| Title | : | Point Omega |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1439169950 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781439169957 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 117 |
| Publication | : | First published February 2, 2010 |
| Awards | : | International Dublin Literary Award (2012) |
Don DeLillo has been "weirdly prophetic about twenty-first-century America" (The New York Times Book Review). In his earlier novels, he has written about conspiracy theory, the Cold War and global terrorism. Now, in Point Omega, he looks into the mind and heart of a "defense intellectual", one of the men involved in the management of the country's war machine.
Richard Elster was a scholar—an outsider—when he was called to a meeting with government war planners, asked to apply "ideas and principles to such matters as troop deployment and counterinsurgency".
We see Elster at the end of his service. He has retreated to the desert, "somewhere south of nowhere", in search of space and geologic time. There he is joined by a filmmaker, Jim Finley, intent on documenting his experience. Finley wants to persuade Elster to make a one-take film, Elster its single character—"Just a man and a wall."
Weeks later, Elster's daughter Jessica visits—an "otherworldly" woman from New York, who dramatically alters the dynamic of the story. The three of them talk, train their binoculars on the landscape, and build an odd, tender intimacy, something like a family. Then a devastating event throws everything into question.
In this compact and powerful novel, it is finally a lingering human mystery that haunts the landscape of desert and mind.
Point Omega Reviews
-
Yes, for sure, in this slender little volume (especially in the first half), you'll find Don DeLillo at his most obtusely self-parodic. You see, DeLillo now apparently culls all of his dialogue from some strange dimly-lit alternate universe where stubbornly humorless men and women sit around drinking scotch and waving their arms in the general direction of infinity -- as a vague, portentous symbol of futility in the face of everythingness. This, certainly, is simultaneously DeLillo's shorthand and shortcoming. If only his shuttle craft would quit orbiting the earth once in a while and land on its prosaic soil! Yes, I will admit that he's responsible for some of the most jaw-droppingly magical sentences in the history of the English language -- sentences which simply and precisely allude to the most indefinable and inexplicable of human experiences and sensations, but holy shit, Don. Sometimes you need to a let a character break wind or talk about how much he laughed watching Paul Blart or something. And I don't appreciate the reference to Sokurov's film Russian Ark (which, as you should well know, I hate), and yet that film suffers from the same malady as some of your novels... terminal self-seriousness and ludicrous ponderousness... Check out just a few examples from Point Omega:
1. 'Human perception is a saga of created reality. But we were devising entities beyond the agreed-upon limits of recognition and interpretation.'
2. 'Day turns to night eventually but it's a matter of light and darkness, it's not passing time, mortal time. There's none of the usual terror. It's different here, time is enormous, that's what I feel here, palpably. Time that precedes and survives us.'
3. 'Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature.'
These passages would be mitigated somewhat if they were third person narration, but no. They're examples of actual character dialogue... Can you even believe it? Don't invite DeLillo to your dinner parties. He'll be trying to discuss the enfolding nature of time while everyone is eating Chex mix and trying to catch up on The Biggest Loser.
AND YET! AND YET!
I really, really liked this book a lot. Despite the aforementioned problems. It's really a powerful little book, and about a third of the way in, it really sucks you into its dreamlike spell (or torpor). One of my favorite things in art is intentional ambiguity (see also Bergman's Persona and Lynch's Mulholland Drive), and Point Omega is a (mostly) succinctly despondent reverie on the opacity of human experience and our ultimately futile misalignment with the profound and tireless workings of time. (Okay, that was a pathetic attempt to parody DeLillo's ponderousness, but I invite Scribner to blurb that line on the jacket of all future editions of Point Omega.) -
It's hardly a surprise to me that I surface from another Don DeLillo novel feeling faintly unsettled and disoriented. This can be seen as both a blessing and a curse throughout much of his fiction, and the reason he can be such a compelling writer in one book, and such a frustrating one in another. I've loved two of his novels, but didn't think much of two others, and for me, Point Omega sits somewhere in the middle. This short novel had a hypnotic feel to it, and is told with a prose that is both rigorous and precise, but the story was also somewhat baffling at times. It starts with a showing of 24 Hour Psycho – a heavily slowed-down screening of Hitchcock's film that was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 2006. The piece is being intensely watched by an unnamed narrator who observes, but the narrator turns out to be a cipher in what becomes a prologue. It's a pair the narrator spots in the gallery, and wrongly assumes to be a film professor and student, who turn out to be the protagonists - Richard Elster, an ageing defence intellectual who advised over Iraq, and Jim Finley, an idealistic young director who wants to make a film of Elster talking uninterruptedly about his work.
We then cut to the Californian desert, where a feeling of slow motion sets in, as the two men reflect on deep subjects such as time, extinction, and the attainment of what philosopher Teilhard de Chardin called the 'Omega Point' - a zen-like state of relinquished consciousness, and of course the open desert landscape that is beautifully evoked is conducive to such thoughts. Briefly the novel becomes a thriller towards the end, after Elster's daughter Jessie, who comes to stay goes missing, but the real quarry here isn't the solution to the mystery so much as the anguish and anxiety that it arouses. While the main plot dithers around without really getting anywhere, on a deeper level this is very much about lateness: lateness in life, time to reflect, hindsight, fear, loss. It is also something of an object lesson in the methods of late-phase literature, where the high-gloss productions of the imagination in full spate gives way to a sparser, grainier art of suggestion and juxtaposition. I liked it, but it's not peak DeLillo. It seems at the turn of the century he started to go downhill somewhat, but that won't put me off reading more of his later novels, as as a writer he has always found a way to lure me in, whether he's on top form or not. -
Last night at work a man who looked like Zizek approached the information desk.
Him, I'm looking for the section on culture process.
Me, what do you mean?
Him, how can I say this (insert vague European accent), (pause), yes, i'm looking for, (pause, looking like he is thinking), books about, (pause, look of satisfaction on his face), the process of culture.
That answer cleared up all my confusions, right?
He continued to speak down to me and explain that he was making a syllabus for a class and that tonight he was going to create his bibliography. Since I was obviously an intellectual ingrate who doesn't know what culture process means, he let me know that a bibliography is a list of books.
I imagine this man speaking normally like the characters, especially the aging intellectual Elster, in Point Omega. He could say, The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments. He said this more than once, Elster did, in more than one way. His life happened, he said, when he sat staring at a blank wall, thinking about dinner.
An eight-hundred-page biography is nothing more than dead conjecture, he said.
I almost believed him when he said such things. He said we do this all the time, all of us, we become ourselves beneath the running throughts nd dim images, wondering idly when we'll die. This is how we live and think whether we know it or not. These are the unsorted thoughts we have looking out the train window, small dull smears of meditative panic
David Kowalski, in his review, points out the artificiality of the dialog. And he's right. The dialog is stilted, sort of in the way the dialog of a Hal Hartley movie would sound if Jacques Lacan helped with the rewrite. I have known people that speak like this. They speak as if Derrida were the screenwriter for the movie-adaptation of their life, which they were important enough to have scored the starring role in.
The people who can speak in this manner are privileged to live their lives as children. They can say that real life is in some paradoxical nether-region because they are children who don't have to live in the real world. This is an age-old ivory tower criticism. But this book is about more than just pointing at the absurdity of certain types of pompous thoughts and attitudes. The Elster character is not just an intellectual, but one that had been hired by the Pentagon to help with the war in Iraq. Elster is a Baudrillard type of intellectual and some of the words used in Point Omega point towards the now-dead French theorist. Paroxysm is one of those words. Elster's job in the Pentagon was as a post-modern theorist who thought he could create new realities by creating new phrases to describe them. If one can believe Baudrillard's triptych of essays about the first Gulf War ("The Gulf War (x)" where x = {will not happen, is not happening, did not happen}), then why can we not just say that the War in Iraq is won. Or that it is over, even if it is not, since it will be the words that create the reality, not the reality that will need to be represented by the words.
This type of intellectualism often gets disparaged as being relativistic, and now is not the place to go into the merits of this kind of critique. Instead, of being a criticism of the ethical standpoint of a left wing intellectual who has sided with that he calls, a criminal enterprise, it is about the personal standpoint of the intellectual when real-life comes crashing in to his theories. Everything DeLillo shows in this character borders on the ridiculous, except for the way that he treats his daughter. While going on a trip to the grocery store he will test and ramble on about the 'objective status' of the GPS thing in his car but make sure to tell his daughter to buckle her seatbelt. Elster can ramble on about some esoteric bullshit in almost every scene we see him in but then show him taking a concrete delight in cooking for his daughter and wanting to share this life-sustaining event with her.
But then something happens to her, and Elster goes from being a fountain of lofty liquid bullshit to being inconsolably human.
Framing the story of Elster, his daughter and the filmmaker/narrator is the story of a man obsessed with watching 24 Hour Psycho (the movie Psycho slowed down so that it takes 24 hours to watch the entire movie) at MOMA. The two stories converge to a degree that DeLillo leaves to the readers imagination. The thoughts of the man watching the movie everyday while the other visitors of the museum pass by the video installation quickly, without taking the time that he is taking to see the 'reality' can be juxtaposed with Elster's with questions about the validity (appropriateness?) of their respective thoughts are.
There is a lot happening in this short and sparse book. Normally, I don't re-read a book immediately after finishing it. I re-read this book, and since finishing it a second time I've picked it up to read five or ten page sections wherever I would open the book to. This is not something I normally do. There is something going on in the book that I still haven't been able to pinpoint in the text.
