| Title | : | Zero K |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1501135392 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781501135392 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 274 |
| Publication | : | First published March 3, 2016 |
| Awards | : | John W. Campbell Memorial Award Best Science Fiction Novel (2017) |
Jeffrey Lockhart’s father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say “an uncertain farewell” to her as she surrenders her body.
“We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn’t it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?”
These are the questions that haunt the novel and its memorable characters, and it is Ross Lockhart, most particularly, who feels a deep need to enter another dimension and awake to a new world. For his son, this is indefensible. Jeff, the book’s narrator, is committed to living, to experiencing “the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth.”
Don DeLillo’s seductive, spectacularly observed and brilliant new novel weighs the darkness of the world—terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague—against the beauty and humanity of everyday life; love, awe, “the intimate touch of earth and sun.”
Zero K is glorious.
Zero K Reviews
-
There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the Stranger.
—T. S. Eliot, Choruses From The Rock
In death we are all equal. Having to face that mortality and illness of their beloved ones is even beyond their control, as upon death all differences amongst people are erased, some of the high and mighty could consider this an inconvenient truth.
The Convergence, a cult-like movement based in a mysterious, sinister compound close to the border of Kyrgyzstan, half- sunken in the ground ‘a form of earth art, land art’, envisages to solve this outrage for the very well-to-do. Ending the Danse Macabre, defying the universality of death, preventing death taking all of use alike, by cryonic suspension.
Ross Lockheart, filthy rich, a ‘man made of money’ earned by analyzing the economic impact of natural disasters, acts as a Maecenas to this futuristic project. He invites his son Jeffrey to the compound to take leave from Artis, Ross’s second wife and Jeffrey’s stepmother, dying, delivering her body to be prepared for preservation, believing that in the future scientific progress of nanotechnology will resuscitate and restore her to full health, and finally resurrect her in a more sophisticated mind and body, for living in an evolved world of light and peace.
Jeffrey realizes that his father, not wanting to outlive Artis, searching to elope the loss and devastating grief, is determined to join Artis in death by prematurely stepping into the ‘transformation process’ still in good health, in the premise called ‘Zero K’ (a special unit for those willing to die before time, named after the absolute zero on the Kelvin scale), in order to live forever. Is his father blinded by science ? Or is he deluded by arrogance and self-deception? Why does he get in touch with his son now, while he abandoned his first wife Madeline and son Jeffrey at 13? Skeptical to the whole endeavor, wryly describing his observations, the horror, the storage of bodies and removed organs in capsules and canopies, Jeffrey wanders through the lugubrious labyrinth of the compound, a spokesman for DeLillo’s astute meditations on control of life and death (‘Isn’t death a blessing? What will poets write about?’).
Although there is some humor in the absurdist sérieux of the people populating the compound, this dystopian and morbid tale is dark and unsettling. Written in a cinematic style, there is an apocalyptic feel to the novel, enhanced by the soundless display of film footage of gruesome natural disasters, war, violence, self-immolating monks and destruction on screens dropping down in the corridors of the compound, illustrating that the present world isn’t worth living in anymore and the end is near anyway.
Assuming DeLillo would intensely focus on the troubled father-son relationship too, I largely missed evolution in or profound dissection of it. Apart from some scarce shared moments of vulnerability and intimacy in the relationships between stepmother, father and son, and emotions stirring observing the process of dehumanization, shaving and preparing the bodies before freezing them - the characters do not really come alive. Lust for life is strangely and chillingly absent.
However the story didn’t particularly move me, DeLillo raises perturbing philosophical and ethical questions, leaving it up to the reader to answer them. A few times the renowned ending quote of Brave New World came to mind, ‘I am claiming the right to be unhappy’, which Jeffrey perhaps would flesh out as the right NOT to live forever. This slim novel was my first meeting with DeLillo, procrastinating
Underworld forever, but as Zero K is considered to deal with most of DeLillo’s trademark themes, it was a thought-provoking acquaintance, keeping me fascinated until the last sentence, nonetheless its horsing around with nanobots and the like.
Counterbalancing the grimness, DeLillo returns to Jeffrey’s ordinary life in New York. There, a child revels in Manhattanhenge, enclosing gracefully a spark of luminosity and hope into this dark tale.
I would like to thank NetGalley and Scribner for generously providing me with an advanced copy. -
I’ve read all DeLillo’s novels except his first, Americana. I’ve read Underworld three times and would make the claim that it’s the best novel written by a currently living novelist. When he’s inspired his prose is as searing, insightful and exciting as it gets. Unfortunately he’s probably had his golden age – White Noise, Libra, Mao II and Underworld are his four masterpieces, written between 1985 and 1997, and pretty much unrivalled by any other living writer as a brilliant sustained feat of exalted artistry. Quite simply DeLillo has helped me understand the nature of the world we live in. Since Underworld in 1997 he’s, understandably, begun to wane. Most noticeably his prose has suffered a diminishment of its old searing clarity, its inspiration and vitality.
So, Zero K. In terms of theme and profundity this is probably his best book since Underworld; however the inspired prose still isn’t quite there. (He’s nearly eighty years old though and as such this is a phenomenal achievement.)
On page one there’s an example of how good he can be at enabling us to see the depth charges of an everyday modern gesture when he describes the wearing of sunglasses in a room as “bringing the night inside”. I’m not even sure why that observation excites me so much. But it does. It reveals to me that not only has the world changed but gives me an insight into how it’s changed. No one, for example, would wear sunglasses indoors in a DH Lawrence novel! Or there’s this about airports (I hate flying!) – “Those blanked-out eternities at the airport. Getting there, waiting there, standing shoeless in long lines. Think about it. We take off our shoes and remove our metal objects and then enter a stall and raise our arms and get body-scanned and sprayed with radiation and reduced to nakedness on a screen somewhere and then how totally helpless we are all over again as we wait on the tarmac, belted in, our plane eighteenth in line, and it’s all ordinary, it’s routine, we make ourselves forget it.” Unfortunately these eloquent insights into our changing world aren’t anywhere near as frequent as in his best novels. Instead it’s the novel as a whole that seeks to achieve this end. DeLillo always pivots his novels on the outer edge of where the world is headed which is why he is almost unanimously deemed our most prophetic novelist. And Zero K certainly maintains this prophetic stance.
To some extent he returns to one of the themes of White Noise – a husband and wife who can’t bear the thought of surviving each other’s death. He also returns to the central character of Cosmopolis - the global financier. The mission in Zero K is to survive death, the ultimate act of hubris. Because a central theme of this novel is man’s ever growing hubris and the irreversible damage this is causing our cultural, financial and physical environment. This hubris is personified by Ross Lockhart, an example of a new cultural phenomenon, an individual who is richer and arguably more powerful than most entire countries, a master of the universe billionaire who owns islands and huge land masses. The novel is about Convergence, the project funded by Lockhart, intent on preserving life through cryonic freezing. Bodies are stored in pods in the hope that advancing technology will soon allow organs to be refreshed with embryonic stem cells and “nanobots.” Brain receptors will be re-fed the memories acquired over a lifetime.
Lockhart’s son, Jeffrey plays a similar role in relation to his father as Nick Caraway plays in relation to Gatsby – he, ironically, is the past viewing and questioning his father’s idealistic romantic vision of the future. He, like Nick not morally flawless himself, is providing a more grounded, humble moral perspective of what actually is going on here. In some ways this is a 21st century version of Gatsby, a new technological dramatisation of the American dream.
For me, Zero K doesn’t quite reach the heights of DeLillo’s finest achievements but is still an important work by, in my opinion, the greatest living American novelist. -
"What was it beyond a concentrated lesson in bewilderment?"
This is my third DeLillo novel. I really enjoyed
White Noise but thought the ending was a little fumbled, and I think
Cosmopolis is a masterpiece of sorts; a nearly perfect novel. I also have a rule for myself that I'm not allowed to have an opinion on a book if I haven't finished it. I had a real internal struggle maintaining that rule with Zero K.
Nearly every page – all the way up until around the 95% mark – I wanted to just cut my losses and bail, the book is just so heavy handed. There's no subtlety at play here. Now that I have finished it, I can say that I gave it that shot, and it's just not good. This novel would never have been published if it were written pseudonymously, that's basically all you need to know.
The handful of good parts are fantastic, but they are literally only a handful:
"This was New York. Every living breathing genotype entered his cab at some point, day or night. And if this was an inflated notion, that was New York as well."
"We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner?"
"Half the world is redoing its kitchens, the other half is starving."
"No, no. I'm not ready for that. You're getting ahead of me. I'm doing my best to recognize the fact that you're my father. I'm not ready to be your son."
"It's only human to want to know more, and then more, and then more, but it's also true that what we don't know is what makes us human. And there's no end to not knowing." -
Weird book.
Don DeLillo has long been on my radar. His 1997 novel
Underworld is on several lists as being one of the greatest books ever. But it is 800 some odd pages. Many readers will say, 800, so what, I’ve read plenty of books that big. Well, yes, I have too, but let’s do some math. I’m 47 this year. Let’s suppose I live another 30 years and that’s a big IF, and I can read 100 books each year for the rest of my life. That’s another 3,000 books. That’s a lot of books. But it is a drop in the bucket of all the books out there, and no matter how hard I try, there are a vast multitude of books I’ll never get to, many I would no doubt like a lot.
So.
That Malthusian recognition of the scarcity of time and the overwhelming plethora of good books makes me seriously consider taking on big ass books since they are taking up space on the ever decreasing and certainly and irrevocably finite list of books.
OK, so back to Zero K, and trust me I have not been wandering around aimlessly, DeLillo is asking these kind of questions, but in a broad scale, he’s painting on a big canvas. What is life? Is it quantity? Is that what matters most, is more life the goal, are we all in a great race to see who can rack up the most years, months, weeks, days, hours and minutes? Is a long life the best life? Does death, or a good death, mean anything by itself?
What about relationships? Fathers and sons and mothers and lovers and job interviews. What about eternal life?
What if we can undergo a procedure that would allow us to see many, many more sunrises and sunsets, and maybe read a hell of a lot more books if you’re in to that sort of thing?
DeLillo describes, in his introspective kooky way, a billionaire whose wife is dying and he takes her to a cult like place in Central Asia to answer just those kind of questions. The protagonist and narrator asks his father, the billionaire, hasn’t this question been asked before? To which said rich guy answers, yes but it is a question now ready to be answered.
And so it goes.
The setting and themes reminding me, curiously, of Robert Silverberg’s 1976 novel
Shadrach in the Furnace and a little more cryptically, because of the quasi religious nature of the clinic cult, of his 1971 novel
The Book of Skulls.
DeLillo’s style of writing is thoughtful and meandering and endearing in its way and I was intrigued and enjoyed some of this book. Other parts left me scratching my head and wondering what in the hell he was talking about. Reading DeLillo was like talking to an eccentric college professor at a party; obviously extraordinarily intelligent and interesting, but also three sheets to the wind and running off in wild, seemingly unintelligible tangents.
Not anywhere closer to spending 800 pages with him.
-
I'm a Don DeLillo newbie!
The very first line of the book grabs your attention.
"Everyone wants to own the end of the world"....
I wonder .. am I the only one who took a break -( after just one sentence)-
to locate the group "Tears For Fears"...on their iPhone?....To sing along to "Everybody
Wants to Rule the World"? -- sing & dance a little? I'm sure the talented Don DeLillo wouldn't have cared if an old favorite song got me in the mood for his book. :)
Jeffrey went through great lengths of travel - thousands of miles - before arriving at a cryogenic compound to be join his father, Ross Lockhart, and his stepmother, Artis, who is dying. His father arranged the travel plans. Jeffrey blindly took the adventure - but really didn't know what he'd be walking into.
Since Jeffrey is the narrator, we are invited into his mind, moods, opinions, questions he has about his father- mother - step mother- his personal interpretations- his descriptions- and questions about death. His dad walked out when he was 13....and he has no idea why he left his mother.
Even when Jeffrey is angry - we see his sweetness - I imagined Jeffrey with a
forgiveness-card in his back pocket - always on hand when needed.
Jeffrey asked Artis if she thought about the type of world she might be returning to.
She didn't. Memories were part of her thoughts, (water drops in the shower),
Artis was aware that she was in a transitional place - with people coming and going. I never got the feeling that anyone was interested in any afterlife
Value our present life is what stood out as the powerful message.
Funny scenes with mannequins! Quite visual!
Since I'm no longer a DeLillo virgin.. I'm looking forward to reading "White Noise" next, which I've already purchased!
Thank You Scribner Publishing, Netgalley, and Don DeLillo -
This started out feeling really creepy to me and I wasn't enjoying it. Now that I've finished reading it, I'm finding it hard to stop thinking about it. About one third of the way through I thought about setting it aside but I changed my mind (at least a couple of times) and decided that I had to give it a chance. This was by DeLillo after all, and because he has so eloquently spoken to me in past novels and caused me to think about the things that happened in my lifetime - the impact of technology, the assassination of a president, 9/11. I continued because I knew there would probably be something provocative, something profound, and there was . But I had a hard time connecting with the characters until close to the end .
Jeffrey Lockhart, from whose perspective the story is told goes on a long journey at the request of his father Ross , to a place called The Convergence. It's an eerily stark place but yet the halls are lined with various pastel blue painted doors and another with mud colored doors and and naked mannequins in various places. This is where his father's wife, Artis will commit herself to death and seek a cryogenic solution to a time when her health can be restored by future medical discoveries . Theres's a cult like aura to this place and Jeffrey, while curious and trying desperately to understand it all, is repulsed by it all - especially at his father's suggestion that although a healthy man in his sixties, he is considering the same fate for himself to be together with his wife .
Jeffrey roams the halls and screens appear with horrifying visuals of natural disasters, floods , fires , tornadoes and monks setting themselves on fire, acts of terrorism. While it is blatantly obvious that DeLillo wants us to take note of these things happening in the world at large , I was also impacted by what happened in Jeffrey's life. Abandoned at 13 by his billionaire father, obsessed with naming people and things, I felt no emotional connection to Jeffrey . That changed for me when he returns from The Convergence and we see his relationship with a woman , named Emma and her son. It is this relationship that brings the broader happenings in the world down to the personal level.
I was not sure how to rate this book . My first inclination is to give it 3 stars - meaning I liked it , didn't love it because I really didn't enjoy reading a lot of it . In the end , I have to move it up 4 stars after considering what DeLillo portrays here about death and life , and and even though horrifying, I won't forget the minute I connected emotionally to Jeffrey Lockhart.
Thanks to Scribner , NetGalley and Edelweiss. -
This isn't the first time I'm trying DeLillo, but I don't know if I'd go back to him after this. Yes, empirically I understand, this is the sort of book that wins awards, it's dealing with heavy subjects (mortality, meaning of life, etc.), it's written in that specific language of structured beauty, it is the very edifice of eligibility for the famous lists and shelves, but...it is absolutely unenjoyable to read, profoundly unengaging, thoroughly unentertaining. The concept is interesting initially, but it gets buried under the ineffectual, somewhat repetitive in composition and sentiment ramblings, the characters utterly fail to compel or rouse basic interest. The book deals with alienation, but it didn't have to be alienating. Well written stylistically, but soulless, with about as much warmth and life to it as its subject of preservation. And, to stretch the pun, polarizing most likely, since I can absolutely envision readers to be as enamored by it as I wasn't. The best thing about it was its brevity, only a few hours and one turn of phrase, which I really liked and seem to have promptly forgotten. Thanks Netgalley.
This and more at
https://advancetheplot.weebly.com/ -
This was my first DeLillo book, and it might be my last. He was never really on my radar, but the premise of Zero K sounded intriguing: A young man's incredibly wealthy father and stepmother decide to put their bodies into a sort of stasis until medical technology reaches a point where they can live new lives again. I thought it might be a meditation on fathers and sons coming together to work through their pasts. Instead, it's just a mess.
The story is slow, plodding, and seemingly pointless--and it goes in directions that work against the narrative rather than for it. It sets itself up as asking "important" philosophical questions. But the questions don't seem that important--and neither do the answers. According to the description this book is setting the horrors of the world (terrorism, fires, conflict) against the beauty of life, but I didn't see that. I must have missed the beauty amid the estranged and distant father, the weird compound where this procedure takes place, and the way the book tries desperately to get me to believe the narrator and his step-mother are reconciling, but that's just not convincing.
The writing is good. "[This] is the song-and-dance version of what happens to self-made men. They unmake themselves." That's GOOD. Unfortunately, Zero K is like a beautiful pool of water, but one that's so shallow it can't support any life. -
"I'd never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying."
"This was not the not the frailty of a man who is said to be 'only human,' subject to weakness or vulnerability. This was a wave of sadness and loss that made me understand that I was a man expanded by grief."
― Don DeLillo, Zero K
I first jumped into DeLillo's unique, hypnotic prose when I read Mao II. His words swelled for me like a sacred mantra. There were other writers before that seduced me, that blew me away with their measured writing, or their erratic narration, but DeLillo was something else. His prose is poetic, weird, haunting, searing. Images grow and then dematerialize. He hints at the future, creates a fabric of tension, and pulls back. Each of his books seems to push towards a vision of our end. He looks at the refuse of civilization, the excesses of capitalism, "the end zone of ancient time". He is a dark worm, pushing through the dirt and the grime and the dark caverns created by our existential rot.
He is obsesses over words, descriptions, names. He is a prose prophet for a technological age. He doesn't always hit it out of the park (dare I call those Pafkos?). Many of his more recent books:
Cosmopolis,
Point Omega,
The Body Artist didn't seem to live up to the expectations created by
Mao II,
White Noise,
Libra,
Underworld. His
five novels from the Names (1982) to Underworld (1997) seems only equaled by Philip Roth's series of
five novels from
Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) to
The Human Stain (2000).
