"Imperialist lackeys and running dogs."- Don Delillo, Running dog"The camera's everywhere.""It's true." (pg 159)"Landscape is truth." (pg 229)"It's a fact. A truth. It's history." (pg 236)This is one of DeLillo's earlier novels. Early, I guess. It came after:1. Americana - 19712. End Zone - 1972 3. Great Jones Street - 19734. Ratner's Star - 19765. Players - 19776. Running Dog - 1978So, it was his 6th novel. 40 years old I guess. I liked it. Basically, a bunch of people (reporters, senators, the...

Edging closer to completing all DeLillo's novels, and I'd put Running Dog just below Great Jones Street - which is just below my four or five faves. Written ten years before Libra, I can't help but wonder whether this novel - which is politically heavy - gave him the idea for that. Anyway, this is no Libra, but I did like it more than I thought I would. Running Dog kind of reads like a conspiracy thriller, and although it does feature a few scenes where guns are drawn and shots are fired and peo...

Looking down at Krok's comment (comment number 1 and the only comment as I write these words), I have to agree. Maybe not with the ultimate ranking of DeLillo novels, but this is a remarkably under-appreciated work. I doubt anyone has been paying attention, but I've been on a very slow and only periodically remembered task to read all of the DeLillo novels leading up to Underworld with the rough theory that Infinite Jest is a response or homage or a something to the pre-Underworld DeLillo. I mea...

It's 1978 (4 full years even before "Joust"!), mom won't spring for Atari (but fobs us off with a cloned "Pong" from K-Mart), and...and Double-D can somehow hear the Seven Seals a-opening and knows how it's all gonna play itself out (the shadowy horses, their long manes a-shake, riding four strong winds toward us, etc., etc.): As I say, I’ve unlinked myself. Too much software, hardware, so on. Technology. The whole thing’s geared to electronics. There’s a neat correlation between the complexit...

A confounded thriller that seems conceived by the same writer as the other novels but not quite carried out by the guy who usually delivers page after page of perfectly attuned phrases. Seems rushed, simply. Could be rewritten and rock: an old porn film shot in Hitler's bunker right before his end might be available; a Senator's proxy, a former Vietnam POW it turns out, is after it; a journalist for a middling radical magazine is on the case; shadowy forces not so well characterized are giving c...

The Graye ReportAn investigation has been conducted pursuant to your request and authorisation concerning "Running Dog", a novel written by the American author Don DeLillo, in order to ascertain the literary and other merits of the novel. The results of my investigation are set forth below under headings designed to facilitate your perusal and analysis.This report is made available to you at your express request, as you have employed me for that purpose. It is a privileged and confidential commu...

This 1978 postmodernist novel emulates a spy thriller. It has a breezy delivery with a great set of mysterious and colorful characters. I liked its stylish and ironic presentation, but all the suspense and action boils down to a shaggy dog story, which I personally don’t favor. Others may appreciate better the little absurdities in the nefarious machinations of the secret power brokers behind the U.S. government and corporations, but in the light of the Iran-Contra scandal of the 80’s the plot h...

Video reviewA thriller about the world of erotica where the secret agents keep doing it and the porn dealers keep shooting each other.

This strikes me as an important and often-overlooked book in the chain of early DeLillo's events, and indeed a necessary stop for anyone curious as to how he got from Americana to White Noise. DeLillo's early novels, particularly the trio of End Zone, Great Jones Street and Ratner's Star, feature these long stretches where DeLillo wanders away from his plots (never the tightest in the world even at his peak, not like it's a big deal (I almost typed "beak deal." I'm a silly person) or anything) a...

I have an ongoing project where I am re-reading all of Don Delillo's books in publication order. There's no schedule attached to this project: I read the next book when the mood takes me. Running Dog, Delillo's sixth novel first published in 1978, is a slight exception to this because this was not actually a re-read: this is the only Delillo book that I have never read before (this true at the time of writing, August 2020, although I understand there is a new book coming soon).As with many Delil...

Quite vague and hazy, supported mostly by it's characteristically beautiful writing. DeLillo relies on too many tricks here, with characters that are too weakly sketched to provide a solid structure of any kind. Worthwhile for how it anticipates, thematically, the later brilliance of Libra, which is perfection on every level.

Running Dog is your typical contemporary thriller. It does not concentrate on postmodernism, stream of consciousness, or existentialism. It rather follows a journalist (what better to develop a thriller?) who seeks to uncover a mystery, and she did not expect to find what she found. I'm not sure I appreciate how Hitler was portrayed in this, but I liked the message behind it. History is True

Guernica: Do you have any favorite genre writers or books?Don DeLillo: I don’t really read much of that. I don’t read detective work and I am afraid I don’t read graphic novels.Guernica: That’s interesting, because your books often make little feints in that direction. I’m thinking about, for instance, the shooting at the end of White Noise.Don DeLillo: That was intentional. If I can recall my design accurately, it was to reduce the idea of death to a tabloid level. Running Dog, I think, would a...

A masterpiece in many ways. All the Delillo touches in full evidence: haunting ambiguity, provocative concept, gritty atmosphere and clipped, droll digressions. The kind of book that inspires other writers.