I've actually been considering buying a copy of it, the copy I've been reading is borrowed from the library. It is the kind of book that begs to be underlined and have marginalia added to it. It is the kind of book that needs to be engaged with, and have the meaning pried out of the words on the page. Not too much really happens in the novel, but it is a much more interesting read than White Noise and while less of a page turner than Libra it is arguably a more important novel. -
Punto Omega (2010). Un Delillo (1936-) sorprendente, original. Novela corta, flanqueada, además, por dos imponentes muros que delimitan la historia central. El capítulo inicial (al igual que el final) me parece de una maestría insuperable. Cómo es posible que una recreación tan minuciosa de un hecho tan nimio despierte tanta atención en el lector. A continuación, la trama principal, la relación entre tres personajes anodinos y muy diferentes en un principio (un viejo analista de la CIA, un joven cineasta muy particular y la hija del primero), reunidos en mitad del desierto y que terminan formando un vínculo sorprendente.
No son necesarios ni los sucesos dramáticos. De hecho, quedan difuminados por la cegadora arena. La nada te atrapa como te podían atrapar las mayores aventuras novelescas, te atrapa como el desierto atrapa a los personajes, sin causa aparente, solo es una sensación irresistible. La trama inicial desaparece y no te das ni cuenta. Solo lees y lees y lees.
No te importa, ni la falta de estructura habitual, ni la falta de final, ni la falta de cierto sentido... Estás embelesado por una prosa de una profundidad pasmosa. Unas frases lacónicas, como ráfagas de ametralladora, como deslumbrantes destellos que no te dan tregua. Un latido inacabable, reflexivo, a la vez que confuso. ¿Qué importancia tiene? Pura literatura. Delillo en su máxima expresión. -
let's get past the fact that don delillo is kind of a dickhead for allowing us to pay $24 for a 117 pg novella and get to the point: it's worth it. twenty-four bucks for a whiff of the ineffable? we'll take it.
“Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.” so speaks richard elster, 73 yr old cog in the american war machine, pining and praying for the extinction of the human race, asking to be zapped back to the stardust we all were only a few years back... could there be a collective yearning way beyond our genes, deep in our atomic makeup, a yearning to cycle back to inanimate primordial muck...? ok -- as pretentious and irritating as this may sound, it's also kind of deeply fascinating.
most thrilling is the novel's framing device, the best piece of art criticism ever written. clement greenberg, guillaume apollinaire, john ruskin, harold rosenberg? bunch of pikers. suckers. y'see, not only does delillo turn what should be a somewhat dull art piece into some seriously suspenseful mindfuckery, but he offers the answers to the secrets of the universe. yes. the nature of time and existence are damn near explained! and there's the joke, people: all this talk of extinction and the species running its course? point omega is the omega point! after the completion of this book we, as humans, have it all figured out, done what we hadda do, missing link is... linked. now, get us out of here! ...well, not really. but it sure as shit feels as if delillo was writing well into, and for, the apocalypse.
we open on an unnamed guy hanging around an actual installation at the MOMA in 2006 called 24 Hour Psycho, in which the scottish artist douglas gordon slowed down hitch's masterpiece so that its original 2 hours now takes 24*. and it's thrilling to read delillo's slooooowed down take on watching a sloooowed down film: “To see what’s here, finally to look and to know you’re looking, to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the smallest register." in less certain terms: you slow shit down and weird stuff happens.
and then we move to the core of the novel whose edges, although they might not appear, lock directly into the framing device. and it's weird stuff: warhol's empire by way of beckett. we follow a young filmmaker as he moves in to a 'defense official' from the bush administration's desert getaway in the hope of convincing the older man to be the subject of a documentary. they sit around in silence until the old guy's daughter arrives and then things get shaken up. slightly. very very slightly. y'see, the structure and pacing of delillo's novella, of course, mirrors the character's talks on the nature of time.
but there's a lifelessness to this section. and though this may be the point, it makes little difference, because toward the end, we're called (or should be called) to feel something. after talk of time and extinction and eternity and the dual lumbering monsters of war and nation, the loss of a single person is what equals (is greater than?) the death of the universe. the micro and macro, the quantum & universal… all are bested by loss. and we retain our humanity.
lemme be straight: i'm a delillo freak. the guy puts me in another world; or, more accurately, forces me to reconfigure this world on different terms. no easy task. for me, his books define the last days of the 20th century as powerfully as did dostoevsky's for 19th century st. petersburg. and a part of the strategy, his means of defining our time, is a defamiliarization of the familiar... the world, reality, is strange stuff -- a point most people overlook. and delillo creates totems and icons and magic out of the ordinary; and zaps the pious into the ranks of the banal. and although i'd like to tell y'all to approach this book as a kind of delilloesque fever dream, to allow its simultaneous strangeness and corniness and ponderousness and profundity and beauty and portentousness to just wash over, to just take it all in… it wouldn't be genuine. there's much here, but there's also something lacking. and while i genuinely love that delillo - in his post-underworld novels - has metamorphosed, i don't think he's quite nailed it. but point omega is the closest he's come.
*if douglas gordon can rip the concept for the tv show 24 , apply it to psycho, and have delillo creaming his jeans... why stop there?
how about a 24 version of remembrance of things past?
war in peace in 24 hours!
why stop with art? let's 24 history:
seven-day war in 24 hours!
thirty-year war in 24 hours!
somebody call joel surnow. -
You may call me uneducated, ignorant, unappreciative, or a philistine, I'll still say that I hated this book. I only finished it because I refused to believe that it would not come to any point, be it point Omega or any other point.
After I finished reading the book, I felt that I should sue the author for stealing my valuable time, charging $ 100.-- an hour because this would be the absolute minimum someone would have to pay me for reading this book a second time. (And this would have been a bargain for the author, as come to think of it, I wouldn't do it for twice the money.)
If I only think what I could have done with the time I wasted on this book! I could have read a book that was worthwhile reading, I could have taken the dogs for walks, I could have pulled weeds in the garden, I could have done some housecleaning. ANYTHING would have made more sense and would have been more enjoyable -- even cleaning litterboxes. -
The "omega point" mentioned maybe two or three times is sort of (its meaning is self-consciously identified as maybe not meaning this) an accretion of consciousness that requires a reversal, a dissolution of self, a "paroxysm," Elster calls it, liking the sound of the word. There are two images in this novella, set in a gallery at MoMA and out west in the middle of nowhere near an impact area, a former blast zone, that struck me: the first is a stray perception that I've also experienced that MoMA seems further down the block every time you go, and the second involved two friends deciding to walk the streets where the Chelsea galleries are but not visit the galleries as usual, walk one block west to its end, cross the street, walk one block back east, walk one block south to the next street down, walk one block west to its end, cross the street, walk one block east, etc, ie, reaching the end point and reversing course, the pattern of movement significant in itself, a sort of art. It struck me too that it's late-stage, end-point DeLillo, airily formatted, shorter, sparer, older like later Philip Roth (the sense that this is the sort of work that can be done at this point in life, in part due to reduced ambition, memory, energy, but also evolved sensibility, needing to prove nothing to no one), slower, open (reliant on suggestion), ambiguous, softly/organically honed, almost delicately insightful, poetic without being lyrical, and for some reason sans contractions pretty much. Like
Players, there's a frame involving a movie,
24-Hour Psycho in this case. Most of the book, the bulk of the middle section, seemed like a reversal/return to the latter half of DeLillo's first novel,
Americana, all grown up, out in the middle of nowhere, idiosyncratic dialogue (reliant on repetition) and drink. But then there's a suggestion of some innocent amorous activity, a semi-shocking/inappropriate paragraph of imagined intercourse, unsweaty holding of hands, a minor transgression of peeking in on someone sleeping, followed by a disappearance. Narrator looks for woman in "the badlands, a series of pristine ridges rising from the desert floor in patterned alignment." (Patterns is a DeLillo keyword.) And then: "It was too vast, it was not real, the symmetry and furrows and juts, it crushed me, the heartbreaking beauty of it, the indifference of it, and the longer I stood and looked the more certain I was that we would never have an answer." That seems to jibe with the writer's overall thesis: attentive, floored observation of the vast, awesome, ambiguous, unreal, mysterious, and possibly meaningless universe. Spoiler alert: the mystery introduced midway through this that drives the story forward isn't resolved, or it resolves ambiguously in the narrator asking a woman for her number after they comment on some of 24-Hour Psycho they watch together (at one point saying to the woman that he was a "pseudo-genius" as a kid, capable of multiplying five digit numbers in his head, redounding to the teen Nobel mathematics laureate Billy Twillig of
Ratner's Star, before admitting in the narration that this was a lie), or it resolves structurally, since the narrator reaches the endpoint, point of reversal, point omega, nearly lost in the desert, near the former blast zone, and then returns to the opening scene watching the famous movie slowed down to a day, realizing its real version. The main subject Elster who had something to do with Iraq, the Pentagon, seems more like an enigmatic, artsy, gnomic conceptual artist than elder military/political advisor. (The
Wikipedia, which makes a lot of debatable unsubstantiated claims -- "the central metaphor is autism" wha?!), makes Elster's deal clear, whereas I didn't exactly find it so cut/dry what he'd done.) Anyway, the sort of novel that presents something like a mini-system of subtle associations, and that pretty much demands re-reading, although I don't think I'll re-read it right away. Worthwhile, sure. Glad I've read it once for now. -
CRITIQUE:
“Somebody said, “What am I looking at?”
Ways of Looking
This novella is concerned with ways of looking, ways of seeing, ways of thinking and ways of being. "We have to make the most of what we see." #
It starts with a desire to make a documentary film of a man's life, and ends with an attempt to comprehend the supposed death of a woman, the man's adult daughter (perhaps murdered with a knife, which is eventually found in the desert).
Neither quest proceeds to completion (the film isn't made, and the body isn't located, by the end of the book), and the novella leaves us in the midst of mystery, the mystery that lies between life and death.
# Interview with Don DeLillo at Prague Writer's Festival 2011
Incisive Gaze
Although the novel is short, a mere novella of 117 pages, it's beautifully written. The sentences are incisive and insightful, if highly abstract and metaphysical. All three (or four, if you count the man leaning against the wall in the gallery?) characters are intelligent and interesting.
The leading man is Richard Elster (aged 73), the woman, Jessica (Jessie). Elster describes her as “an exceptional mind, otherworldly.”
Jim Finley, the film-maker (from Deadbeat Films), finds Jessie attractive, a relief from the pressure of his time with her father in a house in the Anza-Borrego Desert in California:
“She was sylphlike, her element was air...I stared at her sometimes, waiting for what, a return look, a show of discomfort.”
He gazes on her in the bathroom and in her bedroom. He imagines embracing her. It's just enough to disturb her. It makes readers question his innocence:
“I'm there and aroused but barely see myself as I stand at the open door watching us both.”
She talks about looking at art in art galleries in Chelsea. “She wasn't a child who needed imaginary friends. She was imaginary to herself.”
Haiku War
Elster is a former scholar and defence intellectual, who used to work at the Pentagon. His job was to invent a language of euphemisms in support of the American war effort. He worked with “the resident experts, the metaphysicians in the intelligence agencies, the fantasists in the Pentagon.” He invented slogans and catchphrases like “bulk and swagger" and “the blat and stammer of Iraq" (which seem to be modelled on “shock and awe", which was coined by the defence strategists, Harlan Kenneth Ullman and James P. Wade).
“ ‘Their war is acronyms, projections, contingencies, methodologies.’ He chanted the words, he intoned liturgically...
'Their war is abstract. They think they're sending an army into a place on a map...There were times when no map existed to match the reality we were trying to create...
'Human perception is a saga of created reality. But we were devising entities beyond the agreed-upon limits of recognition or interpretation. Lying is necessary. The state has to lie. There is no lie in war or in preparation for war that can't be defended.
'We went beyond this. We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability. These were words that would yield pictures eventually and then become three-dimensional...
'What had he thought of the charge that he'd tried to find mystery and romance in a word [such as rendition] that was being used as an instrument of state security, a word redesigned to be synthetic, concealing the shameful subject it embraced?
'I wanted a haiku war. I wanted a war in three lines...What I wanted was a set of ideas linked to transient things.’ ”
His role was to “unsettle critics of the administration", so that the administration could get on with its business (war, intelligence, counter-intelligence, arms deals) as usual.
Elster seems to be a post-modern neo-conservative.
The Omega Point
Elster studied the works of Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit Catholic philosopher, who created the concept of the
omega point*:
“He said that human thought is alive, it circulates. And the sphere of collective human thought, this is approaching the final term, the last flare...
“We're a crowd, a swarm. We think in groups, travel in armies. Armies carry the gene for self-destruction. One bomb is never enough. The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field...”
“Consciousness accumulates. It begins to reflect upon itself. Something about this feels almost mathematical to me. There's almost some law of mathematics or physics that we haven't quite hit upon, where the mind transcends all direction inward. The omega point...
“Whatever the intended meaning of this term, if it has a meaning, if it's not a case of language that's struggling toward some idea outside our experience...Paroxysm. Either a sublime transformation of mind and soul or some worldly convulsion. We want it to happen...Some paroxysm...Think of it. We pass completely out of being. Stones. Unless stones have being. Unless there's some profoundly mystical shift that places being in a stone.”
* Teilhard de Chardin believed that "When the earth reaches its omega point, everything that exists will become one with divinity." [It's not clear what significance, if any, the reversal of the words to create the title "point omega" has. Nor is it clear whether DeLillo/Elster uses the term as post-modern jargon, similar to what Elster invented at the Pentagon.]
True Life Without Words
At the same time, Elster argued that,
"Words were not necessary to one's experience of the true life.
“The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments...
“We become ourselves beneath the running thoughts and dim images, wondering idly when we'll die. This is how we live and think whether we know it or not.”
“He wanted pure mystery...Mystery had its truth, all the deeper for being shapeless, an elusive meaning that might spare him whatever explicit details would otherwise come to mind.”
Still, in a passage that evokes Proust, once Jessie disappears, Elster “had the intimate past to think back to, his and hers and her mother's. This is what he was left with, lost times and places, the true life, over and over.”
Seeing and Feeling
There is much greater focus on images and film than in DeLillo's earlier novels (although DeLillo has always been influenced by European auteurs like Antonioni, Godard and Truffaut).
Jim, in contrast to Elster, “wanted to reach the scene just to see, to feel what was there.”
“The omega point has narrowed, here and now, to the point of a knife as it enters a body. All the man's grand themes funnelled down to local grief, one body, out there somewhere, or not.”
Is Elster's omega point the moment when he dies, and his grief and suffering come to an end? Is Teilhard de Chardin's unity with divinity materially different from the soul going to Heaven?
24 Hour Psycho
The novella is bookended by chapters set in a museum screening of Douglas Gordon's
“24 Hour Psycho", which allows DeLillo to contrast the language of film with verbal language:
“This was history he was watching in a way, a movie known to people everywhere.
"This film had the same relationship to the original movie that the original movie had to real lived experience. This was the departure from the departure. The original movie was fiction, this was real...
"It seemed real to him, the way all the things in the physical world that we don't understand are said to be real...
"The nature of the film permitted total concentration and also depended on it. The film's merciless pacing had no meaning without a corresponding watchfulness, the individual whose absolute alertness did not betray what was demanded.
"He stood and looked. In the time it took Anthony Perkins to turn his head, there seemed to flow an array of ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things, or maybe he was seeing too much. But it was impossible to see too much. The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw.
"This was the point. To see what's here, finally to look and to know you're looking, to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion.”
Perhaps, being and consciousness are about looking, and being conscious of the fact that you are looking? I look, therefore I am. I see that I am.
“What would it be like, living in slow motion?”
VERSE:
Haiku War
[In the words of DeLillo]
Plotters, strategists...
Things in war are transient
Lines and syllables.
Space and Time
He pays attention
To the desert of the real,
In abstract moments.
Summer Leaves
We watched in silence
As the leaves floated across
The pond last summer.
Slow Motion Psycho
What would it be like
Living in a slow motion
Version of "Psycho"?
SOUNDTRACK:
-
Rendition
“Le città sono state costruite per misurare il tempo, per togliere il tempo dalla natura. C'è un eterno conto alla rovescia, diceva. Quando hai strappato via tutte le superfici, quando guardi sotto, ciò che resta è il terrore. E' questo che la letteratura vuole curare. Il poema epico, la favola prima di andare a letto”.
Il punto omega è sempre esistito, deve essere personale, trascendente, autonomo e irreversibile: è il massimo livello di complessità e di coscienza verso il quale sembra che l'universo tenda nella sua evoluzione. Nel deserto di Sonora o del Mojave si incontrano un intellettuale che ha lavorato per la Difesa e un giovane regista che vuole fare un film confessione sulla guerra in Iraq e sull'agire umano: le parole e i gesti diventano un intenso problema che custodisce un'inquietante e evocativa riflessione sulla natura nuda del tempo, sul vivere che tramonta nella transitoria esistenza. I due uomini vengono raggiunti dalla giovane figlia dello studioso con la sua innocente inafferrabilità e questo evento darà origine a un mistero angosciante e metafisico. Le domande che De Lillo si pone, scrivendo con tanta intensità e rigore, risuonano in uno spazio non delimitato né riconosciuto. “Dobbiamo essere umani per sempre? La coscienza è esaurita. Ora si ritorna alla materia inorganica. E' questo che vogliamo. Vogliamo essere pietre in un campo”. Così sono le cose invisibili e nascoste a prendere il centro della scena, rivelando la necessità di una riserva di segretezza, quel qualcosa che nessuno sa di noi e ci permette di conoscere noi stessi. Di arrendersi o rendere qualcosa, interpretare il nostro ruolo. E' un racconto costruito su distanze, silenzi, forze sotterranee e potenzialità: i personaggi fuggono il reale, sprofondano in un abisso, nel vuoto si annullano. Soggettività inconsapevoli, anime segnate da una disarmonia radicale, i due protagonisti tornano a scoprirsi esseri umani sopravvissuti a un'estinzione, giunti a un esistere senza futuro, a una disillusione tragica e insensata, che espandendosi in essi produce un'estrema e introspettiva remissione, una redenzione senza causa né ritorno.
“La vita vera non si può ridurre a parole dette o scritte, nessuno può farlo, mai. La vita vera si svolge quando siamo soli, quando pensiamo, percepiamo, persi nei ricordi, trasognati eppure presenti a noi stessi, gli istanti submicroscopici”. -
En una sala oscura de un museo de arte moderno, sobre una gran pantalla, se proyecta Psicosis. La película se ha ralentizado de forma que la proyección dure veinticuatro horas: la acción sucede fotograma a fotograma, casi congelada, irreal y silenciosa.
