Point Omega

by Don DeLillo

Book Overview

A brief, unnerving, and exceptionally hard-hitting novel about time and loss as only the bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of White Noise and Underworld can tell it. In this potent... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1439169950
• ISBN13: 9781439169957
• Release Date: February 2010
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 117 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Unlimited Time.

Time is the leading thread of this novel. It tells how it affects people and how people are trying to manipulate Time. I believe that Don Delillo didn't write a novel but a long poem instead. Not modern poetry but an epos if you will or better: a play from antiquity (both limited in Space and Time). And like a Greek tragedy it has only a few characters: Richard Elster an old scientist and philosopher, Jim Finley a film maker and finally Jessica, the daughter of Richard. The main character is Time. Richard, gloomy and taciturn. Jim, idealistic and has his head in the clouds. Jessica seems to carry a secret and is a little reclusive. At the beginning of the novel - as a sort of introduction - an unnamed person (Elster or Finley?) - talks about a video performance at The Museum of Modern Art in New-York-City. The performance is an attempt to reach unlimited Time; The movie 'Psycho' by Alfred Hitchcock is electronically slowed down to full 24 hours. So if you stare for only a short while at the video screen it's as if nothing happens. Almost infinite or unlimited Time. There are not many visitors to the room of the video-show and they stay only for a minute at the most. The mysterious person who explains to the reader the video performance and the behavior of the public, stays in the dark shadow of the room (Jessica?) and only now and then he/she walks around the room for a while. Richard Elster and Jim Finley live in a house with a corrugated metal roof above a clapboard exterior and located at the edge of a desert. They only stay for a few weeks. Jim tells Richard that he would like to make a video-film with Richard as the only character. He doesn't have to say or do anything. This way a parallel is made between the video performance and the real life at the edge of the desert. Here too Jim Finley searches for unlimited Space and Time. But this peaceful situation can't go on for ever. Sooner or later real life will stand at your front door. One day Jessica visits her father Richard. She stays for a few days. One day she disappears without leaving a trace (literally). No footprints in the dust, no tire tracks, nothing. She vanished into thin air. Maybe she was never there in the first place, she could be a ghost or a hallucination. When all is said and done we die. We reach the final checkpoint, Point Omega. We become matter and the curtain falls Talking about poetry: this is the last sentence from 'Point Omega', " Sometimes a wind comes before the rain and sends birds sailing past the window, spirit birds that ride the night, stranger than dreams."

Vivid, Elegant, Unsettling and Recommended

In this book, DeLillo sets the initial scene in museum in which the art work, "24 Hour Psycho" is being shown. The piece consists of a projection on a scrim of Hitchcock's film, "Psycho", in vastly slowed frame-by-frame style lasting 24 hours. DeLillo eloquently describes how the setting, presentation and altered time transform the film from its original form, creating an entirely different perceptual and conceptual experience. In the gallery, as a man experiences the piece, the reader is confronted with questions of the role of perspective, expectation and time on one's personal perception. In the process, DeLillo very effectively projects a sense of the disorientation and intellectual challenge provoked by the art piece. The next location is in the desert, where a film producer attempts to involve a academic war planner in a proposed documentary. A kind of symmetry occurs here, with the war planner's own concepts forming the basis of his individualized abstract notion of what war would be and what his role would be in planning it. The planner's abstract concept of military planning and government then parallels his difficulty in interacting and understanding his own daughter, and is no less personalized and disconnected from reality than that of the film producer and, for that matter, the man viewing 24-hour Psycho. DeLillo's presentation of the thoughts and perceptions of the man in the museum, the war planner, the film maker all focus on questions of perception and reality, and the characters are themselves disoriented and sometimes confused about what they are experiencing. Interestingly, the daughter is described but her thoughts and perceptions are never revealed. The narrative in this book is important but not foremost. It is a skeleton on which to hang important ideas and questions that are hard to shake off. This book is austere in its writing and DeLillo's prose is beautifully economical. There is not an excess word, but at the same time the writing is vivid and frequently arresting. Although the writing is clear and very accessible, the book is not a "read" or page-turner, it needs a deliberate and attentive approach and rewards with a rich experience. This book is food for some interesting thoughts about the influence of time, personal experience and point-of-view perception as they relate to whatever reality might be. It is another important work by DeLillo and it should be read.

