Point Omega

by Don Delillo (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2011

  $11.61

  Reading the fiction of Don DeLillo is an utterly original experience: powerful, prescient, perceptive. Writing in a prose that is both majestic and muscular, his unerringly accurate vision penetrates deep into the soul of America and consistently leaves readers with a fresh perspective on the world. Since the publication of his first novel, in 1971, he has been acknowledged across the world as one of the greatest writers of his generation.

  Richard Elster, a retired secret war adviser, has retreated to a forlorn house in a desert, 'somewhere south of nowhere'. But his planned isolation is interrupted when he is joined by a young filmmaker intent on documenting his experience in a one-take film. The two men sit on the deck, drinking and talking. Weeks go by. And then Elster's daughter Jessie visits. When a devastating event follows, all the men's talk, the accumulated meaning of conversation and isolation, is thrown into question.

  Written in hypnotic prose, Point Omega is both a metaphysical meditation and a deeply unsettling mystery, from which one thing emerges: loss, fierce and incomprehensible.

• Used

  Paperback
  2010

  $21.01

  In the middle of a desert `somewhere south of nowhere', to a forlorn house made of metal and clapboard, a secret war adviser has gone in search of space and time. Richard Elster, seventy-three, was a scholar - an outsider - when he was called to a meeting with government war planners. They asked him to conceptualize their efforts - to form an intellectual framework for their troop deployments, counterinsurgency, orders for rendition. For two years he read their classified documents and attended secret meetings. He was to map the reality these men were trying to create. `Bulk and swagger', he called it.

  At the end of his service, Elster retreats to the desert, where he is joined by a young filmmaker intent on documenting his experience. Jim Finley wants to make a one-take film, Elster its single character - `Just a man against a wall.'

  The two men sit on the deck, drinking and talking. Finley makes the case for his film. Weeks go by. And then Elster's daughter Jessie visits - an `otherworldly' woman from New York - who dramatically alters the dynamic of the story. When a devastating event follows, all the men's talk, the accumulated meaning of conversation and isolation, is thrown into question. What is left is loss, fierce and incomprehensible.

  Point Omega is a deeply unnerving and brilliant work from one of our greatest living writers.

  `DeLillo is one of the greatest living American writers' Scotland on Sunday

  `Extravagant literary gifts, formidable intellect and unflinching artistic gaze . . . A genuine master' Irish Independent

  `The most trustworthy and rigorous prose writer of our age' John Burnside

• New

  Paperback
  2010

  $15.91