La mayoría de los visitantes que entran en la sala observan durante unos segundos la imagen casi inmóvil de la pantalla y se marchan. Pero un hombre acude cada día y permanece horas enteras contemplando hipnotizado la proyección, de pie, hasta que la secuencia de fotogramas pierde el sentido; entonces las imágenes aisladas, desprovistas de tiempo, cobran un nuevo significado. Y regresa día tras día, abismándose en la observación de la pantalla y espiando a los visitantes, a la espera de alguien que sepa ver en el montaje lo mismo que él.
Así comienza Punto Omega; sus primeros compases son deslumbrantes, demoledores; tras acompañar al misterioso espectador en la proyección deconstruida de Psicosis, tras compartir sus reflexiones, el lector queda atrapado en la narración y, a partir de esas primeras páginas, no le queda otra alternativa que seguir a Don DeLillo hasta donde él quiera llevarle.
Y le va a llevar a un lugar tan desolado y árido como la oscura sala del museo: el corazón del desierto. En un lugar donde el sol dilata las distancias hasta el infinito vive retirado Richard Elster, un oscuro intelectual que trabajó como asesor del Pentágono, donde se convirtió en uno de los “autores intelectuales” de la guerra de Iraq; un hombre extraño que le hablaba de filosofía y de haikus a los militares.
Jim Finley, un joven cineasta, apasionado y visionario, le sigue hasta su refugio en el desierto para convencerle de que participe en un proyecto que le obsesiona: un documental consistente únicamente en un plano fijo de Elster, con un muro desnudo de fondo, hablando de Iraq y de sus extravagantes teorías sobre la guerra y la sociedad.
Al poco tiempo se les une Jessie, la hija de Elster, una joven introvertida, difuminada, casi ausente. Los tres, en contra de toda lógica, van a formar un grupo inexplicable, una extraña familia que consume sus días hablando o contemplando el horizonte en silencio.
En este escenario irreal, donde el tiempo se diluye como en la proyección del museo y la naturaleza apabullante pesa como una losa sobre los ánimos de las personas, los diálogos se vuelven casi abstractos: a veces no son sino una concatenación de palabras sueltas apenas hiladas, como en las conversaciones de los borrachos; otras, en cambio, las disertaciones con las que Elster trata de impresionar a sus acompañantes oscilan entre lo poético y los filosófico, entre lo profundo y lo terrible.
¿Qué es el Punto Omega? A lo largo de la primera mitad del siglo XX, el filósofo jesuita francés
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, convencido de que la teoría de la evolución era aplicable también a la consciencia de los seres humanos, postuló la existencia de un momento en el que culminaría la evolución de la consciencia colectiva, de la suma de billones de consciencias en el mundo: el Punto Omega. Eslter afirma que ya hemos alcanzado ese punto, el máximo desarrollo de la consciencia humana. Y ahora, ¿qué?
—Somos una manada, un enjambre. Pensamos en grupos, nos desplazamos en ejércitos. Los ejércitos vehiculan el gen de la autodestrucción. Una bomba nunca basta. (…) Plantéate esta pregunta. ¿Tenemos que ser humanos para siempre? La consciencia está agotada. Toca ahora regresar a la materia inorgánica. Eso es lo que queremos. Queremos ser piedras del campo.
Elster, por su parte, prácticamente lo ha logrado.
Ciertos temas son recurrentes en la obra de DeLillo: en sus novelas se combinan desde los miedos más profundos y las obsesiones más íntimas de las personas a la política exterior, el terrorismo o el papel de los medios de comunicación en la sociedad actual. Esta amalgama de psicología, teorías conspiratorias y crítica al “sueño americano”, presente también en Punto Omega, pone de relieve lo extraño —casi aleatorio— que resulta el comportamiento de las personas cuando se las observa individualmente, en contraposición al de los grupos que integran, habitualmente predecible e incluso manipulable.
El poeta de la paranoia, como le llamó
Martin Amis, escribe con una prosa rica y a la vez austera que posee un lirismo muy especial, lo que hace que sus novelas sean muy plásticas, muy visuales. No en vano el propio autor reconoce que sus principales influencias no son otros escritores, sino el expresionismo abstracto de Rauschemberg y Pollock, las películas de Fellini y Godard y el jazz. Quizá estas referencias ayuden a entender mejor la particular manera de escribir de DeLillo que la etiqueta de posmoderno que habitualmente le acompaña.
En definitiva, Punto Omega es una novela brillante como la luz del desierto y, al igual que el desierto, desoladora y cruel. El tiempo y el espacio se funden en una atmósfera densa e irreal poblada de personajes confusos y desorientados como animales ciegos.
El espectador del museo, escudriñando los fotogramas mudos de Psicosis y Elster, contemplando en silencio las puestas de sol en los horizontes infinitos del desierto, llegan a la misma conclusión: no sabemos mirar de verdad lo que nos rodea. Quizá nos da miedo hacerlo. Me quedo con la sensación de que leer a DeLillo es casi como “mirar de verdad”: una sensación desasosegante y muy difícil de olvidar. -
Consider me the Bizarro David MK. He doesn't like poor people and their B.O. Contrarian-contrarian that I am, I don't like whiny rich people who are so jaded they drone on about the ineffability of everything, and how no one is really sure of anything ever, and you can't cross the same river twice and so on.
Elster, a defense intellectual, picked for his mean liberal arts skills, is one such man (Fuck, if that's what it takes, the DOJ should give me a job. I'm a renaissance man with a liberal arts degree). It is implied that he helped contrive the jingoism for Iraq II, trying to make it a "haiku war," creating facts from nothing and brainwashing the populace into an undulating 24-hour news channel wargasm. He is self-centered, completely oblivious to those who die and to those who repeat his empty propaganda. He plays abstract games and goes about his life until he meets a prosaic personal tragedy that undoes him.
There is also a documentary filmmaker, Finley, but he is merely an eye to observe Elster. And Elster's daughter also makes an appearance. She's self-absorbed too, broken in fact. She just floats about, trapped miles below her own skin, doing whatever it is that she does, walking this way and that. Her dad thinks her quirks are complex in the way that Cameron Diaz's characters think their cross-purpose yammering substitutes for complex (see
Amanda from "The Holiday" for a prime example). Elster's Russian ex-wife makes an appearance via phone conversations, and Delillo gets her accent and stilted grammar pitch-perfect. The ex-wife, she's my favorite. She's the best flat character in the parade.
I hated Elster so much, because he is weak. He isn't weak because personal tragedy undoes him. He's weak because he is amoral, willing to harm nameless others, not responsible for his key role in a bureaucratic process that hurts many, and then isn't the super man all the way down -the guy ordinarily skipping on a road paved with other people's necks- when something rather commonplace happens to him. He is hard and emotionless, reptilian, until he feels pain. Master of the universe, and titan in his own mind, until he bumps into an emotional reality. I want my coldblooded, self-styled badasses to stay unrepentant, true to their uncaring form like Anton Chigurh or Lilah Morgan.
Elster reminds me of a few guys I've worked with. The amalgam of these guys would be someone wearing death metal t-shirts of gore and pain, willing to be theoretically cruel to outsourced teams as long as he wasn't actually implementing the policies he had a hand in crafting, not directly telling departments to work harder for less, instead having digital tools and support staff play the intermediary for him, ever ready to break the rules of the social contract and hide in bureaucracy to get things done faster and cheaper, insisting others play by the rules, and gleefully not following any protocols in secret. Pale, thin, definitely among the first against the wall if an armed revolution came. A poseur who would in no way defend himself and his actions, only point to a machine and shrug at how life sure is random in a half-hearted attempt at justification. Seduced by power, but too much of a scrotum to grab the reins and be the primary actor. The social contract, that he is so willing to bend and twist on the sly, is the only thing keeping him on life support in civilized society. Thank god, he wasn't born a Mexican, or even 70 years ago in any nation. Elster is an ideal of that amalgam: a self-important, fêted coward who gets to wax lyrical all day about the nothingingness of everything, which better serves as an unconscious critique of his personal character.
That said, Delillo can write! The plot is besides the point. It reminds me of Murakami's
Sputnik Sweetheart: a novella where so much Nothing happens that it eventually reaches a critical warp where something actually does occur. It is rather confusing, having this something leap out of Nothing, but then Nothing descends again covering everything in blankness. There are no explanations or satisfactory resolutions. It is Delillo's sentences that make this book worthwhile. He crafts some beauties about the unknowability of knowability and the limits of human knowledge, time, space, heat, light, and death-- epic sentences. The guy could talk about the horror of waiting in line for his healthcard or renewing his plates at the DMV, and I'd want to read and nod, and say "Yes, Don. You have your pen on the pulse of this age, and you also manage to make the dull roar of it sound entertaining." His sentences are granite. That's how I read this book, checking out the sentences, cocking my head, blinking, re-reading them, and marveling at his huge looming boulders.
I'm giving in Point Omega 3 stars, because it is such a short book, the plot is nonexistent, and there are no real characters besides Elster. Maybe it is time for Delillo to write more plays or try his hand at essays. He's gotten so spare, there are only sentences to go on. -
Ο τρόμος· το αίσθημα της ματαιότητας, του ψυχικού ευνουχισμού μπροστά στο αναπόφευκτο του χρόνου.
Ο χρόνος· δύο συλλαβές με τόσο μεγάλο φορτίο.
Ένα μυθιστόρημα γεμάτο μοναξιά, με την καθαρότερη έννοια του όρου, γεμάτο υπαρξιακούς και συναισθηματικούς προβληματισμούς. -
This flirtation with DeLillo is leading nowhere. That moment of elation when one imagines someone is nurturing amorous intentions behind their flirting towards you, but is flirting for the fun of flirting and nurturing ideas to call up ten other people who aren’t you instead, despite your sleepless nights of dreams and delights. That, Don. That.
