This, of course, is classic DeLillo, the tension between body and mind. “Terror and war, everywhere now,” DeLillo suggests, “sweeping the surface of our planet….And what does it all amount to? A grotesque kind of nostalgia.” In removing ourselves from everything, then, even the inevitability of death, we achieve a kind of purity. And yet, here at the end of life, there seems a promise: that we can take charge of our destinies once and for all. Artis is dying, but then, DeLillo makes clear, so are all of us, every day, our lives a series of choices, less drama than determination as we move through a world we cannot control. Set in part at a facility in the trackless steppes of a former Soviet republic, it tells the story of a Manhattanite named Jeffrey, his financier father, and his stepmother, Artis, who has traveled thousands of miles to be cryogenically preserved. “I can poke my finger through it.” This sentiment reverberates throughout this elusive book. “The thinness of contemporary life,” DeLillo writes in his 16th novel. A cryogenic facility beyond the edges of civilization provokes a series of meditations on death and life.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |