Writing about conspiracy theory in Libra, government cover-ups in White Noise, the Cold War in Underworld, and 9/11 in Falling Man, "DeLillo's book...
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Oct 05, 2010
brian
rated it: 
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 star More...
“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 star More...
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Jun 25, 2010
Evan
rated it: 
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 More...
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 More...
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Jul 24, 2010
Michelle
rated it:
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 th More...
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 th More...
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Feb 03, 2010
David
rated it:
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 a
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Mar 02, 2010
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. More...
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. More...
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Jan 24, 2011
Tim
rated it:
If you're a reader who likes plot points neatly tied and convention followed, this book is not for you. Point Omega by Don DeLillo revolves around a character named Elster, who is an intellectual that was brought into the war effort around 2004. I can't think exactly who he is modeled on, but he's an apologist, a hawk, a salesman coming up with terms like "a haiku war," as if by changing the words we use to wage war we can change the context or identity of war.
Elster has More...
Elster has More...
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Jan 03, 2011
Sean
rated it:
Every so often in a bookstore or library I will run across DeLillo's books on the shelves and remember that I really like his writing. That happened tonight so I checked out Point Omega and Falling Man. After these two I suppose I'll forget about DeLillo again for another year or two.
Early impression of this book:
It feels like a cross between Edward Abbey's Fool's Progress and the documentary film Fog of War.
Just a thought: Has anyone ever seen Don DeLillo and Joyce Carol More...
Early impression of this book:
It feels like a cross between Edward Abbey's Fool's Progress and the documentary film Fog of War.
Just a thought: Has anyone ever seen Don DeLillo and Joyce Carol More...
Jan 03, 2011
William Thomas
rated it: 
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 washe
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Aug 05, 2011
Delillo's latest novel (or novella), Point Omega, is a departure from his typical sprawling narratives, yet it maintains a familiar density. It is, in fact, a story with unusual constraints that records the exchanges between a retired, mystic academic, Elster, and a misplaced documentarian, Jim, in, ironically, an expansive Southern Californian desert. 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 fina
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Nov 06, 2011
Chazzbot
rated it:
This deceptively slim novella effectively merges (though "clashes" might be a better term) seemingly contradictory notions: the world of art and intellectualism with unforgiving nature, and DeLillo's own narrative tendencies (abstraction vs. narrative). Indeed, this novella perfectly divides DeLillo's stylistic modes between four chapters (and two framing sections), using the physicality of the book to mirror his authorial voices. Surprisingly, it works, not only as an intellectual e
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Sep 01, 2011
Marie
rated it:
I picked up this book in a store in an effort to pass a few hours by. I had this on the Kindle, but the Picador paperback was so darn pretty - I definitely judged this book by the cover.
Having read other DeLillo, I was prepared for his style. It doesn't fail to disappoint, in that respect, he is an exceptionally talented writer. As a novel, or novella, though - I felt it fell a little flat. The right concept was there, certainly - the theatre of war played out, hurtling towards this su More...
Having read other DeLillo, I was prepared for his style. It doesn't fail to disappoint, in that respect, he is an exceptionally talented writer. As a novel, or novella, though - I felt it fell a little flat. The right concept was there, certainly - the theatre of war played out, hurtling towards this su More...
Jun 22, 2011
This is a really strange book. After completing it and thinking about it, at times I think it's genius, and at times I think it's crap. I just can't decide how many stars to give it because it does not deserve to be graded in the middle. A gentleman's C is not enough, one must give at an F or an A+.
The story is about a small-time film-maker trying to get a man who was involved in helping the government conceptualize and theorize a war, presumably the second Iraq war, to star in a do More...
The story is about a small-time film-maker trying to get a man who was involved in helping the government conceptualize and theorize a war, presumably the second Iraq war, to star in a do More...
Jun 09, 2011
Ashley
rated it:
Per usual, I'm impressed by DeLillo's control of language. I found this book to be full of sentences and observations that cut to the core of things - fitting in a book about the dangers of over-abstraction and self-consciousness. Though there's a lot to be said about some of the deliberate ambiguities of the narrative, I'd like to focus on three elements:
1. Ideological flaws in DeLillo's characters - a common critique is that DeLillo's character's are walking,talking ideas; not fully More...