The last couple books DeLillo delivered seemed to be experimentations, theories, unfinished paintings that hint at the ground DeLillo loves (technology, paranoia, death, history, humanity, religion). With this novel, DeLillo seems to have perhaps not jumped up to his highest shelf. (See MII, WN, L, U), but close. This is a book that belongs next to
Falling Man,
End Zone, Americana*, the Names*.
I don't want to give too much of the book away, but as I read this unsettling novel, I kept on thinking of modern-day technology pharaohs. My brother and I were having a conversation the other day about how the life of a millionaire and a billionaire isn't that different. There is just so many things you can literally buy. Even when they are buying expensive shirts and pants the styles and cuts for those worth $100M and those worth $100B aren't going to be THAT different. Yes, the billionaire might own an Island instead of just a home, but ultimately, the billionaire can't live in more than one home at a time. The millionaire might be able to buy $4000 pants when you and I can only, rationally, expect to buy pants in the $40 - $140 range. However, the Billionaire isn't able to just add a couple zeros to the millionaire's pants. There is no market for $40,000 pants. So, the average $B$ lives about like the average $M$, except in a couple small ways.
Death, or the desire to escape death, may be one of those places where only those with significant, GDP-sized capital, can tread. Thus those with wealth that involves 9+zeros become the modern-day pharaohs of death. They are the only ones with the capacity to fight against the dying of the light with money, medicine, and technology. Money absolutely has become their god, and perhaps in 10, 15, or 20 years their GOD might actually deliver them from death. Instead of pyramids of stone, we might see pyramids of stainless steel and ice. Frozen mummies surrounded by bytes instead of jewelry and gold, these modern-day pharaohs may one-day-soon be waited on by high-priests with PhDs in computers science; the ceremonies and rituals of religion will be replaced with a transhumanist incantations and rites.
But when our modern-day pharaohs side-step death, what does that exactly mean as far as life? That is the territory of DeLillo. Listen to his prose prayers, and prepare yourself for salvation, death, and perhaps even eternal life.
* I'm going here by reputation not experience since I have yet to read these two. -
[Originally appeared here (with edits):
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/li...]
The battle to outlive life and peek into the world beyond it has been an area of great fascination. From ages, this unknown, unattainable stage has drawn the attention of thinkers and the results have spanned the entire continuum of credibility and flimsiness.
Zero K fits somewhere on this scale.
The novel follows Jeffrey Lockhart, who is invited by his wealthy father, Ross Lockhart, to witness the final days of his ailing wife, Artis, at an isolated compound, in a remotest corner of Russia. But the compound isn’t any ordinary brick and mortar structure; it is a highly advanced, scientifically augmented laboratory where living men and women surrender their bodies to be preserved in cryogenic pods and whereupon, a series of radical and cutting-edge innovative methods are applied to them with an objective to bring them to life in much more robust, transcendent and resilient human forms. The amount of time this transformation might take? No one quite tells me that. Jeffrey, after seeing Artis slip into the other world, returns to his daily humdrum at New York and continues living a normal life, albeit with occasional flashes from his Russian detour, until one day, it is Ross’ turn to embrace the pod and he is summoned again. The amount of time that has lapsed between the two trips? Two years.
As a premise, this book held promise. The composition of the controlled environment within which passionate, eclectic ideas collided and thrived was deftly done. While I ain’t sure how DeLillo goes about his novels since this was my first of his’, I found traces of diligent ground work here that added to a certain veracity of such an experiment. I also found a veritable sincerity in the painstakingly long and patient narrative barrels deployed by him to connect to those, uninitiated in the scientific realms. But as most of these explanations happened as long conversations or pep talks to the lab inhabitants, it quickly turned tedious and tryingly commonplace. This excess ended up robbing off the empathy that I might have showered on Artis, Ross or Jeffrey for their sacrifices, separation and longing to reunite, which runs as a key theme underneath the more visible props.
I found it interesting to view the work as an approach to securing love. Ross’ firm assertion of investing in the biomedical experiment as a means to extend his time with Artis (beyond her mortal body) is in stark contrast to Jeffrey’s detached yet sincere stand towards Emma. While Ross believes in the permanence of a physical form (and a feral reluctance to renounce it) as essentials to the perpetuation of a love story, Jeffrey, as easily, embraces emotional intimacy as the chief criterion to achieve the same objective. Who is to say whose love holds the most resplendent flames?
This book, in subtle undertones, asked questions on life, love and death and the extent to which we are willing to travel to find their answers. But perhaps, the binding rigmarole of present day impaled the lofty enterprise of future halo. -
Pretentiousness has always been the sense that I got from reading snippets of DeLillo's novels. I had the impression that his success was propelled by the same (wrong) reasons why American academia looks down at John Grisham and Stephen King, both seen as too "pop" to be welcomed in the golden temple of literary art, and often dismissed as tripe, while in reality they both very often offer much more interesting plot and development when compared to contemporary literary authors like DeLillo.
However, the marvelous cover sang at me like a mermaid from the bookstore shelf, and I impulse-bought it. I tried to be openminded and it kind of paid off, because I did enjoy the book - although only in parts.
In this novel, in a not-too-distant future that could very well be our present, a guy travels to a cryogenics facility in Central Asia to meet his billionaire father who is preparing his terminally ill wife, the guy's stepmother, for her futuristic cryogenic transformation. A myriad of thoughts about death and existence ensue. That’s about it, as far as a plot goes.
Oddly enough, what I took away from this novel is not the novel itself, but rather some beautiful sentences and paragraphs.
And even more oddly, those seem to be the real focus of DeLillo, rather than the novel as a whole.
Examples :
"The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it".
"I wanted to hear what he had described, the oceanic sound of people living and thinking and talking, billions, everywhere, waiting for trains, marching to war, licking food off their fingers. Or simply being who they are. The world hum"
"I could call her Zina. Or Zara. The way the capital letter Z dominates a word or name"
In fact, make no mistakes, the novel as a whole is pretty bad. Every time a contemporary "literary" author steps into the science-fiction arena, he seems to be totally unaware of the thousands of stories that have already been written about the same exact concept, and often already taken to a much more satisfying development.
Not to be petty, but here are 21 examples of much more interesting stories about the same concept explored by Zero K:
http://best-sci-fi-books.com/21-best-...
Another example of this mutual ignorance of sub-cultures is Cormac McCarthy's "The road", another non-interesting re-writing of one million previous science fiction stories about the same concept, only with the "literary" attention to each word, sentence, paragraph, blah blah blah "look how fantastic I am with words!" yeah yeah we're looking, we're looking and we’re yawning while we're looking.
However, as I mentioned, I think there is a lot to like and to enjoy about DeLillo's work, and about this book.
The real stars here are the small segments, the brief literary inventions, the author's obsession with words, mirrored by the main character's obsession, the sentences that make you stop for a second and ponder.
In fact, this is the first book that I listened to as an audio-book (great job, Thomas Sadoski. I liked your work in Newsroom as well) without being able to shift to a 1.50 or 1.25 reading speed. Either you take your time in reading this stuff, or you can just as well throw the book away.
So, there is this slow attention to the single sentence. And the novel seems to be nothing but the vehicle to deliver these little creations. As if - here's a cake. It's a mediocre cake, but the cherries on it are some of the very best cherries you can find.
The narration is often completely erratic, as if you were listening to one of those drunks who stop their train of thought abruptly to shout out something else entirely, and then maybe reattach the thread later on.
How does DeLillo do this? He said in an interview: "It happens in ways that are very hard to describe because they’re not so easy to understand. I’m not sure how a sentence or a paragraph extends itself. I can’t say it’s automatic, but it all seems to happen in a kind of intuitive way. And I’ve become much more conscious of letters forming on a page, letters and words. And correspondences, not only the way they sound but visual correspondences between letters in a word, or from word to word. It’s a little mysterious. It’s as though a single printed page has not only a responsibility to meaning, but also to one’s visual sense".
If you accept the rules of this quirky game, you might as well enjoy his style.
To the question: "Do you identify with these individuals? (the characters)", he answered: "I really don’t. I can’t talk about characters outside the frame of the fiction. I identify with the words on the page. I identify with the paragraphs.”
And right here I should insert a "Munch's scream" emoji, because this makes me scream. But yeah, as weird and presumptuous as it sounds, that's exactly how he writes.
According to the literary critic Frank Lentricchia, DeLillo’s novels are “cultural anatomies of what make us unhappy”, while Joyce Carol Oates has hailed him as “a man of frightening perception”. And yet what fans regard as eerie and insightful, many others have dismissed as chilly and contrived. I find all these comments to be true, both the positive and the negative.
In summary, Zero K is both sharp and opaque. Great sharp inventions and intuitions in moments, sentences, paragraphs. Opaque whenever it goes off on meaningless tangents that seem to exist purely as page fillers - a lot of them.
The final pages are absolutely spectacular. Maybe a philosophical statement from the author himself, who through the main character might be trying to say that he does not feel the need to follow a religion, as long as he can enjoy the spiritual experience of a boy's sense of wonder (I said "might be"! Who knows what Delillo is talking about at any time, if HE doesn’t even know?)
If you don't mind trying a different and weird flavour every now and then, like marmite or dragon fruit or boar’s testicles, this author might be for you. -
This started off great - an overwhelming vividness being introduced to the remotely located 'Convergence', which led me to blast through the first half of the novel in just over a day. When I picked it up again though I found myself reading sluggishly, in smaller chunks, over much more time, as it just didn't have the absorbing nature from earlier on. Switching back to New York in the middle section felt almost like being back in Underworld. If only it was that good.
There are two blurbs in particular on this cover that caught my eye: one I agree with totally - 'Supple and sad and oddly compassionate', the other I absolutely don't - 'A terrifically funny novel'. I found nothing funny about Zero K at all. If anything, I found it a little bit cold - not just for the cryonic freezing process but parts of the father/son relationship - more than I did funny. Once I'd brushed of the chill though, I still found it a very tender and moving work with lots of heart from a DeLillo who at the time was nearing 80-years-old. In the background of my mind whilst reading this was Vanilla Sky and its soundtrack - similar themes of cryostasis, mortality and love, which is the 2001 remake of Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes) by Spanish/Chilean director Alejandro Amenábar.
Of DeLillo's seventeen novels - four of which walk into my fave novels of all time - that just leaves two to go. Still for me my favourite living novelist, despite Zero K leaving me with mixed feelings, like a few of his other works have done. One thing I always gave him huge credit for is being one step ahead of everybody else; having one foot in the future when it comes to storytelling, that goes right back to when he started out in the 70s. -
A son follows his father and stepmother to a cryogenic facility in a desert near Kazachstan. Not much happens beyond this premise, excluding the lightly-sketched fate of a superfluous Ukrainian adopted boy
Half the world is redoing its kitchen, the other half is starving
A fascinating premise doesn’t go anywhere. The book is well enough written but the main character and narrator feels both decidedly immature AND old (in his overly reflective ways and being stuck in his childhood) and there is no real payoff.
We follow a sun visiting his mid to late sixty (how do you not know your fathers age) father in the middle of a desert in Central Asia. His father is a hedge fund manager, rich through betting on natural disasters occurring, turned messiah
Meanwhile we get some glimpses of the narrator growing up with his mother Madeline in Queens
Artis, his stepmother who is an archeologist is meanwhile dying.
A cryogenic storage company, with Faith based technology, should bring some kind of release, and gives
Zero K's main characters a vibe of being like the pharaohs in their obsession with eternal life.
He did not talk so much as narrate and this applies equally to
Don DeLillo his dialogues. Jeff watching his stepmother dying doesn't feel emotional at all, the food was eatable but not always identifiable is the most distinct he can say about the facility in the desert and there are very random talks about books with strangers:
I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books.
His father is interesting enough, but seems rather mad as well:
You and your girlfriends never seem to live in the same cities, why is that?
It makes time more precious.
or
What’s more serious than money?
WeWork’s elevation of global consciousness seems rather unambitious compared to Ross (the father) his vision of new metropolis in the desert in the vicinity of Kazakhstan
What’s the point of living if we don’t die at the end of it feels like a lackluster rebuttal to the hype curve his company projects.
I am aware that when we see something we’re getting only get a measure of information, a sense, an inkling of what is really there to see. I don’t know the details or the terminology, but I do know that the optic nerve is not telling the full truth, we’re seeing only intimations, the rest is our invention, our way of reconstructing of what is actual, if there is any such thing philosophically that we can call actual.
The ending of the book, binding a strange boy and fellow son with the convenient modern art installation is rather flimsy, and some themes and character just peter out/disappear without any satisfactory outcome. The writing of DeLillo is nice enough but this book as a whole just doesn't convinces me as a reader.
Quotes:
I have every belief that I will reawaken to a new perception of the world.
I will be reborn into a deeper and truer reality.
How old are you?
Thirty four.
You’re just starting.
I’m someone who is supposed to be me
Define loyalty, define truth.
I had to stop before it killed me
Death is a hard habit to break
Life everlasting belongs to those of breathtaking wealth
Define person, I tell myself, define human, define animal
Ordinary moments make the life
Chemically induced to expire
Too much engenders too much
Humans as mannequins
Or when does utilitarian becomes totalitarian
Am I someone or is it just the words themselves that make me think I am someone?
She is living in the grim limits of self
This is what I do to defend myself to some spectacle of nature: think of a word. -
I'm 1/3 into this book and I'm DNF'ing it. To be honest, I feel like this book is one long pretentious ramble on death and religion, and it's written in a fragmented language which I've never been a fan of. It's more of a meditation on life than it's an actual story, and I'm just not a fan...
-
(Disclaimer: this is likely the least objective review of this book as you’ll find. I’m a DeLillo apologist, for which I make no, um, apologies.)
(Disclaimer the Second: there’s an awful lot of dopey shit in Zero K; sci fi-isms that really aren’t up my alley. Per disclaimer the First (see above), I was willing to overlook the cryogenics, the stray robot, etc. Like I said, something about that superfox DeLillo and his bedroom eyes just makes me a happy podperson.)
The problem with knocking it out of the park is that someone has to go get the damn ball if you want to keep playing. Thus, after Underworld DeLillo had two options: try and top that achievement, which was the logical summation of his career up to that point (Big Sweeping Epic), or head assfast in the opposite direction. He chose the second option. For me, a lot of it didn’t work. I have a lot of fondness for Point Omega, but the rest of the work either left me cold or, in one spectacular instance, embarrassed (the shitstorm that is Cosmopolis, recommended only to those looking for kindling with which to start a fire).
So with not a small amount of cautious optimism, I looked forward to Zero K. I am pleased to report back from the interzone that Don is back, if in noticeably smaller form. All of his hallmarks are present and accounted for: terrorism, fear, paranoia, paranoiac terroristic fear, blahdy blah. But what the book is primarily concerned with, and why I enjoyed it so, is its callback to The Names and that minor masterpiece’s obsession with language. Here, DeLillo really sets to exhuming words, phrases, etymology, and the power we assign to language—and, in turn, the power that it exerts over us in response—to the point of obsessive giddiness (the giddiness being my own).
There’s another parallel current running through the novel: death (not a spoiler as that’s what the book is about). I couldn’t put it out of my mind reading it that this is the work of a man who will be 80 in November, and Zero K’s many forms of death (and its possible abeyance) read like the man, also an author, coming to terms with his own mortality. Call it DeLillo’s public form of Working Shit Out; the important thing is that it mostly hits the target. The fact that DeLillo—who could be raking in that sweet AARP cashola and enjoying his ‘Twilight Years’ (sitting, reading Twilight)— is still asking The Big Questions and attempting to figure out what the fuck this (I’m swinging my arms around me in dramatic gesture) all means is laudable. It is a credit to his commitment to vision and reserve as a human being. Ignore the star doors and podpeople and dig the fact that, underneath the space-snazzle, DeLillo is still with us and unafraid to look Death in the face with unflinching honesty and fucking dignity. That’s a sight more than I’m ready to do. You? -
Ai margini estremi del plausibile.
Immaginate di essere in un luogo in cui lo spazio e il tempo paiano non aver valore. Una sorta di cattedrale nel deserto, in cui si entra solo se dotati di apposite credenziali, un luogo in cui si professa una specie di religione tecnologica.
Si combatte una battaglia non per tutti, la battaglia contro la morte. Un luogo algido e asettico, in cui tutte le stanze son loculi, le porte sono tutte rigorosamente chiuse, abitato da manichini e da poco più che manichini, involucri di uomini, congelati e svuotati di tutti gli organi, un limbo incerto. Un luogo in cui sono stati fatti convergere gli interessi dell’alta finanza e l’idea di poter sconfiggere la morte.
In questo luogo ovattato e incolore, vengono proiettate NON STOP immagini di guerra, di popoli che muoiono, di stragi e di sciagure. Come dire, chi sta in questo luogo, sopravviverà alla fine del mondo.
Improbabili Guru di una sorta di setta adorante la tecnologia a presidio di questo luogo spettrale. Cimitero di ghiaccio o sorta di capsula proiettata nel futuro?
Ma che cosa significa esistere? Una roccia è, non esiste. Solo l’uomo esiste.
È vita o esistenza quella degli essere crioconservati deprivati degli organi interni? Sono uomini o manichini?
Esiste un linguaggio con cui definire cosa voglia dire vivere?
La vita in cosa consiste? Nella ripetizione di gesti tranquillizzanti? O nel lanciarsi in improbabili imprese?
Sembra fantascienza ma stiamo parlando di realtà. Esistono società (Alcor) dedite alla crioconservazione di corpi, sperando che un domani la scienza abbia fatto tanti e tali passi avanti da poter “risuscitare” pensieri e coscienze degli esseri surgelati.
Se un romanzo deve stimolare la riflessione, suggestionare e suscitare domande, questo DeLillo è stato di grande efficacia. -
A book about words, about names and the act of naming. A book about death that is also very much about its opposite, life. A narrator, obsessed with naming everyone who crosses his path. His discovery that his father, who walked out one night while the son was doing his math homework (leaving him with the words sine cosine tangent as a mantra and with an interest in numbers that is second only to his obsession with names) changed his name.
In Don DeLillo’s new novel, Zero K, Ross Lockhart (and the assumed name has, I assume, special meaning in view of his obsession with money-again, numbers-and the abandonment of his first family) is a powerful and wealthy man whose second wife, Artis, is dying. The book begins with father and son and wife travelling to some desert land in which is housed a cryogenic facility. Artis will be frozen until her condition can be cured. Eternal life is being created for all-well, all who can afford it.
The facility is a strange, impersonal zone with screens that show various images, including those of burning men, those monks who protested by setting themselves on fire. It is a book obsessed with words, about a man obsessed with names, and it is punctuated with images, images that the narrator searches for meaning. Back at home, in New York City, he is struck by the image of a woman who he believes, or creates a story of, who represents some movement for peace or protest.
It is a strangely bloodless novel, despite its preoccupation with bodies. As the narrator and his girlfriend and his son (who has been speaking Pashti with their cabdriver) visit a rock in a museum, the narrator remarks that he feels as though all the color has been sucked from their body as they ascend the steps and they are now black and white people, almost cartoon drawn, in a colorless world. Looking at a rock that reminds the narrator of a quote by Heidegger, “It is but it does not exist.”
On the other hand, it is a novel filled with images of terror and bloodshed, references to bombings, terrorism, and mass panic of various kinds. In the face of such intense feelings, the characters are numb.
“You are about to be postmarked Zero K.” Zero K is the temperature the people are frozen at (although apparently this is metaphorical: the temperature never actually reaches that level). The narrator seems frozen, attempting to become alive and warm through names and careful observation of a life he can barely participate in. In his rejection of his father’s wealth, he is as obsessed as his father with money (the not-having) and numbers.
The mania for naming seems to be a defense against the overwhelming presence of anonymous crowds and random, impersonal terror.
This is a work that begs (as is usually the case with DeLillo) to be explained and interpreted. The constant references, for example, to naming and language push the reader to recognize that something more than simple narration or characterization is present.
I found the references tantalizing and evocative, as I find all of DeLillo’s writing. He demands to be read with the intellect, But even when I don’t understand his themes, I am drawn into their web.
Zero K is a fascinating read. It’s a book about death that yields ultimately to a book about life. A book about words that is also about something that goes beyond words. A sad yet beautiful book. I loved it.
I am grateful to NetGalley and Scribner Publishing for providing me with an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. And of course to Don DeLillo for creating this work of art. -
No word out of place.
I'm a DeLillo Newbie, so don't take my word for it. This is only my seventh; and I've read little to no secondary, etc ; and nothing pre=White Noise. For the real word, you'll want to ask the DeLillo Fanatic, most competent to separate the Better from the Best, who's spent more than a European Vacation with him. The DeLillo Fanatic knows.
Also (ie, today's discussion=thesis), you'll note just from the blurbs that this, like last year's Ignored Book of the Year,
Book of Numbers, is science fiction. Also like
Plus and
The Gold Bug Variations. That is, fiction that's about science, about technology.
Obligatory criticism : The Heidegger was gratuitous. Or an opportunity was missed. Rather than being/existence he should've picked up something from The Question of Technology. Since it's right to the heart of the matter of the novel (so maybe he's playing it quietly) ; which the Schwartze Hefte are not at all even remotely part of anything.
And so but, it came to me at an opportune time. Very pleased. -
Don DeLillo is thinking about death.
Admittedly, that’s not breaking news. DeLillo has been thinking about death — his, ours, America’s — over the whole span of his extraordinary career. But now, at 79, the author of such modern classics as “White Noise” and “Underworld” has produced his most funereal novel.
“Zero K,” a slim, grim nightmare in print, opens with a trip halfway around the world. The narrator, a young man named Jeffrey Lockhart, has been summoned to the Convergence, a compound in the desert near the capital of Kyrgyzstan. There he’s greeted by his powerful father, “a man shaped by money,” who has poured his billions into creating a secret facility that’s part laboratory, part mausoleum — “science awash in irrepressible fantasy.” Designed to keep human bodies frozen in cryonic suspension for millennia, the Convergence is the most ambitious life-after-death scheme since the pharaohs built the pyramids.
Jeffrey has arrived just in time to speak with his sick. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert... -
I found Zero K highly derivative and poorly written. It really does not bring up any new ideas but just mashes up old ones. One might try to make excuses for him based on his age (and maybe he is hoping for this kind of cryogenic technology to defy death himself), but his contemporary Pynchon still puts out readable, original books (Bleeding Edge, Inherent Vice) in his later years.
-
Video-review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCxI6...
Featured in my Top 20 Books I Read in 2016:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X6OQ...
Yet another ethereal, slow DeLillo novel where today's absurdities and horrors are pitched against the wonders and complexities of language, thought, and everyday life. More compelling, fascinating and layered than possibly any other post-Underworld DeLillo novel. -
C’è sempre un qualcosa di antropologico in Delillo, una specie di nostalgia: Déi, totem, credenze.
Le sue riflessioni su tecnologia, identità, senso della vita sono ormai un marchio di fabbrica.
Qui si aggiunge l’idea rivoluzionaria del controllo sulla vita.
Per quanto mi riguarda è impossibile leggere il primo capitolo e non rimanere lì incollati.
Il primo paragrafo ha una purezza formale invidiabile, oltre a contenere un mondo.
La parte migliore del libro è la distaccata umanità di Jeff, la voce narrante.
Il finale del quinto capitolo apre la strada ai suoi ricordi e, in particolare, alla figura della madre, Madeline.
“Le case degli altri mi facevano paura. A volte, dopo la scuola, un amico mi convinceva ad andare a fare i compiti da lui. Rimanevo sconvolto nel vedere come vivevano le persone, gli altri, quelli che non erano me.”
Nella seconda parte compare Emma, la sua ragazza, con il figlio adottivo Stak. E giù altre pagine micidiali.
Jeff e i suoi colloqui di lavoro. New York. Il potere (fallimentare) del denaro e la paura del caos.
“Anche dopo aver spento i fornelli non faccio che controllare la cucina. Prima di tornare alle mie occupazioni, la sera mi assicuro che la porta sia chiusa a chiave, ma poi torno sempre in punta di piedi davanti alla porta, ispeziono la serratura, giro il pomello di qua e di là per verificare, confermare, saggiare la verità, prima di mettermi a letto. Quando è cominciato tutto questo?”
Ha una quantità di chicche assurda. Il tema delle diverse lingue parlate nel libro (uzbeko, pashtu, russo, cinese) è una di queste.
“Volevo leggere Gombrowicz in polacco. Non conoscevo una sola parola di polacco. Conoscevo solo il nome dello scrittore e continuavo a ripetermelo sia mentalmente che a voce. Witold Gombrowicz. Volevo leggerlo in originale. Questa espressione mi affascinava. Leggerlo in originale.”
Non credo di avere capito tutto. Probabilmente dovrei rileggerlo.
Tra i corridoi labirintici e le stanze inaccessibili di Convergence si srotolano anche manciate di pagine un po’ noiose. Guerre e catastrofi naturali in loop.
Il lato poi più strettamente fantascientifico è quello che mi ha interessato di meno. E probabilmente, a dirla tutta, non è all’altezza per originalità ed elaborazione dei temi.
Ma Delillo rimane uno dei migliori e probabilmente sono d’accordo con chi definisce Zero K il suo miglior lavoro da Underworld.
Cupo, freddo, futuristico, certo. Ma anche umano e struggente.
Ricco di dettagli, di frasi evocative.
Decisamente appagante. [78/100]
-
”Zero K” (2016) – décimo quinto romance – do Don Delillo (n. 1936) é a sétima obra que li do escritor norte-americano.
Alguns Spoilers
”Todos querem ser donos do fim do mundo.” (Pág. 11)
O narrador Jeffrey Lockhart, com trinta e quatro anos - filho de um excêntrico milionário Ross Lockhart, gestor de fortunas e de consórcios dinásticos, especialista em mercados emergentes, capa de revista da Newsweek - é convidado a visitar a Convergência um complexo de edifícios escondidos, agorafobicamente herméticos, auto-suficientes, disfarçados e sombrios, com janelas invisíveis, algures na estepe do Cazaquistão, um aterro, uma forma de earth art, de land art, com inúmeros corredores e paredes nuas, portas sempre fechadas, com alguns ecrãs que descem dos tectos para reproduzirem algumas imagens e alguns filmes.
Cazaquistão - estepe
Jeffrey vai ter com o seu pai e com a sua madrasta Artis Martineau, para lhe fazer uma despedida irresoluta. Artis sofre de várias doenças incapacitantes, a deterioração deve-se em grande parte à esclerose múltipla e está no complexo Convergência para o seu corpo ser congelado, numa suspensão criogénica e num momento futuro – quer o corpo, quer a mente – serem revigorados, isto é, ressuscitados.
Tempo, destino, acaso, imortalidade. (Pág. 22)
Ross Lockhart que injectara vastas somas de dinheiro naquele projecto – tal como muitos outros doadores e entidades – comunica a Jeffrey uma decisão o que o deixa profundamente perturbado; apesar de compreender, ou tentar compreender a decisão do pai.
Entre a Primeira Parte “No Tempo de Cheliabinsk” e a Segunda Parte – “No Tempo de Konstantinovka” existe um capítulo ”ARTIS MARTINEAU”, um monólogo interior, um texto na primeira e na terceira pessoa, numa narrativa inquietante em que Artis não está viva, mas não está morta, um interlúdio existencial, onde a memória e os estímulos sensoriais vão desaparecendo - ”Olhos fechados. O corpo de uma mulher num casulo. (Pág. 160)
Na início da Segunda Parte – “No Tempo de Konstantinovka”-, decorridos dois anos, Don Delillo situa a narrativa, essencialmente, em Nova Iorque, e Jeffrey anuncia “(…) a Ross que estávamos de regresso à História. (…) Certas coisas são previsíveis, mesmo no âmbito do leque de desvios em relação à ordem habitual.” (Pág. 165); procura emprego, rejeitando o envolvimento na estrutura empresarial do pai; num relacionamento com Emma Breslow, educadora para crianças portadoras de deficiências, uma mulher divorciada que tinha ido à Ucrânia com o seu antigo marido adoptar um garoto de cinco ou seis anos, Stak, na actualidade com catorze anos; quando Ross lhe comunica que quer voltar à Convergência.
Na Convergência, além de cientistas e especialistas em ciências médicas, existem também biólogos, futuristas, geneticistas, climatologistas, neurocientistas, psicólogos, eticistas e filólogos. Filólogos que estão a criar uma língua nova – ”Uma língua que nos irá permitir exprimir coisas que agora não somos capazes de exprimir, ver coisas que agora não conseguimos ver, ver-nos a nós próprios e ver os outros de maneiras que nos unam, expandir todas as possibilidades. (Pág. 41).
”Zero K” é uma profunda reflexão sobre a morte, num tempo em que para se ser imortal basta apenas ser rico, dispor de uma fortuna para entrar no processo de criopreservação, em que Don Delillo medita sobre inúmeros temas:
”- Pensas no futuro? Como será o regresso? O mesmo corpo, sim, ou um corpo aperfeiçoado, mas então e a mente? A consciência permanecerá intacta? Serás a mesma pessoa? Vais morrer como alguém com um certo nome e com toda a história e memória e mistério reunidos nessa pessoa e nesse nome. Mas acordas com tudo isso intacto? Será apenas uma longa noite de sono?” (Pág. 53) – são muitas perguntas e muito poucas respostas – e, mesmo para uma pessoa muito imaginativa, nas quais me incluo, a imaginação e a idealização esgotaram-se. Uma das quais é que não consigo imaginar o Ross Lockhart e a Artis Martineau a fazerem jogging em Lisboa ”(..) às seis da manhã, subimos aquela rua íngreme até à igrejinha e ao miradouro.” (Pág. 55) – ainda não consegui identificar o local - talvez, o Miradouro de São Pedro de Alcântara(?).
Lisboa - Portugal - Miradouro de São Pedro de Alcântara
A escrita de Don Delillo é excelente, fascinante nos detalhes e na construção dos diálogos, mas neste Zero K demasiada ambígua e especulativa, a vários níveis, independentemente, de apreciar algumas das questões vinculadas, como o reencontro e a redenção entre pai e filho, a fé e a religiosidade como aglutinação de vontades e desígnios – quer se concorde quer não – mesmo com mais perguntas: ”Precisamos mesmo de uma promessa? Porque é que não nos limitamos a morrer? Porque somos humanos e agarramo-nos com unha s e dentes. Nesta caso, não à tradição religiosa, mas sim à ciência do presente e do futuro.” (Pág. 78); numa visão futurista da vida, entre a criopreservação e a ciberressurreição, e muito mais.
Recomendado para os fans de Don Delillo e para os incondicionais de ficção científica especulativa.
Para todo o sempre. (Pág. 254)
”Um homem de riqueza épica tem o direito de se deixar dilacerar pela amargura?” (Pág. 138)
Para mais informações:
http://kriorus.ru/en/Human-cryopreser...
https://www.alcor.org/ -
Last week for my birthday I went to hear the variously reconstituted 1960s-era Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, not because I was particularly attached to them or any of their songs but more on an impulse, and while listening I found I was coming to some conclusion about how to review Don DeLillo's Zero K, which I had just finished.
I don't relate easily to Don DeLillo's books, and this one was no exception. The main character, Jeffrey Lockhart, comes across bloodless and lost in anomie. Other adjectives that come to mind are cold, vacillating, weak, uncommitted, hopeless, helpless--adrift on a sea not of his own making. So I guess it's no wonder I have trouble relating to him. There is a sense of foreboding, angst, paralysis.
At the rock show I didn't feel a communion with other aging hippies or the music, but I did remember something. In recent years I've been writing about the discovery that the vaunted American myth of equality and belonging is a sham--somewhat in the sense of Ta-Nehisi Coates (although without his blessing since I'm not a member of his in-group). What I remembered was "the '60s" and that during the '60s I did feel I belonged: that I was in the right place at the right time. It was home.
The '60s were a time of danger and risk as well as opportunity, but I think if Jeffrey Lockhart, the Zero K protagonist, had come up in the '60s, he wouldn't have been quite so rootless. Nor would Ta-Nehisi Coates have been quite so enraged and indignant.
What I'm doing with Zero K, then, is eisegesis, reading into it, more than exegesis, reading out of it.
Several years before, I'd been interested in the subject of resurrection. I can't remember exactly why or what my interest was. But more recently (spring of 2016) I read
this review/essay (which thankfully is not locked), and that's what made me want to take another stab at DeLillo.
But the current twist is that I finished it just after reading A Canticle for Leibowitz so from that angle I'm seeing as sanctuary this suspended animation in an isolated and subterranean institution (the Convergence) that's being dangled before potential takers. Potential sanctuary, that is, and for potential takers with deep pockets.
The prospective customer is repetitively bombarded with scenes of disaster and violence. In our world such scenes are always there for the filming, of course, but there seems to be something more at work here, something creepy, for the projected scenarios start linking up to our viewer Jeffrey's life in ways beyond the purely coincidental. I did not find myself feeling good about the deep-freeze proprietors and their kind of persuasion. That is, I suspected they didn't have their customers' best interests at heart.
Will Jeffrey take the bait? I was anxious for him but simultaneously aware his life was an anemic argument for why not; his life was no defense against the pressure on him even as the book ended.
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band played Symphony Hall, which is more conducive to the comfort of aging youth revolutionaries than an outdoor venue. When the show was over we wended our way down the steps and through the various parking levels where, lo and behold, mural-sized photos adorned the stairwell walls at each level. But unlike the wall screens in DeLillo's fictional underworld, these were sans disaster. Instead they portrayed the geometric rows of an orchestra or a spread of outdoor cafe tables. -
CRITIQUE:
Distillation of the Spirit
There's a common misapprehension that the shorter Don DeLillo's novels get, the more there is something lacking in them. This view is related to the veneration of post-modernist maximalism (which has by and large shunned DeLillo since
"Underworld").
In reality, the shorter they become, the more condensed and concentrated they are. DeLillo's writing has undergone a process of distillation, if it's not exactly an embrace of minimalism. The closer he and his fiction get to death and the void, the more his words approach images, film, art, music and silence:
"All I'm able to do is watch and listen, a sudden clutter of sound and image."
"All But Abstract"
The narrator of "Zero K" (zero kelvin, absolute zero or minus 273 degrees Celsius) is Jeffrey Lockhart. His father, Ross, is a sixty-something multi-millionaire who has made large investments in the "faith-based technology" developed by an organisation called the Convergence.
Much of the novel is set in a laboratory and hospice at an underground cryo-preservation facility in Chelyabinsk run by the Convergence. (Chelyabinsk is in Russia, although DeLillo frequently mentions staff speaking Uzbek.) The facility (including the guest/patient bedrooms) reminded me of the white room in "2001: A Space Odyssey":
"Sometimes I think of the room, the scant roomscape, wall, floor, door, bed, a monosyllabic image, all but abstract..."
