Silence

Don DeLillo has been hailed as one of the three greatest living American novelists (along with Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon) - and his latest book, the slim novel Silence, eloquently demonstrates why. The plot of the novel is not complicated: in Manhattan, an elderly married couple and a younger family friend are about to watch the Super Bowl, the American Football League finals, on television. They are to be joined by a second couple who are returning from Paris by plane. However, the world is suddenly hit by an unspecified but total technological disruption; Nevertheless, the friends eventually come together and try to cope with the situation, fluctuating between paranoid beliefs, that the world is coming to an end, and doubt, if all these fears and anxieties aren't just exaggerated, a deeply irrational reaction to a generic blackout. But the plot is not so much the point in the end: the tension in DeLillo's prose does not come from the plot, but from a language full of strangely composed words and phrases charged with mystery, hidden, and yet familiar meanings and emotions - and also from sentences full of unfinished ones, and yet the ominous signs that we all kind of know, or at least darkly suspect. In his novel, DeLillo uses the same words and phrases that make up our world today to announce its difficult demise - the act of creation or creation is here an act of creation and removal.