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3.37 AVERAGE
3.37 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
No huhhuh taas. Näennäisen välinpitämätön, jopa tylsä kirja, josta ote lipui, kunnes äkisti puolivälissä kaikki tiheni ja imi sisäänsä, tavalla, jonka vain Don DeLillo osaa.
challenging
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Loveable characters:
No
I just devoured this book in three hours (all but the two pages I read before falling asleep last night.)I have no idea what I think about it. But because it's Delillo, I loved it. Now, I'll spend days reading others' reviews that I avoided the past few months/weeks. Then maybe I can form a coherent thought.
The vast atmosphere of this book always soothes me, despite gently walking me through 5 stages of emptiness. A graceful grief for aging. Grief for poignancy, for slowness. Grief for... Maybe not grief, but a longing for anonymity that seems to unwind a moment into a lifetime within the secret of quiet observation. I think what DeLillo did for me is offer the most poetic description of presence in absence and even acceptance of what has been erased.
For the sake of disclosure, let me point out that there are few authors for whom I'll build shrines towards their greatness like Don DeLillo. If you've scaled the mountaintops of his watershed works like White Noise, Underworld and Mao II, you know what DeLillo's is magnificently capable of.
Point Omega, on the other hand, reveals a master writer of prose stuck in neutral. The rub on DeLillo, the primary criticism levied against him, is that he's been too long and too often fixated on postmodern dread - terrorism, consumerism, Wall Street economics, government conspiracy, etc. While those same fixations were fleshed out in glorious prose in his earlier works, Point Omega demonstrates that DeLillo hasn't so much run out of ideas as much as he's began to parody himself. Point Omega, and whatever the hell the novel was really all about, feels like a gruesome parody of a Don DeLillo novel. The crime of it all is that it's DeLillo who, purposefully or not, is the perpetrator of this parody.
(And, as for my biggest beef, you can't just suddenly write out a major character 2/3rds into the novel and offer ZERO explaination as to the fate of that character. That's bullshit; you can't expect the reader to invest what little emotional investment could be given to 3 of the blandest characters DeLillo's put on paper, and then dismiss such an investment.)
In the hands of a lesser writer, Point Omega would be worthy of praise. On the other hand, being it's a Don DeLillo novel, Point Omega is a dispiriting disappointment from an author who should know better than to give us something so inferior.
Point Omega, on the other hand, reveals a master writer of prose stuck in neutral. The rub on DeLillo, the primary criticism levied against him, is that he's been too long and too often fixated on postmodern dread - terrorism, consumerism, Wall Street economics, government conspiracy, etc. While those same fixations were fleshed out in glorious prose in his earlier works, Point Omega demonstrates that DeLillo hasn't so much run out of ideas as much as he's began to parody himself. Point Omega, and whatever the hell the novel was really all about, feels like a gruesome parody of a Don DeLillo novel. The crime of it all is that it's DeLillo who, purposefully or not, is the perpetrator of this parody.
(And, as for my biggest beef, you can't just suddenly write out a major character 2/3rds into the novel and offer ZERO explaination as to the fate of that character. That's bullshit; you can't expect the reader to invest what little emotional investment could be given to 3 of the blandest characters DeLillo's put on paper, and then dismiss such an investment.)
In the hands of a lesser writer, Point Omega would be worthy of praise. On the other hand, being it's a Don DeLillo novel, Point Omega is a dispiriting disappointment from an author who should know better than to give us something so inferior.