One, James, told me today about a new novel by Don DeLillo, Point Omega, due to be released next year. The great DeLillo website, DeLillo’s America, has a short plot summary:
A young filmmaker visits the desert home of a secret war advisor in the hopes of making a documentary. The situation is complicated by the arrival of the older man’s daughter, and the narrative takes a dark turn.
The other, Mary Anne, will meet up with UD at an Irish bar tomorrow night, where they’ll drink to James Joyce for Bloomsday.
Colum McCann has a pleasant little Bloomsday piece in the New York Times.
… The messy layers of human experience get pulled together, and sometimes ordered, by words.
… The book carried me through to the far side of my body, made me alive in another time. I was 10 years old again, but this time I knew my grandfather, and it was a moment of gain: he was so much more than a forgotten drunk.
Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of storytelling is “to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”
This is the function of books — we learn how to live even if we weren’t there. Fiction gives us access to a very real history. Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be…
June 16th, 2009 at 7:58AM
I wonder who writes these plot summaries. I can just imagine Delillo summoning up Prufrock–"That is not it at all":
"A young filmmaker (Americana’s TV exec) visits the desert home (Americana–the southwest) of a secret war advisor (Mao II–reclusive novelist) in the hopes of making a documentary. The situation is complicated by the arrival of the older man’s daughter, and the narrative takes a dark turn (Mao II, The Names, etc)."
I’ll be interested to see how his perception of the moving image has changed since Americana.