-
***ATTENZIONE, ATENCIÓN, ATTENTION---First time reader of Don DeLillo***
At the library kiosk labelled 'New Arrivals 2010,' Point Omega's snazzy purple-pink dustcover called out loudly to passersby with its nicely-centered, infinity icon and bold raised print. It was shiny, crisp, and industriously stamped in solid black 'Jan 2010' on the pages' top edge. I snatched it up as soon as another returned it to the inclined sill, probably its first day in circulation, drawing immediate attention. I missed the fine print next to it on orange card stock that cautioned, "only for loyal fans...very loyal."
I've never read Don DeLillo before, but his newer publications extol him as the winner of the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, and the American Academy of Arts & Letters William Dean Howells Medal. How could I go wrong with a 117 page novella from the author that inspired the youngest generation of serious writers of fiction? I suspect it's me that went wrong. When scouting an author that's new to me--dammit I know this--I should select a seasoned, time-tested, award-winner like White Noise or Libra or Underworld. Instead, I believe Point Omega is a book most appropriately called a 'filler.'
What's a 'filler?' First, it's a short book that intermittently 'fills' the publication time between longer novels. DeLillo consistently publishes about every 3 years, +/-12 months (or one standard deviation). His last book was published May 2007, so Jan 2010 is within 3 yrs, +/-12 mos. You can expect his next book early 2013, +/- one standard deviation. He's been very consistent with this publication interval since 1971. Second, his next book will undoubtedly be longer than 117 pages (his shortest book ever), probably more typical in length of his award winning novels in the 80s/90s, which are around 250+ pages. If so, then Point Omega has productively 'filled' the space between his normal-length publications. Third, a 'filler' is that mid-career book, say the 13th or 14th or 15th, in a prolific career when the author, frankly, gets bored with his normal fare and tries stretching his award-winning themes and attributes in common vectors, along similar veins, but to such a tenuous--almost absurd--dimension that the subject matter becomes almost concept-writing, or writing that's experimental. This is indeed his fifteenth novel, and we all expect him to continue writing, so it's reasonable that DeLillo is at the mid-point in his career. Also, the concept of Point Omega is wicked esoteric, and it's bereft of the common mile markers of normal writing that, for me, helps root a novel to earth, placing it into the family of novels that you can explain clearly to your friends. This book does not lend itself to easy explanation. Fourth, 'filler' books win no awards. I tell you now, with only my small Goodreads library and 40 years of reading experience, that Point Omega will win no awards. Nothing. It was ground out like scrap meat for sausage in those old, cast iron, hand-cranked meat grinders. And like that ground meat, you can't quite tell its original cut, shape, form, or function. Fifth, a 'filler' is forgettable. Like in acting, it's the movie a major star appears in that goes straight to DVD, and you're like "That's Michael Caine...I never heard of that movie". When DeLillo's career is over, this book will not measure into his top 10, maybe not even the top half. I'm justified in making this prediction without having read any other DeLillo because I've read many National Book Award novels, know the quality of their writing, and can make a reasonable call. You can too if you've been a reader all your life.
Bold predictions? Yes. Course, I could be wrong and have, stupidly, missed something.
I was intrigued by the dustcover description of the protagonist, Elster, "a 'defense intellectual' involved in the management of the country's war machine...and such matters as troop deployments and counterinsurgencies." I'm in the military and have been involved in tactical-level management of the country's war machine and troop deployments. I'm not an 'intellectual' by any means, but 20 years of school, 2 Masters, and years of Professional Military Education--I was looking forward to tangible similarities between me and Elster.
No. Nothing of the sort. DeLillo immediately wigged-out into a kind of short-sentenced esoteric existentialism that had me wondering: what's this about, what's there to like about any of these characters, and what am I learning here. Abutted between 2 bookend chapters, called Anonymity 1 & 2 (which take place on successive days), there is a story of several months. Jim Finley wants to shoot a documentary of Elster against a wall, talking, ostensibly, about all the Top Secret issues involved with his employment at the Pentagon. (Hey, I've signed, co-signed, witnessed, and co-witnessed all the DoD Forms that order me not to talk about details of my job for 99 years, and Elster was probably levels of classification higher than me. So, yeah, first flashing BS warning light.) Elster plays the shaman. He makes Jim search for the answers to his own questions in tangential, staccato rejoinders. Nothing is on the surface, nothing straight from Elster for over a month in his austere getaway south of north Arizona. Additionally, a girl arrives, she stays awhile, then disappears. No documentary, no backstory, no answers, nothing about Elster's employment. Maybe this is how DeLillo writes. He makes you hunt for meaning. DeLillo probably has a niche audience. Maybe he's the kind of author that w_a_r_p_s his writing so far back upon itself that standard literary customs shatter and you look for meaning--reflected, twisted, distorted--from the broken pieces around you. It's writing whose theme is in such redux, that--like overly boiled soup--you can't separate the products and get a fix on a single ingredient. Are these carrots or bok-choy, are these onions or cabbage, is this a potato?
In the book is hidden (too deeply for me) a rumination of time and space. The austerity of the desert and the stark geologic formations are supposed to add depth to the questions Jim and Elster are seeking. Alas, like a furrowed gulch unchanged for eons, there are no answers for time, and no time in answers, ...or so it goes. I'm sure there's a theme of immutability and conscience and relativity and cosmology among the sun-scorched environs, but I didn't learn anything about it. Lesson #3 in Writing 101: leave readers with some questions to ponder, but don't overwhelm them by deconstructing deconstructionism, making the writing an answer unto itself. If you do, then you better be a damn good writer. This, to me, was not damn good writing; it was concept writing. On several occasions, I was reading and, honestly, forgot that I was reading. The characters were null, the narration unsavory, the denouement too mysterious, the subject too interstellar, dissociative, out-of-body. There's a curious Acknowledgement at the rear of the book, 2 sentences, and it directly influences the bookend chapters. DeLillo was so inspired by a 1993 videowork screened in New York in 2006, that this videowork is the basis of the intro and conclusion of Point Omega. It threads together DeLillo's riddle of time and space, and our characters talk about it in the middle of the book. Unusual, I think, to so directly derive and attribute the substance of your own work based on another's.
I was going to insert here something mean like Point Omega reminds me of "Out, out brief candle! &c, &c, &c, struts and frets his hour upon the stage, &c, &c, &c, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." But it really doesn't deserve that.
I make it a rule never to read reviews until after I write my own, then I wolf down as many as I can in about 15 minutes. Baby, I hope I find something I overlooked, because I really want those 3 hours back to re-invest in DeLillo's other book I checked out, Underworld. So, yes, I'm giving him another chance. But, it's one of his earlier books when he was moving among Book Awards instead of orbiting away from them.
New words: none. -
Hyper-abstract intellectualization. Overly-ruminative prose peppered with mysterious and incomplete sentences. Pages of characters projecting thoughts onto others. Ugh.
I get what DeLillo is going for in Point Omega: the environments that we create and choose to inhabit blind us and remind us of what makes up every millisecond of our human existence. And, the relationships and events of our lives thrust us inevitably forward, into and through the importance and significance of now. This is a nice revelation to have.
But one line perhaps best sums up why DeLillo’s treatment of this idea doesn’t work for me: the narrator’s wife, in a gentle criticism of the narrator’s film work, asks, “Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?” Reading Point Omega, I feel DeLillo is, like in Falling man, too serious about his subject, too self-conscious and self-indulgent. (And also, that comma without the conjunction in the middle of the quote—whose mother speaks like that?)
So the story: Defense Department intellectual Richard Elster flees from the city and immerses himself in the vast and vacant land- and skyscape of the desert southwest. He seeks perspective and escape. Young filmmaker Jim Finley visits him there to persuade him to make a one-take, no-cut documentary interview. Before long, Elster’s daughter, Jessie, arrives and a new dynamic opens up between the three of them. Bookending this action are two scenes from an art exhibit obsessively frequented by an anonymous fourth character and visited once by Richard and Jim, and another time by Jessie.
The mind moves fast and furiously in these scenes in Point Omega, but, in the name of economy (or self-indulgence?), it leaves the prose in scraps behind. We’re thrown quizzical contradictions like: “It was like bricks in a wall, clearly countable, not like the flight of an arrow or bird. Then again it was not like or unlike anything.” Or “’Meaningless,’ he thought ‘or maybe not.” And other times we’re left pondering chapter-starters like: “Every lost moment is the life.” Intentional vagueness and self-conscious profundity really rub me the wrong way.
Equally maddening is when characters spend pages fabricating other characters' thoughts and personality—especially when it’s painfully, painfully obvious that the imagineer is wrong (and borderline insane): the helpless and anonymous fourth character, a man at a museum who lingers for hours every day watching and contemplating the film Psycho played in super-slow motion, fantasizes about the thoughts and personalities of the people who enter and leave—and we are forced to follow his twisted thought. Argh. Argh. Argh. Argh. Argh. Instead of groaning, perhaps I should choose instead to give DeLillo credit for capturing the man’s instability.
(DeLillo says that the idea for the novel came from watching this exhibit repeatedly at the MoMA. I hope the character in the novel is an exaggeration, and not a mirror, of his own thoughts…)
Overall, it seems that everyone is in search of something in Point Omega, and no one quite gets there. We and the characters are pulled away from the omega point, when time slows down and understanding is complete, by the people and action around us. I respect this, but I wish that the experience of achieving this understanding could have been more pleasurable.