An early DeLillo novel I've never even heard anybody mention, and I get into every conversation I can about DeLillo, as I think DeLillo is one of the very finest writers in the English language. DeLillo explores many of his usual themes here, most prominently themes of image, the gaze, and power. Running Dog reads more like a thriller than anything else DeLillo's written, and the prose, while it feels like DeLillo's writing, only occasionally approaches the ineffable and peculiar rhythm of much

Even by DeLillo standards, Running Dog is a strange beast. A radical journalist investigates rumors of a pornographic movie featuring Adolf Hitler, which leads her into a tangle of corrupt politicians and smut peddlers, government officials and Vietnamese death squads. Structurally it's much more conventional than your average DeLillo work, resembling the paranoid thrillers so popular in the mid-'70s, but at service of an utterly weird plot whose strands don't entirely coalesce. Ultimately it fa...

When I hold you in my arms; And I feel my finger on your trigger; I know nobody can do me no harm; Because, Happiness is a warm gun, oh yes it is "Saigon, shit. I'm still only in Saigon. Every time I think I'm going to wake up back in the jungle. When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd be nothing... I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a divorce. When I was here I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back into th...

The following review has been copied from http://behnamriahi.tumblr.comRunning Dog, written by Don DeLillo and published by Alfred A. Knopf, is a third-person novel following several points-of-view, most notably journalist Moll Robbins and secret agent Glen Selvy. When an art dealer comes upon an erotic film made in Hitler’s bunker, everyone wants to get their hands on it—senators, pornographers, transvestites, and even one crazed Vietnam vet. Only no one has seen the film and it exists in rumor...

A bunch of spies, journalists, and politicians looking for Nazi porn shot in Hitler’s bunker, what’s not to love?

I had no idea Don DeLillo wrote a novel meant to be turned into a Coen brothers movie. There's a good deal of snarky, dark and black humor. The plot revolves around a whole number of people trying to get a hold of an old film reel that is purported to be of a sex orgy in the bunker in the last days of the third Reich. Maybe even Hitler's in it. Having read a number of DeLillo's work there's a lot of the same kind of stuff. There's the usual DeLillean talk that all seems to revolve around it's ow...

More of the same but better. This thriller suggests sex and power are now commercial spectacle, not transgressive fulfillment.

Narrative chases a “very curious film” (18), made in “the bunker under the Reich Chancellery” (19). We learn that the “Nazis had a thing for movies” and “film was essential to the Nazi era” (52). A prelude to White Noise insofar as “People can’t enough. If it’s the Nazis, it’s automatically erotic” (id.). It’s presented as a mix between journalist mystery and espionage thriller.Some presentation of Chaplin’s parody of Hitler (60 et seq.). (view spoiler)[The video everyone’s chasing is not, as it...

No more than thirty degrees now, dropping. Dry cold. A pure state. An elating state of cold. Not weather. It wasn't weather so much as memory. A category of being. The temperature kept dropping but this didn't signify change. It signified a concentration of the faculty of recall. A steadiness of image. No stray light.It was snowing in the mountains. All behind him now. Cities, buildings, people, systems. All the relationships and links. The plan, the execution, the sequel. He could forget that n...

An investigation into the black market dealings of a prominent U.S. senator leads a journalist onto the trail of a mysterious film, which is rumored to have captured the final days within Hitler’s bunker. A suspenseful beginning turns altogether sensational as the story grows more darkly comical by the chapter.

This book is all over the place. It doesn’t have the same kind of depth that other Don DeLillo books I’ve enjoyed have had, but it’s humorous and has just enough of that paranoid mystery to be enjoyable.

Not my favorite DeLillo but he still deserves the Noble (as Trump would say) and the Nobel.

Another audiobook read where I don’t feel like I had the best retention, which is different from the two precious DeLilo audiobooks I did. Interesting book at points, but I wasn’t finding the prose as good as in previous books of his I’d listened to.

ahhh what is this? really wasn't into it from the CSI TV opening but it grew on me as i went. if end zone was a controlled burst of semi-abstract expressionism this was like a loose haze of superabstract commerciality - cliches and commentaries rolled into one - nothing too out there but like a spy thriller coming apart at the seams - and though not quite like anything else I've enjoyed from DeLillo - more cheaply violent, more overtly thrillerish - ends up being something i like anyways quite a...

It's hard to follow the plot of this novel, or to remember how the different characters - most of them unpleasant - relate to each other. After finishing the book today I noticed how the strands seemed to have been drawn together (including a predictable plot twist at the end), and I suppose I could have gone back and read it again, this time following the story with more understanding of what was going on. But life is too short, and this novel isn't worth the effort. In its favour, it creates a...

I dig the hell out of this book. And why not? A strong female protagonist (with great legs!), espionage, erotic antiques, and a mystery centered around a sex tape made in the Führerbunker during the last days of WWII. DeLillo's dialogue is modern and snappy as always. His images are spot-on. His pacing is tight. Toward the end, the narrative shifts focus from character to character, giving only a few paragraphs to each. It's exciting and appropriately climactic. The reveal of the Führerbunker fi...