1. Ideological flaws in DeLillo's characters - a common critique is that DeLillo's character's are walking,talking ideas; not fully More...
Apr 08, 2011
Sarah
rated it: 
A sparse novel at only 117 pages, it conveys more with what is not said than what is directly stated. A quote from the opening scene of the book,
"The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw"
seems to set the tone for the rest of the story. A filmmaker, Jim Finley, heads to the desert to interview Richard Elster, a scholar who was recruited by the federal government to conceptualize war. During their stay in the desert, time seems to slow d More...
"The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw"
seems to set the tone for the rest of the story. A filmmaker, Jim Finley, heads to the desert to interview Richard Elster, a scholar who was recruited by the federal government to conceptualize war. During their stay in the desert, time seems to slow d More...
Apr 02, 2011
Cary
rated it:
I may add or subtract a star after reading this a second time, which I will after letting it settle into my bloodstream, as you have to let a DeLillo novel do. This one's brief, oblique, precise, sometimes maddening, sometimes beautiful, the clearest sign yet that he's turning into a Pinter or Beckett in his austerity. There's no doubt he's perfectly in control, so the lacunae of the story are there on purpose, to beguile us, to keep us thinking. Yes, it's dry and cerebral, with those odd, vivid
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Mar 28, 2011
Karl
rated it:
Point Omega is Don DeLillo's look into a very slow tragic space. I don't want to spoil the plot (what of it there is to spoil) but basically, we've got two parts of this book: first, there's a criticism of a work of art called 24 Hour Psycho that bookends the story. This art work is actually the movie Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock, only slowed down so that it takes 24 hours to play out. DeLillo calls our attention to this work of art because it calls his attention to the progression of time, how so
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Jan 12, 2011
Kristoff
rated it:
Don DeLillo blogt, facebookt noch twittert, en op YouTube valt hij slechts in een handvol filmpjes te bewonderen.
Toch is deze onhippe maar ongemeen krasse zeventiger hypergevoelig voor de 'Witte ruis' (titel van zijn meesterwerk uit 1985) die onze almaar accelererende informatiemaatschappij overspoelt.
Meer nog: hij weet 'm niet alleen haarscherp te lezen en te interpreteren, hij giet zijn analyse ook steevast in romans die veel weg hebben van literaire röntgenfoto's.
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Toch is deze onhippe maar ongemeen krasse zeventiger hypergevoelig voor de 'Witte ruis' (titel van zijn meesterwerk uit 1985) die onze almaar accelererende informatiemaatschappij overspoelt.
Meer nog: hij weet 'm niet alleen haarscherp te lezen en te interpreteren, hij giet zijn analyse ook steevast in romans die veel weg hebben van literaire röntgenfoto's.
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Dec 25, 2010
I don’t usually read books by the Great Straight White Men, but then I read a review of Point Omega that said that DeLillo finally succeeds at writing about nothing, no not writing about nothing but writing a book where nothing happens, so I got excited. Even if the review was in New York Magazine, a piece of garbage, somehow they have this great book reviewer, and even though he mostly reviews the Great White Men at least he writes something interesting. Usually. Definitely in this case.
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Dec 10, 2010
J.j.
rated it:
(For a more detailed review of this book, go to <http://blog.jjwylie.com/2010/02/point-omega-by-don-delillo.html>.)
I have just now finished my second read-through of Point Omega, and this slim, oblique little tale has not disappointed. It's amazing.
Delillo opens with one of his trademark set-pieces, this one an art installation that involves the Hitchcock movie, "Psycho". And here Delillo is at his cogitative best, following a nameless character who immerses h More...
I have just now finished my second read-through of Point Omega, and this slim, oblique little tale has not disappointed. It's amazing.
Delillo opens with one of his trademark set-pieces, this one an art installation that involves the Hitchcock movie, "Psycho". And here Delillo is at his cogitative best, following a nameless character who immerses h More...