Do I recommend it? For DeLillo enthusiasts and serial music fans...
Would I teach it? Shockingly, maybe. It’s short, and full of stuff.
Related texts: Falling Man
Lasting Impression: Stylized reflection on the acceleration and deceleration of time and knowledge.
Postscript: (Note: I'm about to perform an act of literary blasphemy and talk about sports. Don't hate on me.) I have not seen Douglas Gordon's installation, 24 Hour Psycho, but I did see the Superbowl, and the super slow motion clips of wide receivers and defensive backs running and colliding serve equally well for demonstrating the thousands of mental calculations the human mind makes every second, and therefore encouraging us to consider time and thought in new ways. The most relevant difference, I imagine, is that 24 Hour Psycho is the result of careful calculation and artful construction, while sporting events are the result of athletic improvisation. Nonetheless, as an insight into what we see and don't see in our behavior, I think the result is the same. -
In short? It's about a secret war advisor and a young filmmaker.
Well before the book graced shelves, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin coined the term Omega Point, described as a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which the universe appears to be evolving.
The novel records the exchanges between a retired academic, Elster, and a documentarian, Jim. Elster, at the end of his storied career as a scholar and wartime philosophizer for the U.S. government, retreats to the desert to enter his final stage of personal consciousness and introversion – his own Omega Point.
Finley’s goal is to persuade Elster to make a one-take film with Elster as its single character – “Just a man and a wall.”
The novel’s framed by scenes of an art installation by Douglas Gordon, shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2006, entitled “24 Hour Psycho.” In it, Hitchcock's movie is slowed down to complete a single showing over 24 hours. This stands as a reference point for the novel’s many meditations on time. “Point Omega” is small yet intense novel that emphasizes that the important things in life are not the big sweeping events, but the small moments and micro-moments that we live. The type of things that make time stand still.
Perhaps he presents his ideas in such a condensed format because he wants us to slow down and read them again. You can read this in a day, but when you do, slow down and really pay attention to DeLillo, I think you will be rewarded. -
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2023...
"Como comprenderás, no es cuestión de estrategia. No hablo de secretos ni de engaños. Hablo de ser tú mismo. Si lo revelas todo, si desnudas todos tus sentimientos, pidiendo comprensión, pierdes algo fundamental para tu noción de ti mismo. Necesitas saber cosas que los demás no saben. Lo que los demás no saben es lo que te permite conocerte a ti mismo."
Esta novela de Don DeLillo es extraña y enigmática al mismo tiempo, porque incluso después de terminada tengo la sensación de que podría haber sido una novela más contundente, más redonda; hay momentos en la que los personajes aparecen poco perfilados o por lo menos sombras de algo que podrían haber sido... delineados por Delillo quizás pensando en desarrollarlos más adelante. Es como si DeLillo hubiera esbozado una novela borrador y durante el camino su interés se hubiera centrado en otra historia y la hubiera dejado ahí medio esbozada. Es una sensación porque de lo que llevo leído de DeLillo se ha convertido también en una de mis favoritas, parece contradictorio pero no lo es porque precisamente esta fugacidad y ambigüedad en la historia, es lo que me la hace especialmente atractiva. En Punto Omega no se puede decir que haya acción o un argumento definido, y durante el núcleo de la historia, los dos o tres personajes, casí únicos en la historia, se la pasan en conversaciones o mirando por las ventanas el enorme desierto que se despliega frente a ellos, como si de una película de Antonioni se tratara. Sin acción, sin casi historia, y con personajes que casi no parecen seres de carne y hueso Don DeLillo ha construido una novela experimental y fugaz que me ha gustado muchísimo.
"Esperé que me preguntara dónde vivía yo, cómo vivía, con quién, algo. Quizá la hiciera interesante, ese no preguntar."
Punto Omega transcurre en una casa retirada del mundanal ruido en un desierto de California donde vive Richard Elster, un asesor bélico de la guerra de Irak, una especie de cerebro en la articulación de la guerra planificando jugadas teóricas como si de un ajedrez se tratara, esta teoría una vez elaborada se llevará a la práctica en una guerra real. Hasta allí viaja Jim Finlay, joven cineasta obsesionado con filmar y entrevistar al elusivo y enigmático Elster. Finlay está planeando un documental donde Elster simplemente mirando a la cámara con una pared de fondo, sin más elementos que su rostro y su voz, se manifieste en torno a su experiencia en el Pentágono. Es cierto que Finlay es invitado a su casa del desierto, pero durante toda la estancia del cineasta, le resulta casi imposible que Elster se muestre del todo de acuerdo en participar en este documental, aunque sí que tienen conversaciones interminables sobre el tema. Tras unos días la compañía de ambos hombres es interrumpida por la presencia de la hija de Elster, Jessie, que no perturba la relación de los dos hombres pero si que viene a distraer a ambos del objetivo inicial en forma de documental. Jessie es una joven tímida y que encierra un cierto mundo interior en el cual es casi imposible penetrar.
"Miró el vaso de cerveza que tenía en la mano y anunció que su hija iba a venir de visita. Fue como oír que la tierra se había desplazado sobre su eje, volviendo a trocar la noche en un brote de día. Noticia significativa, otra persona, un rostro y una voz, llamada Jessie, dijo, una cabeza excepcional, etérea."
Y tengo que abordar lo primero que se me vino a la mente en cuanto comencé esta novela y fue el magnífico documental de Errol Morris en torno a las experiencias durante su estancia en la Casa Blanca de Robert McNamara como secretario de defensa de Kennedy entre otros. En "The Fog of War", Errol Morris, al igual que pretende hacer Finlay en la novela, coloca a un cerebro en la planificación de la guerra frente a la cámara y le hace hablar, le conduce por derroteros aparentemente inocentes hasta que McNamara cae en su propia trampa y de alguna forma se desenmascara frente a la cámara. Es increible la forma en que la estructura de The Fog of War se parece a la película que pretende crear Jim Finlay con Elster como su Robert McNamara particular e intuyo (no me cabe la menor duda) que Don DeLillo debió inspirarse en ella para plantear la estructura de esta novela porque incluso durante un momento de la novela, el mismo Elster se revela al cineasta con esta frase: "-Lo que tu quieres, amigo mío, lo sepas o no, es una confesión pública.", una frase que revela el porqué Elster no quiere participar en el documental: no quiere exponerse y no termina de confiar de hasta qué punto esta exposición le va a pasar factura porque él como teórico de la guerra es un personaje invisible, sin responsabilidad de las consecuencias, pero esta exposición pública podría cambiar esta invisibilidad.
"-Quieres la película de un hombre derrumbándose -dijo él-. Lo comprendo. Si no, ¿para qué?"
Punto Omega es una novela corta donde hay muchos momentos donde parece que lo que de verdad importe es la obsesión de sus tres personajes por comunicarse sin llegar a conseguirlo del todo, conversaciones que parecen lanzar esbozos de algo que nunca termina de decirse mientras se dedican a pasear, mirar por la ventana o leer poesía. Hay una historia paralela en torno a un hombre anónimo que en el Museo de Arte Moderno está visionando una película experimental, 24 Hour Psycho, que consiste precisamente en la proyección de la película de Hitchcock, Psicosis, ralentizada en una duración de 24 horas, una especie de metáfora sobre el poder que puede tener alargar una trama eternamente para que solo sobrevivan el silencio y la nada finalmente. El núcleo de la historia formada por Elster, Finlay y Jessie podría ser esta ralentización de la trama, quizás, pero Don DeLillo la envuelve de esa atmósfera tan particular suya en la que la eterna insatisfacción de unos personajes los convierten en esbozos melancólicos de un mundo ya de por sí casi carente de vida. En los diálogos de esta novela se encuentran algunos de los momentos más geniales de lo que he leido hasta ahora de DeLillo y aunque no sea una de sus novelas más redondas, la intensidad de algunos de sus momentos, la convierten para mí en una novela muy atractiva que me ha llegado especialmente.
"Empecé a comprender cuando Elster quería decir que el tiempo aquí es ciego. Más allá de los matorrales y de los cactus locales, solo olas de espacio, un trueno distante de vez en cuadno, la espera de la lluvia, la mirada, pasadas las colinas, hasta una cadena de montaña que ayer estaba aquí y que hoy se pierde en cielos sin vida."
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What In The World Is A Philosophic Novel?
Idea-driven novels have traditionally been regarded as precarious. (It would be good to know the history of this idea; it was in force in the reception of Kundera in the 1980s, but it probably derives from the reception of 19th century realist novels.) "Point Omega" is very brief, cleverly set by the designers at Picador with a large trim size and ample kerning and line spacing, so that it scrapes by at 117 pages. The book's brevity advertises its conceptual nature, and so do the opening and closing chapters (12 pages and 16 pages) describing Douglas Gordon's "24 Hour Psycho," the slowed-down video of the Hitchcock film.
An idea-driven or conceptual or philosophical novel that is also brief runs a special risk, because the brevity declares that the resources of a full novel are not needed. "Point Omega" has little character development, minimal psychological depth, minimal descriptive prose, and a carefully attenuated capacity to be immersive or absorptive. The book announces, in effect, that the author has had an idea that needs for some reason to be put as a novel -- but employing fiction in such a spare way that it is only the novel's freedom of invention and narrative that matter.