The White Room in "2001: A Space Odyssey"
"Solitude in Extremis"
There is much tension between Jeff and his father, particularly over the ethics of the cryo-preservation of human life.
Initially, Ross plans that his terminally ill, second wife, Artis, will undergo cryo-preservation:
"She would die, chemically prompted, in a subzero vault, in a highly precise medical procedure guided by mass delusion, by superstition and arrogance and self-deception...
"You understand there's something beyond the last breath. You understand this is only the preface to something larger, to what is next...
"Think of being alone and frozen in the crypt, the capsule. Will new technologies allow the brain to function at the level of identity?
"This is what you may have to confront. The conscious mind. Solitude in extremis. Alone. Think of the word itself. Middle English. All one. You cast off the person. The person is the mask, the created character in the medley of dramas that constitute your life. The mask drops down and away and the person becomes you in its truest meaning. All one. The self.
"What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others?
"[Was Artis] the half fiction who would soon be transformed, or reduced, or intensified, becoming pure self, suspended in ice?"
Sources of Abstraction
I'm often unsure whether DeLillo is influenced by concepts that he might have read in Baudrillard, Derrida, Heidegger, and Jesuitical or Catholic philosophy. Alternatively, he might simply have imagined and developed these concepts from first principles or his exposure to Catholicism.
Like Dostoevsky, these concepts emerge from the mouth of the narrator or a character, rather than directly from the author, DeLillo, himself. Thus, it's hard to determine whether DeLillo raises them to advocate or dismiss them.
In "Zero K", DeLillo expressly mentions Martin Heidegger as the source of the idea that "God is, but he does not exist."
Perhaps this means that God is real, but he is not a being that has life. Likewise, a rock or stone might be, but does not exist as a being.
I can't determine whether Heidegger ever actually said this, whether in English or German. However, there is much mention of Being in the novel (as there was in
"Point Omega"), so it could be inferred that DeLillo might have been familiar with Heidegger and his concept of "Dasein".
"Being-Toward-Death"
Heidegger certainly coined the expression "being-toward-death", a concept that makes us conscious of the possibility of our own eventual death and therefore the finitude of our own life or being. This consciousness makes us more authentic.
On the other hand, the cryo-preservation offered by the Convergence allows its patients to deny or cheat a natural death. This means that their life or being might somehow be less authentic (because it hasn't had to confront mortality or finitude).
Jeff seems to prefer the "shared awareness" of an actual physical relationship, to the hope that a worldly relationship will potentially resuscitate after two patients have been resurrected.
He also questions Heidegger, a philosopher who he "hadn't known until fairly recently...had maintained a firm relationship with Nazi principles and ideologies. History everywhere, in black notebooks...gone dark in the process."
Catastrophic Vulnerability
One of the staff, who Jeff calls the blinking man, says "catastrophe is our bedtime story...catastrophe is built into the early brain."
"Does literal immortality compress our enduring artforms and cultural wonders into nothingness?"
[Catastrophe might mean death, or the end of life or being.]
Jeff describes the blinking man as "Miklos Szabo, the Old World professor, and I imagined him in a three-piece suit, someone from the 1930's, a renowned philosopher having an illicit romance with a woman names Magda." [Is Magda supposed to imply Hannah Arendt, with whom Heidegger had an affair?]
"Everybody Wants to Own the End of the World"
Ross invests in the Convergence, so that he can be in control of his own life and death, as if he were God and not mortal.
There are two other men who promote the facility, the Stenmark twins, who are in their early fifties, and whom Jeff suspects were "street anarchists of an earlier era, quietly plotting local outrages or larger insurrections, all shaped by their artistic skills". They claim that "life everlasting belongs to those of breathtaking wealth." Only the wealthy can experience the "reverence and awe".
A character called the Monk quotes the English polymath, Sir Thomas Browne, from 1658:
"It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man to tell him that he is at the end of nature, or that there is no further state to come."
It's this realisation that causes humans to "deplore their own natures...and [strive to be] more than our present selves."
"No Choice But Disconnection"
In "Zero K", the patients seem to be destined for aloneness, even if they are currently in a relationship. If they're resurrected successfully, there is a question as to whether they will be the same person, and their partner the same person that they were before their cryo-preservation. There is no guarantee that the technology will work or that it will benefit the patients. It seems to have the potential to disconnect them from themselves and each other, i.e., to dehumanise them in the name of transhumanism.
Gary Lockwood in "2001: A Space Odyssey"
MULTI-VERSE:
[In the Words of Don DeLillo]
Still Life
There is tone and colour,
Shimmer everywhere,
Sun beginning to sink,
Trees alight.
Pod Life
On and on.
Eyes closed.
Woman's body
In a pod.
Still Conscious
She is trying
To understand
What has happened
To her and
Where she is and
What it means
To be who she is.
Residue
She is the residue,
All that is left
Of an identity.
Grim Limits
She is living
Within the grim
Limits of self.
Manhattanhenge with Boy
The full solar disk,
Bled into the streets,
Lighting up the towers
To either side of us.
The boy did not see
The sky collapse
Upon us, but found
The purest astonishment
In the intimate touch
Of earth and sun.
Manhattanhenge (or Manhattan Solstice)
VISION & SOUND-TRACK:
-
La ricerca dell'immortalità
C'era una volta l'uomo. Nasceva, cresceva, diventava vecchio, si ammalava e moriva. Era abbastanza stupido e non si faceva troppe domande, se non quelle legate alla sopravvivenza; e quello che non capiva lo imputava al soprannaturale.
Pian piano quest'uomo iniziò a pensare e con il pensiero arrivarono i primi interrogativi sul perché della vita stessa. E quest'uomo iniziò a chiedersi come allungare la vita, come ridurre gli effetti dell'invecchiamento, come sconfiggere la morte. Come diventare eterno.
Come?
La risposta odierna è: con la scienza e la tecnologia.
Crioconservazione, studi biologici sull'invecchiamento, transumanesimo (ossia fusione tra uomo e macchina). Inevitabilmente però insieme ai progressi scientifici, che ormai sono realtà, iniziano gli interrogativi.
"Una volta che avremo imparato a dominare il prolungamento della vita e ci saremo avvicinati alla possibilità di diventare eternamente rinnovabili, cosa sarà delle nostre energie, delle nostre aspirazioni?"
Usando una scrittura quasi alienata, Delillo ci conduce in una storia solo all'apparenza fantascientifica che ci bombarda di stimoli e di domande.
"La morte non è forse una fortuna? Non definisce il valore della nostra esistenza, di minuto in minuto, di anno in anno?"
Mentre camminiamo con i protagonisti nei lunghi corridoi gelidi, asettici, deserti, pieni di porte senza maniglie, non possiamo non chiederci il significato della vita e della morte, cosa leghi il corpo con la vita, come la nostra vita possa essere separata dalla fisicità, come la vita possa essere legata alle persone che ci stanno intorno.
"L’io. Cos’è l’io? Tutto quello che siamo, senza gli altri, senza amici, estranei, amanti, bambini, strade da percorrere, cose da mangiare, specchi dove guardarsi. Ma si è davvero qualcuno senza gli altri?"
“Non ci basta vivere un po’ più a lungo grazie ai progressi della tecnologia? Dobbiamo per forza andare avanti all’infinito?"
Un libro che contrappone uno stile limpido e lineare a riflessioni tutt'altro che semplici.
Parlando della morte, Delillo riesce a farci riflettere sulla vita. -
Tra presente e futuro, forma e contenuto, il diciassettesimo romanzo di Don DeLillo rappresenta uno dei punti più alti e intensi raggiunti dall’autore americano nel corso della sua lunga carriera. Si farebbe però un grave errore a considerarlo come una mera riflessione sulla morte e sull’avido desiderio umano di poterla sconfiggere/procastinare. Zero K, infatti, andrebbe meglio considerato come un libro sulla fine del tempo e, come scrive la traduttrice Federica Aceto, «sulla fine del linguaggio, […] sulle parole, sui loro limiti, sul bisogno irrefrenabile di dire, dare nomi alle cose e alle persone, definire, raccontare, nonostante tutto».
La morte, per DeLillo, è morte del linguaggio, inteso come atto sociale e creativo per eccellenza. Se Jeffrey Lockhart, infatti, cerca ossessivamente di definire la propria esperienza tramite il codice linguistico («Un nome avrebbe aggiunto profondità a quel corpo snello»), i pazienti e gli scienziati della Convergence sembrano essere alla ricerca di qualcosa di ulteriore, in grado di avvicinarsi alla «logica e alla bellezza della matematica pura». Dopotutto, qual è il fine ultimo della criogenesi se non quello di condurre l’uomo oltre la morte, liberandolo delle convenzioni sociali e permettendogli di diventare ciò che si è «nel senso più vero», in vista di un nuovo stadio di consapevolezza (fisica e intellettuale) e di una nuova lingua, priva di «similitudini, metafore o analogie»?