DeLillo Degree Zero

Don DeLillo's novels have been remarkably strong given the length of his career, and the only one I think is sub par is his 9/11 novel; nicely fitted, of course, with some of the author's famed verbal brilliance, but it seemed more per-formative than anything else, with the estranged characters and their respective stages of psychic exile twined in pro forma fashion around that date's catastrophe. The novel seemed to have been written out of sense of obligation, that the author who had made a career out of writing about a world that fits the 9/11 cliche "everything has changed" felt compelled to give his remarks in fictional form. It alone among his books was a labor to read, as it seems to have been a labor to write. Otherwise, I salute his post-"Underworld" writings "The Body Artist" and "Cosmopolis", a delicately etched character study and a black comedy respectively who's central characters, a performance artist and a digital guru commodities broker, reach the end of the belief systems that filled in the interior absence of purpose and commitment to the world.In this instance I find much to like about "Point Omega", although I think it helps if you've read several of his books , are aware of his larger themes and appreciate the way he has condensed and concentrated his themes into a hard,splendidly spare narrative line. It is, I think, a continuation of DeLillo's examination of a culture that has had the mystery and mythology stripped from it by the harsher trends in Modernism, replaced with various wrap around belief systems ranging from political ideology, art-for-art's sake, technology and assorted other absolutist-tending habits of mass-think that each attempt to replace what had been the spiritual, the religious, the intuitive. Our character Elster, here, is a polymath, a genius versed in a seeming unlimited variety of cross-indexed disciplines, someone whom the intelligence and defense apparatus of the State brought on as someone who's musings about their agendas and techniques might somehow give them an advantage over opponents both current and future. Elster,though, is someone who finds his learning, the knowledge and he garnered in an effort to weave his way through an infinitely complex network of warring belief systems, collapsing upon itself. Now he considers the finite essence of all things, stripped of meaning as he has been stripped of his inner life;he watches an endless artful deconstruction of an iconic movie, he prefers the limitless waste of the desert, he desires an existence that can be mute, meaningless, flat and precisely without resonance. I think this is powerful stuff, really, a lyric poem. This is the tragedy of a man who has theorized about the elimination of the human from existence who, in turn, vanishes from his own passions, vanquished by a determination to see beyond appearances. He does not get to the point, he rushes by it, missing everything as a result.

An engaging, mysterious, haunting and beautifully written gem

I found this to be a mesmerizing book, DeLillo's best, I think, since Underworld. I was disappointed by his last three efforts: Falling Man, The Body Artist, and Cosmopolis, although the latter had its moments. But here he sharpens his sentences with a laser and sandwiches a tale about a filmmaker who wants to make a documentary about one of the architects of the Iraqi War between two episodes of "Anonymity," the same filmmaker watching a video installation called "24 Hour Psycho" (an actual video work which showed at the Museum of Modern Art in Summer 2006) in which the Hitchcock film is shown in ultra slow motion to screen in 24 hours instead of 2. There are a number of interconnections between the two stories having to do with men and relationships, psychological dependence, filmic reality versus actual life, fathers and daughters as opposed to mothers and sons, imagined and actual violence, and the obsessions of the artist to get things right. It's filled with the kind of insights we've come to expect from DeLillo. Like this: "I wondered what he meant by everything. It's what we call self, the true life, he said, the essential being. It's self in the soft wallow of what it knows, and what it knows is that it will not live forever."Or this: "If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself." I'd have liked to have seen the middle story--depicting the filmmaker, the Iraqi war architect and his daughter--fleshed out a little more fully. It's sort of a teasing mystery that doesn't quite get worked out, but then again, that's part of its allure.

The Desert Life

A filmmaker tracks down one of the architects of the Iraq war in an attempt to convince him to be involved in a documentary about his role. Rather than take this thin idea of a plot and politicize it, use it as a pedastal to rant on about how wrong the war was/is, Mr. Delillo has written a very powerful meditation on time and death. Out in the desert, under the vast expanse of sky, surrounded by geology and nature, the young filmmaker becomes enamored with the philosophical ramblings of the old man. He begins to understand that there is more to be seen than what is obvious. The war itself may be a metaphor for something even larger, more looming, but it is only suggested and whispered. Mr. Delillo's writing, as always, is stunning. His descriptions are atomic, carefully constructed phrases that linger long after you've moved on. This brief novel is a mystery because it is mysterious, it requires involvement. You cannot read it for the sheer pleasure of escapism, Mr. Delillo asks something of you in return. Listen, pay attention. See. I feel strongly that Mr. Delillo is the seminal writer of our time, however his last book, "Falling Man," felt cold and distant. Perhaps it was because 911 is still so fresh in our minds that it didn't enlighten as much as it simply reminded us of the tragedy, which is still difficult to make sense of. Delillo is at his best when writing coldly of cold people. Men and women who regard their own lives from a distance. If pure story is what you want, look elsewhere. If you appreciate intelligent and insightful writing, Point Omega is a book that demands to be read and re-read.