed to deal only with Truth. They pursued Pythagoras’ mathematical insights, and sought to expand his work on ratios and the table of opposites. The other group, the akousmatikoi (literally “the ones eager to hear”--the root of our word acoustic and all it implies), were not recognized by the mathematikoi as genuine Pythagoreans. The akousmatikoi were circumspectly treated as a superstitious, mystical and undisciplined cult. This split, in a very fundamental sense, marks the beginning of the dialectic of Enlightenment: it is the beginning of the rejection of mysticism or myth in favor of scientific-mathematical truth.

But it is worth noting that Pythagoras himself fell on neither side of this divide, but believed that both myth (read: spirituality) and mathematics informed and depended upon one another. Pythagoras understood that human life--how we live and how we should live--is not decipherable nor discoverable via pure mathematics. Perhaps, on Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading, Pythagoras was the last real Mensch: he daringly lived well in the opposition before the opposition, and for that reason is rightly venerated.

I’d suggest DeLillo, or at least the younger DeLillo that wrote Ratner’s Star, was fully aware of Pythagoras’s mensch-ness, and wrote a (literary/untrue) novel about (mathematics/truth) to explore the tension and how to resolve it. ( )

DeLillo's young genius struggles with being young and being a genius. The world doesn't seem to know what to make of him either. Still one of my favorite DeLillo (along with _Underworld_. ( )