A review by marcnash21stc
Point Omega by Don DeLillo

5.0

With Delillo,my favourite living author, it's all about the central metaphors and the sculpted words he plants as little word cluster bomblets that detonate in your reading mind as you progress and stop you up short. "She wasn't a child who needed imaginary friends. She was imaginary to herself". You don't need to say anything else to have a full picture of this person in your mind's eye. This is a book about waiting. A civilian specialist adviser to the US military, has retired to the most isolated place he can find in order to consider the meaning of his work. A film maker accompanies him, wanting to make a single-take movie of the man addressing the camera about his findings. In the name of research, as pre-production of a scriptless movie, they hang out together in the desert. And that is the plot. What it really is however is a meditation on life and the human condition. Coming in at 117 pages it avoids the indulgence that such treatments usually deliver. Instead it is a masterpiece of layered, dense economy. Each sentence is a carefully conceived chisel into the grain of a fine marble sculpture. Fabulous.