Here the opening rumination on Gordon's video introduces themes of patience, of not knowing what meaning something has, of listening and looking without judging, of being alone in reflection. The same themes reappear in both principal characters. Human connections are programmatically absent: both men are apart from their wives; the narrator doesn't quite connect with the only woman in the novel; in the end, the "anonymous" viewer doesn't quite connect with a woman he meets in the Museum of Modern Art. The video piece makes the experience of film unreal, and the desert setting of most of the book makes ordinary city life unreal, and both places are unreal in themselves.
The book does sometimes behave like a longer, richer, less conceptually-driven novel, especially in the few passages when DeLillo takes time to describe people or places other than the video screening room or the desert. The same effect, of the possibility of a different kind of novel, also surfaces when DeLillo inserts examples of alienated experience: a woman who walks downstairs backwards (p. 32), the extinct North American camel, the age of the universe. These function as condensed or tentative allegories of the book's themes.
(Critics seem to find DeLillo's descriptive writing to be exemplary: I find it intentionally abstract. Passages describing the desert, people's appearances, the house, and the video are intentionally minimal. He is not competing with traditional, realist, or late-romantic writers who show off the powers of their prose. Praising DeLillo for his evocations of desert misses what he is deliberately missing. His descriptive prose is flat: its sharp edges are smoothed, and it often reads like a translation, with generic words in place of unique untranslatable words, and modifiers chosen by compromise. This is not to say DeLillo's ekphrasis of Gorgon isn't effective: DeLillo's smoothened prose is a good mimic for the textureless and nearly eventless surface of "24 Hour Psycho.")
The widely distributed, apparently random moments of description and of allegory seem odd or imperfectly realized, just because there could have been many more of them: it seems DeLillo thought he had to be parsimonious because his book was short, but that also means every such passage attracts attention, and its placement, length, and motivation seem less secure.
Philosophically, philosophical novels are problematic because the ideas they offer seem (I suppose mainly to philosophically-inclined critics) to be uninteresting as philosophy. In this case, the principal character has theories about how real life, real existence, is revealed when you attend to the low-level continuous sense that you're going to die. "Point Omega" proposes, in effect, that the temporal dilation of Gordon's video, and the spatial and temporal dilation of the desert, can bring on that low-level awareness. In that state of mind, people become shells or tokens, their inner life inaccessible, their words unimportant, their physical existence insecure. Philosophically, it is not really news. And yet to say "Point Omega" "proposes" such-and-such a thing "in effect" is a way of saying it doesn't propose any such thing, because it doesn't propose anything, because it isn't about effect, because it's a novel.
(Much more on this novel, from a different perspective, on the blog 305737.blogspot.com, chapter 23.) -
3,5 αστέρια
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I've tried to get into Don DeLillo a few times, mostly because I often see him listed among a general shortlist of other writers I greatly admire. But for the life of me, I can't understand why he shares the podium with clearly better talents. Maybe I just haven't read the right stuff by him yet.
That's not to say DeLillo is a bad writer. Far from it. His prose is generally quite smooth, and the subject matter intelligent. But the books I've tried smack of that peculiar brand of somewhat subtle high-brow self-congratulatory pride that hobbles so many other "Literary Writers" out there; something I like to call 'The Problem With Being Too Literary'. There is a deluge of this kind of stuff on the market. In pursuit of lofty literary goals, it's real easy to end up penning a fucking snoozer of a book. The next step is to defend your professionally published bore by alluding to the important themes within and the fact that you were trying to do something "different" which should automatically make it special.
And that is exactly what 'Point Omega' is. It's written like a Haiku (a noted theme in the novel) and proves not only experimental, but also goddamn boring in the process. The plot (or more accurately, the "non-plot") moves at a glacial pace and provides little to intrigue readers other than the largely reluctant dialogue between two, and later three, socially maladjusted characters. Surprisingly, there is some interesting interaction between a bitter old scholar, a failed filmmaker, and an autistic young woman, but it's barely enough to keep the pages turning. You might, as I did, keep reading because you're convinced something exciting or gripping is bound to happen. Don't hold your breath.
In a review in New York Magazine, Sam Anderson said that 'Point Omega' is "the latest of a recent stretch of post-Underworld metaphysical anti-thrillers showing DeLillo's writing has reached a whole new level of narrative inertia". That sums up my feelings quite nicely. Many will maintain that a guy like Don can do no wrong. I ain't buying it. And I might not bother buying another of his books while I'm at it.
It's obvious that a big name like DeLillo can plug a big hole in a sinking ship of a novel... but in my opinion he can't stop it running aground. -
O artista plástico, Daniel Gordon criou uma instalação na qual é projectado o Psycho de Hitchcock à velocidade de dois fotogramas por segundo. Desta forma, a exibição do filme dura exactamente vinte e quatro horas.
O livro começa e termina com um homem, de pé na sala de projecção, a visualizar o filme.
O centro do romance é passado num deserto onde um jovem realizador, durante uns dias, conversa com Elster, um idoso que esteve envolvido na guerra do Iraque, e com o qual pretende fazer um filme/entrevista. Tudo se altera quando a filha de Elster os visita e acaba a desaparecer no deserto.
E, eis um enredo com todas as condições para ser uma grande maçada. Mas não...
Está irrepreensivelmente bem escrito e, embora as cenas narradas sejam estranhas, senti-me sempre envolvida e sem nunca me aborrecer.
Quando o terminei fiquei, por momentos, frustrada porque nem tudo, ou quase nada, é explicado. Mas, creio que é esse o fascínio deste livro: ter de o olhar em câmara lenta (dedicar-lhe tempo...) para, aos poucos, lhe ir encontrando os pormenores - tal como no "24 Hour Psycho" - que lhe darão um sentido completo e perfeito.
Há três dias que ando a pensar neste livro...e encontrei-lhe um sentido...julgo ter encontrado...
T E M P O
"A verdadeira vida não é redutível a palavras, faladas ou escritas, seja por quem for, nunca. A verdadeira vida tem lugar quando estamos sozinhos, a meditar, a sentir, perdidos nas nossas memórias, a vasculhar sonhadoramente no nosso inconsciente, os movimentos microscópicos." -
Quién: Don DeLillo es uno de los grandes posmodernos americanos, junto con autores como Gaddis, Pynchon o Foster Wallace, así que no hay que esperar una lectura tranquilita y convencional.
De qué va: Pues en principio, sobre la guerra/invasión de Irak en 2003 pero de hecho habla sobre el tiempo, el...paso...del...tiempo...
Qué es el Punto Omega: Un concepto filosófico acuñado por el filósofo Teillhard de Chardin, que se explica aquí:
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punto_o...
Qué me ha parecido: Pues está llena de reflexiones interesantes y es una escritura como... hipnótica, con esos personajes perdidos en el desierto. Tengo la impresión de que sólo he captado una parte (pequeña) pero está bien. Es muy breve, lo que también facilita las cosas. La conclusión es que quiero leer más DeLillo, a ver si lo pillo...
La verdadera vida ocurre cuando estamos solos, pensando, sintiendo, perdidos en el recuerdo, soñadoramente conscientes de nosotros mismos, los momentos submicroscópicos. -
Αυτη ηταν η πρωτη μου επαφη με τον delillo.διαλεξα τυχαια 3 βιβλια του εχοντας ακουσει τοσα για αυτον και επισης τυχαια ξεκινησα με αυτο εδω:
η ιστορια αφορα σε 2 κυριως ατομα.εναν συμβουλο για θεματα πολεμου στο πενταγωνο που πια εχει αποσυρθει κ ζει στην ερημο ολομοναχος και εναν νεο σκηνοθετη που θελει να κανει ενα ντοκιμαντερ με τις εμπειριες του συμβουλου.ετσι πηγαινει στο σπιτι του για να τον πεισει για το εγχειρημα του.ξαφνικα στο παιχνιδι μπαινει και η κορη του συμβουλου που στη διαρκεια του βιβλιου της συμβαινει κατι μυστηριο που δεν θα αποκαλυψω.αλλα ειναι αυτο: μυστηριο.η πλοκη δεν ειναι κατι για το οποιο τραβας τα μαλλια σου απο ενθουσιασμο αλλα αυτο που με μαγεψε ηταν τα διαφορα μηνυματα και στοιχεια που "κρυβει" ο συγγραφεας στο βιβλιο και που χρειαζονται παραπανω απο μια αναγνωσεις για να τα καταλαβεις.επισης η δομη του εργου.σε καποιο σημειο ο συμβουλος αναφερει πως:"ηθελα εναν πολεμο χαϊκού.εναν πολεμο σε 3 στιχους...αυτη ειναι η ψυχη του χαϊκού.ξεγυμνωσε τα παντα σε κοινη θεα.δες τι υπαρχει και μετα προετοιμασου να το δεις να εξαφανιζεται".με τη λογικη αυτη του χαϊκού ειναι δομημενο και το βιβλιο.3 κεφαλαια, 3 γραμμες χαϊκού.3 εικονες απο τα οσα συνεβησαν στη συνυπαρξη των 2 πρωταγωνιστων.και πριν και μετα απο αυτα υπαρχει μια παράλληλη ιστορια με μια εκθεση κινηματογραφου σε μουσειο οπου προβαλλεται σε slow motion επι 24 ωρες το "ψυχω"(το γνωστο) και ενας μυστηριος αντρας την παρακολουθει ενω παραλληλα βγαζει τα δικα του συμπερασματα για οσους θεατες συναντα εκει.το πως δενουν ολα αυτα θα το δειτε οσοι το διαβασετε.ειναι παντως ενα βιβλιο που πραγματικα ηταν πολυ ιδιαιτερο και διαφορετικο απο οτιδηποτε εχω διαβασει.ειναι εντυπωσιακο σε ποσες σκεψεις μπορουν να σε βαλουν 120 μολις σελιδες με ενα φαινομενικα απλο θεμα..εμενα παντως με κερδισε για να συνεχισω με τα υπολοιπα βιβλια του.. -
This is a terrible, terrible book: self-indulgent, pretentious, without meaning or explanation and largely without action or incident. Its sole plus point is its length. At less than 150 pages of well-spaced type you only waste two or three hours getting through it.