Nov 21, 2010
Eugene
rated it:
a beautifully structured murder mystery, or is it an idea of the universe as an inversion of the infinite, a compression of all event into a common, everyday chamber? war as haiku is one of its “unintentionally humorous” conceits… i admit to being totally surprised by this book. at first approach, reading the familiar delillo scenes of lonely men in empty rooms i was lulled into thinking we’d be covering old ground. but in the middle of the book, a plot point, which initially feels somewhat easy
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Aug 31, 2010
Kayla
rated it:
POINT OMEGA by Don DeLillo
My Thoughts:
I can't say I sought this book out, because I didn't. I had never even heard of Don DeLillo. I wanted a book that could give me a break, however small, from the classic I was reading. I decided to choose the book just by its cover, and chose this book without knowing what it was about, and without wanting to. I was going to read it regardless. I didn't know what to expect going into it, but I was pleasantly surprised. DeLillo's writing styl More...
My Thoughts:
I can't say I sought this book out, because I didn't. I had never even heard of Don DeLillo. I wanted a book that could give me a break, however small, from the classic I was reading. I decided to choose the book just by its cover, and chose this book without knowing what it was about, and without wanting to. I was going to read it regardless. I didn't know what to expect going into it, but I was pleasantly surprised. DeLillo's writing styl More...
Jul 25, 2010
Joanna
rated it: 
For a short book, this novel has an excessively long lead up to the eventual swift downward slide of action. You are reading along as a less-than-engaging character study plays out in the desert. Throw in a samovar and it could be a Russian reflection on humanity and the nature of war. Then, quite suddenly, about 2/3rds of the way through, it takes an unexpectedly creepy twist.
The later part of the book succeeds as a tale about loss and waiting and despair - about the way that str More...
The later part of the book succeeds as a tale about loss and waiting and despair - about the way that str More...
Jul 24, 2010
ambimb
rated it:
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers.
To view it, click here
May 18, 2010
Read this through quickly when it first came out -- thank you, Amazon pre-order -- and then again this past month, as I was fiddling with a short essay about an earlier book, Cosmopolis.
Point Omega can be read as the fourth book in a series of which Cosmopolis was the second: the four slender novellas that have followed DeLillo's sizable Underworld.
When I reread Point Omega, I did so slowly, though not quite at the pace suggested by the book, which opens and, in as near as More...
Point Omega can be read as the fourth book in a series of which Cosmopolis was the second: the four slender novellas that have followed DeLillo's sizable Underworld.
When I reread Point Omega, I did so slowly, though not quite at the pace suggested by the book, which opens and, in as near as More...
Apr 30, 2010
Jack
rated it:
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 deser More...
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 deser More...
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Apr 12, 2010
el_quijote
rated it:
Point Omega by Don DeLillo
This novel has an element of suspense, but it is not a suspense novel. Don DeLillo’s skillful prose and modern use of language place this slim volume in the category of literature. You should not read it for the story or the storytelling but for the ability of the writer to use words; to elicit feeling and meaning.
An idealistic film maker wants to make a film about a story that can only be told by one man. He visits the desert home of the man to More...
This novel has an element of suspense, but it is not a suspense novel. Don DeLillo’s skillful prose and modern use of language place this slim volume in the category of literature. You should not read it for the story or the storytelling but for the ability of the writer to use words; to elicit feeling and meaning.
An idealistic film maker wants to make a film about a story that can only be told by one man. He visits the desert home of the man to More...
Apr 10, 2010
Stephen
rated it:
For a DeLillo, this is a slight novel. Still, he remains one of America's most gifted writers, and anything he writes is worth reading. "Point Omega" is about time and seeing. The frame of this novel is provided by Douglas Gordan's installation of "24 Hour Psycho," in which the movie "Psycho" is played over a twenty-four hour period at the rate of two frames per second. Such a slowing of the movie facilitates a new form of seeing, one that allows the viewer, for
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Apr 03, 2010
Ted
rated it:
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 ca
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Mar 20, 2010
David
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When I visited Paris in 2000, I went to Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. I walked down a dark corridor with a picture on the far wall. When I got closer, I saw it was a photograph of a hitchhiker along a busy highway holding a sign that said, “psycho”. I turned down another dark corridor into a room that showed the movie Psycho at a frame every two seconds. There was no sound. I stood alone in the room and watch Janet Leigh check into the Bates Motel then left.
DeLillo’s Poin More...
DeLillo’s Poin More...
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Feb 18, 2010
Jason
rated it:
***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 a More...
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 a More...
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