Ma se l'operazione messa in atto dal protagonista si rivela fallimentare già in partenza, anche l'utopia ricercata dagli scienziati della Convergence pare un'algida illusione: «Ma si è davvero qualcuno senza gli altri?». In altre parole, è possibile immaginare un futuro dove l'unica realtà attendibile, per citare ancora una volta Federica Aceto, è «una promessa di solitudine, un linguaggio perfetto, ma senza interlocutori, un ponte verso il nulla»?
Una possibile risposta ci vene data nell'ultimo - splendido - capitolo del romanzo: quando i «raggi del sole si allineano perfettamento al reticolo delle strade», solo le grida di stupore e tremendamente umane di un bambino sono in grado di contenere «il più puro senso di stupore all'intimo contatto fra la terra e il sole».
Per questo ed altri motivi, Zero K non può che rivelarsi come una delle più lucide ed importanti riflessioni sul presente che stiamo vivendo. Ciò che forse dobbiamo ancora realizzare - e che Don DeLillo sembra suggerirci tra le pagine del suo ultimo romanzo (im)possibile - è che, nonostate tutto, con la fine del tempo non abbiamo niente da perdere. -
- lorin hai capito il senso di questa roba?
- macché, bocol. mi sto annoiando che mi cala la palpebra.
- che si fa?
- sorridi e asseconda. tentiamo di guadagnare l'uscita con nonchalance.
abbandonato per insufficiente motivazione a pagina 111 su 240. nelle precedenti (a parer mio inutilmente esiziali) 110 ho proceduto in ragione non tanto dei 19 euri ormai spesi, quanto di una spinta inerziale che si è esaurita alla frase "è nella natura umana voler sapere di più, sempre di più, sempre di più, - ho detto. - ma è anche vero che quello che non sappiamo ci rende umani. e quello che non sappiamo non ha fine". grazie per il viatico, don. alle 3 di notte passate ho capito che del tuo libro non mi interessa sapere oltre. in più il ricordo di ubik è troppo fresco perché fin dalla storia del centro di congelamento convergence, che richiama il moratorium diletti fratelli di zurigo, il tutto non mi sembri un pastiche dal copione poco originale. più che zero k, per quanto mi riguarda questo coso poteva intitolarsi: interesse-intorno-allo-zero-assoluto. nessuna quantificazione in stelle ovviamente: per la metà scarsa che ho totalizzato, e perché una parte della mia insofferenza forse è dovuta a impietosi paragoni. con underwolrd e quella sua pallina da baseball lanciata tipo bomba attraverso la narrativa contemporanea, ma anche con il pur non perfetto rumore bianco. leggo che per michiko kakutani, temutissima critica del ny times, zero k è un romanzo così così, ma è la prova più convincente di delillo dai tempi appunto di underworld. che tradotto mi sembra, perdonami michiko, un mezzo giudizio sfangato grazie all'esistenza del comparativo di maggioranza. (forse superlativo relativo? - bocol domani tra le 2 e le 3 si ripassa l'analisi grammaticale.) -
"Everyone wants to own the end of the world." Thus, opens this newest novel by Don DeLillo and these are the words of the protagonist's father, Ross Lockhart, who becomes obsessed with cryogenics when his wife becomes ill. The novel begins with the narrator traveling to the Convergence, located somewhere in Russia, so that his step-mother can be frozen, so that she might return many years later. At Convergence, there is no sense of time or even identity. People there are cut off from the rest of the world. Jeffrey Lockhart's room where he stays is referred to as his "introversion box." It forces one to wonder what creates a human identity. Is it something deep within oneself or is it one's associations with other people and the world. Formless meals are eaten in isolation. Mannequins are a continuing theme and ubiquitous decoration at Convergence. The films showings scenes of horror and death, pointing to an inevitable apocalypse are the only other break from the quiet and solitude at Convergence.
The cryogenic process itself is brutal. The bodies are decapitated, organs removed, and they are kept in pods. The body expected to return would be void of memories, identity, even perhaps, gender. They seemingly become mannequins.
When Jeffrey leaves Convergence and returns to NYC, there is dramatic contrast of noise, people, lights, and action. Jeffrey, in his early 30s, is struggling with his identity. He is jobless, seemingly insecure in his romantic relationship, and he is rejecting living in association with his father. He is constantly wanting the name things. He is constantly counting. These attributes make him seem like he is watching and evaluating the world around him, but not fully living within it.
This is my first Don DeLillo book in over 20 years, since reading Libra which I loved. Don DeLillo is obviously a brilliant mind, but the darkness and foreboding of this novel was a bit much for me to truly love this novel. It is a novel that depresses the reader, especially as you get only feelings of emptiness or numbness from the characters portrayed. However, it is brilliantly written and leaves much to discuss.
For discussion questions, please visit
http://www.book-chatter.com/?p=375.
Thanks to netgalley and Scribner publishing for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. -
This is a difficult book for me to review—and a challenging one to read, much less enjoy. And I do enjoy* Uncle Don, usually (the sole exceptions being The Body Artist and Cosmopolis, pretty much). Delillo's meditation on Death, language and technology was intermittantly compelling, and occasionally flummoxed me. Sometimes I had the feeling that I was being initiated into a new way of seeing and thinking about things. Other sections left me doubting my ability to understand anything—much like the narrator, whose father has played a major role in building the cryogenic facility in Ubekibekistanstan somewhere, where, at the beginning of the novel father and son are together (after many years apart) to witness the interment of the father's second wife, Artis, so that she may be born again at some point in the future thanks to the near-mystical technologies being developed by The Convergence (the name of said subterranean, apparently bomb-and-catastrophe-proof facility).
Jeffrey, the narrator, then takes us back to his teenage years, when his father left his mother, and this was the best part of the novel for me. The young Jeffrey has a compulsion (one he may be only just overcoming by the novel's end, but then again perhaps not) to give everything and everyone names: he scrutinizes them (with a pubescent phallogocentric Male Gaze?!), figures out (or imagines he does) how they tick then labels them appropriately. The trouble is, though, that The Convergence resists his efforts to scrutinize and apprehend—as does the 'death' of Artis, as do numerous other interactions he has over the course of the novel. Reality, as the PoMo types used to love sayin' is ultimately sublime, and laughs at our puny attempts to, erm, penetrate its ever-shifting surfaces. (n.b. this is what bugged me most about Cosmopolis, that it seemed to capitulate to the "it's sublime" line as regards the capitalist economy...)
A good example of this kind of thinking/writing comes near the end (don't worry, I am not sure that the word "spoiler" could possibly apply to this gyre-like book):I have to stay until the screen goes dark. I have to wait and see. And if they send an escort for me, the escort will have to wait..., let the picture fade, the sound die, the screen roll up, the entire hall go dark. The other halls empty out, an orderly flow of people, but this hall goes dark and I stand here with my eyes shut. All the times I’ve done this before, stand in a dark room, motionless, eyes shut, weird kid and grown man, was I making my way toward a space such as this, long cold empty hall, doors and walls in matching colors, dead silence, shadow streaming toward me.
Once the dark is total, I will simply stand and wait, trying hard to think of nothing.
But "nothing" is impossible for the living—we live inside language, and we compulsively cling to it just as it sticks to us. Only at certain key moments do we seem to elude it, or it us—when Jeffrey sees a mute protestor in New York, or a taxi driver getting out of his cab to prostrate himself in the direction of Mecca, or his occasional visits to his father's old townhouse:When I ask myself why I requested an occasional overnight visit to the townhouse, I think at once of the building where Emma lives, in this general area, or where she used to live, and I take frequent walks in the neighborhood, expecting to see nothing, learn nothing, but feeling an immanence, the way in which a painful loss yields a shadow presence, and in this case, on her street, I sense a possibility that I haven’t even tried to understand.
But the desire to transcend language is also linked to a desire to transcend the messiness of existence—the desire for simplicity a veiled desire for death:Languages, sirens all the time, beggar in a bundled mass, man or woman, awake or asleep, alive or dead, hard to tell even when I approach and drop a dollar in the dented plastic cup.
Two blocks farther on I tell myself that I should have said something, determined something, and then I change the subject before it gets too complicated.
Language links us, at least potentially, to each other, but our narrator Jeffrey spends the novel narrating it to us, not communicating with his father, Ross, or his arms-length partner, Emma. He would rather tell us, abstract entities he does not have to deal with, about his mother, his father, and about himself, than Emma. As he confesses, "I'd wanted her to see me in an isolated setting, outside the forces that made me," because this is how he wants to see himself, how he can bear to live with himself, with and in the world:On public elevators I direct a blind gaze precisely nowhere, knowing that I’m in a sealed box alone with others and that none of us is willing to offer a face open to inspection.
Wow. I feel skewered, pinned, wriggling on the wall, awaiting inspection by Jeffrey's practiced gaze. Am I glad that I've met him, this mirror man? Am I glad to have read this book?
*My most-enjoyed Delillos in order of joyability:
Libra
The Names
White Noise
Underworld
Mao II