This is the first DeLillo I have read and it will be the last. I like a fair bit of modern American fiction (Roth, Franzen et al.) and was expecting to like this and then move on to what is (I think) supposed to be his best book, the lengthier Underworld. I suppose I should be grateful that this novella has saved me the trouble.
Point Omega doesn't get anywhere near working as a story or as a metaphysical meditation. The book is topped and tailed by chapters written about the exhibiting of a real piece of modern video art, which consisted of showing Hitchcock's Psycho slowed down so that it took 24 hours. This book is equally artistically bankrupt, bereft of ideas and uninteresting. If showing a well-known film really...really...slowly is your idea of art, then this book is for you. -
Audio book experiment failed.
Even though Campbell Scott has a nice voice, I probably should have read this book instead of listening to it in my car. The parts devoted to Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho were beautiful and had me wishing that for my first experience with DeLillo I had chosen to read him rather than listen to someone else read him to me.
The beginning had my attention, but then I zoned out a lot during the middle section and had to repeat tracks more than once. Towards the end of the book, when 24 Hour Psycho was mentioned again, I actually missed my exit. That accounts for the third star rather than the two I was going to give it. I do believe it would have been a solid three-star or even a four-star rating if I had read it, but I know I'll never take the time to find out for certain.
Oh. Some of you who know me know that I hate spit. I hate listening to someone spit or watching someone spit. I feel a gag coming on even as I am typing this. Anyway, there is one part where DeLillo colorfully describes Elster 'hocking up a loogie' and I gagged in my car. That was a plus in my book. -
Sometime while writing Libra, you decided that your work should be epic, larger than life, more important than life even. You thought you would write books with overarching universal truths steeped in history and modernism and somehow that would in turn make you a part of history. But what you began to write were flat, soft, somber, monotone pieces inflated by your ego and disguised in a thin veil of humility- as if speaking softly would show the world how humble you were. Instead, you are washed out, and cannot reclaim or recreate the brilliance of your youth.
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Mesmerizing
This novella by Don DeLillo (only 117 pages) opens and closes with an unnamed man in a museum watching Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho being shown over and over again in slow motion, its two-hour span being stretched to fill an entire day (this is an actual videowork by Douglas Gordon). For the man, lurking in the darkness at one side of the screen or the other, time dissolves, scale becomes meaningless, and random details take on an almost mystical significance. Mesmerizing. The story that comes in between has many of the same qualities, yet it held me completely in its thrall. Curiously enough, I thought again of a classic movie, L'Avventura by Michelangelo Antonioni, another work in which very little happens, although you cannot tear your eyes away.
Independent filmmaker Jim Finley travels to the remote Southern California desert to interview Richard Elster, a retired academic recruited by the recent Bush administration to lend intellectual credibility to the planning for the Iraq war and counter-terrorism operations. Jim wishes to persuade him to sit in front of a blank wall in New York and make a movie in one very long uninterrupted take, in which Elster will say anything he wishes to say without questioning, more a credo than a mea culpa. As the two men spend their days together in their desert cabin, time dissolves once more. The arrival of Elster's daughter Jessie alters the dynamic, but only somewhat. Anything that happens subsequently seems to take place offscreen (Antonioni again), yet by the time Jim drives out of the desert everything will have changed. I know this sounds as exciting as watching paint dry, but this was one book that I genuinely could not put down until I had finished it; I wish I could say quite why.
In
Falling Man, DeLillo offered an oblique but emotionally powerful response to the Twin Towers attacks; here he is dealing with things like Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition, but his treatment is even more oblique. While politics often play a part in DeLillo's writing, they are always in the background, taking a distant third place to his philosophical and human concerns. The Omega Point referred to in the title comes from the evolutionary philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin, representing the point of highest complexity and most fully developed consciousness towards which civilization can aspire. Elster, it seems, sought a personal omega in the cleansing paroxysm of war. But the determinedly non-eventful passage of DeLillo's novel denies such aspirations, and if there is a heightened consciousness at the end of the book, it is found in acceptance of the silent infinite.
Frankly, I have no idea how to rate this. My four stars (five on Amazon at the time, subsequently downgraded) reflect my personal sense of being in the presence of greatness. But I realize that others may suspect that this emperor has no clothes. -
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
If any more proof is needed that September 11th effectively brought an end to the Postmodernist period, just look at the sad recent fate of author Don DeLillo, who back in the 1970s and '80s was one of the most brilliant and celebrated writers in the entire country, perpetually cranking out masterpieces like Americana, White Noise, Libra and Mao II which deftly combined pop-culture with academic finery, but who in the 21st century has put out nothing but an entire string of novella-sized flops (can you even remember anymore what The Body Artist or Falling Man is about?), lifeless duds that feel like they only exist in the first place to remind people that DeLillo has indeed not actually died yet. And so it is with his latest as well, this year's Point Omega, which is not a novel at all* but rather yet another 100-page novella, which is so boring and meandering and pointless that I can't even seem to muster up the energy to give you a plot recap. (Well, okay, here's a quick one -- pretentious "conceptual filmmaker" wants to make one of those intolerable eight-hour unedited movies, in which he interviews a politically moderate intellectual who is unbelievably asked by the Bush-era Pentagon to contribute ideas to the war effort, which leads him to the man's desert home where they sit around endlessly blathering about time and space and mistakes and poets and museum installations and more more it never freaking ends, until the man's daughter shows up and is suddenly all like, "O-M-G, you two are so stooopid and stuff!," and then they all go sit in the desert for awhile, The End.)
Sigh. Oh, DeLillo, what happened to you? Oh, right, Postmodernism died, that's what happened to you. Don't you have some grandkids to go play with or something?
Out of 10: 1.8
*And seriously, mainstream publishing industry, listen up -- if I can read the entirety of a book from beginning to end on an el ride from my apartment to the Chicago Loop and back, then f-ck you, it's not a novel, and I am godd-mned sick and tired of you trying to sell the thing to me for $25 anyway. This is why your industry is dying, because your audience can plainly see through your shell games; but what you need to understand is that it's not our job to pay for your Brooklyn condo mortgage, and that we will continue to desert you by the millions the longer you keep up these elaborate ruses, just because you don't want to take the pay cut you so obviously deserve. Your attention to this matter is greatly appreciated. -
This was book 15 in my publication order re-read of all Delillo’s novels (just Zero K and The Silence to go). At 117 pages of widely spaced large type (with some blank pages) it is almost a long short story, although the title page insists it is a novel.
Whatever it is, it is pure Delillo which means you will either love it or hate it.
The novel begins and ends with scenes set in MoMA, New York in 2006 when (this is real) Douglas Gordon’s work “24 Hour Psycho” was on display. This work consists of nothing except Hitchcock’s famous movie that has been slowed down so that it lasts for 24 hours. There’s a sample here:
https://youtu.be/a31q2ZQcETw. Sandwiched between these two sections, we read the story of Jim Finley’s visit to meet Richard Elster in the desert and discuss making a movie consisting only of Elster talking - one take, no direction. Elster was an advisor to the Bush administration in the Iraq war and Finley wants him to spill the beans.
In the opening and closing sections, a movie is slowed down and a man stands in the gallery watching obsessively and noticing details. In the central part of the novel, Elster visits the desert in order to feel that time has stopped and it is we, the readers, who are invited notice details through the distinctive prose that only Delillo could write.
So, already we have a book that’s a bit about the Iraq war, a bit about “watching” or “observing”. Then, part way through Elster’s daughter comes to visit and then someone disappears. In The Guardian, James Lasdun wrote "Briefly the novel becomes a thriller, with search parties, helicopters, a knife found in a cave. But the real quarry here isn't the solution to the mystery so much as the anguish and anxiety it arouses; feelings that, again, circulate back into the book's larger political themes." He then ends his review saying: "It requires careful reading, but as with the man in the gallery, and as with every other aspect of this finely austere novel, the harder you look, the more you see."
This might be one of Delillo’s shorter works, but it packs a lot in and is a very satisfying read. -
Point Omega je kratki roman strukturiran kao haiku, a radi se o autističnim ljudima koji uz pomoć potpune izolacije prostora i vremena pokušavaju shvatiti koncept svemira, kao i čovjeka koji je njegov dio.
Ljudi, meni je ovaj roman(čić) apsolutno fantastičan. Nema baš tu neke radnje, što ne znači da se ništa ne događa, ali dijalozi (koji su više filozofski nego realni), likovi (koji su neshvatljivo drugačiji) i cijela okolina (koja je apokaliptično prazna), su me tako opčarali da mislim da ću mu se vraćati više puta. Pogotovo zato jer ima tek nešto malo više od 100 stranica i da ga se pročitati relativno brzo.
Što da vam kažem... Ako vam ideja "24 Hour Psycho" zvuči zanimljivo (što je verzija filma Psycho bez zvuka u kojoj svaki frejm traje jednu sekundu čiji je rezultat film od dvadeset i četiri sata), pročitajte ovu knjigu.
Ako vam takvo nešto zvuči kao besmisleno, pretenciozno smeće, onda možda radije čitajte nešto što ima klasičniju radnju.
Cheers!
