Needless to say, I didn't love it. I wanted to. Really. I am the type of person who needs to finish a book if I get 50 pages in, even if I find it agonizing. I could not manage to finish this one. I have loved many of DeLillo's earlier books, but this one was too just too obtuse and self-aggrandizing in my opinion. Maybe it gets better after the first half, but I kept either falling asleep or finding excuses to put it down. I think I will go back and re-read Americana instead...

Es un libro extraño y creo que no acabo de entenderlo del todo. Sí habla de la muerte, de elegirla, de desafiarla, de evitarla y negarla. Habla del tiempo y el no-tiempo, habla de identidad, memoria, dolor.
Pero no sé qué decir al respecto. Tengo que pensarla más, quizás necesito alguna clave para interpretarla.
Siento que este libro quiere hablar de como la muerte es algo que no podemos capitalizar, pero si fuera posible sería como ocurre en la novela, una apropiación de la muerte.

La verdad es que es una espera el libro. Igual que lo es la muerte de la que hay que despertar a un nuevo mundo. No ocurre nada realmente, hay reflexiones que aparecen y se van y no sé dónde colocarlas.

No lo he disfrutado realmente, pero me ha intrigado.
Le tengo que dar más vueltas.

"Isolation is not a drawback to those who understand that isolation is the point."

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. In the spirit of said honesty, I could not finish this book. I really tried, especially since I started reading it an airport and decided to quit when we were in the air and I had no access to any other form of entertainment. I just really couldn't get into it. The entire plot was odd and poorly explained and jumped between the present and flashbacks without warning. Entire interactions made very little sense to me and not much actually happened in the part that I read. I could honestly say I did not care how the book ended, ultimately prompting me to move on to another book, because life is too short.

Theoretically, this is the story of a man saying goodbye to his ailing stepmother before she undergoes assisted suicide and cryogenic freezing (in the hope of being reawakened and cured at some unknown future date), and then later to his father when he follows in her footsteps. In actual practice, it's a bizarre string of half-baked navel-gazing, in which the characters wander around issuing pseudo-intellectual declarations that don't feel tied to any particular personalities and reflect on unrelated matters. A few things do happen, but not in a way that forms any coherent larger plot. And the limited action is secondary to all the empty dorm room philosophizing and random flashback memories, anyway.

One critical lens which I find valuable is to ask, what is the apparent intent of this work, and how does it succeed or fail towards that aim? What is the best possible version of the project, and what tweaks might help bring that in line? But I'd be flummoxed as the editor of a novel like this. Passages have no clear relation with one another or purpose in the narrative, the protagonist doesn't really seem to be driven by anything or to ever interact with anyone interesting, and the questions that get raised aren't generally treated as important enough to require answers. As a reader I hoped it would all tie together or build to some grand point by the end, yet it just never does. I don't say this about too many books, but this feels like it's been an utter waste of my time.

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

There were starkly beautiful lines I sent my husband in text messages, because they were so perfect, so relatable. The run down of monotonous events that read like poetry. It was entirely a DeLillo novel, but for some reason I didn't devour it as quickly as I thought I would.

This is one of the thin, rather ephemeral DeLillo novels, rather than one of the big, meaty ones. It muses about life, death, meaning, violence, etc., and the prose is often captivating, but in the end I'm really not sure if this book in particular and many others like it in general really have all that much to say. I realize I'm supposed to consider the bigger issues and the questions it raises, but who doesn't in the normal course of events, and needs a novel to remind them to question the meaning and purpose of life? In the end, it will go down, at least for me, as a book with some memorable and moving passages, but not a particularly memorable or moving book.

I don't know how he keeps getting away with it...

I've read all of the so-called "great" DeLillo novels and then some and what I've come to realise is that even the one's that I wouldn't call great are still really really good - it surely has something to do with the rhythmic precision? or maybe the melodic intonation and repeated motifs? the wildly unrealistic dialogue coupled with every character being hyper-astute?

I don't know what it is but it's there on almost every page, especially so in this book which I would gladly admit isn't Don's finest work, not even a top 5 for him but it's still one I'm sure I'll remember forever fondly.

So what's the difference between Zero K and say, White Noise? I think the DeLillo factor is a little bit overdone in this book, maybe the Thing That He Does shouldn't be on every page because at times it feels a little bit heavy-handed and possibly detracts from the times when it could have been more penetrating had the narrator not expounded on reading Gombrowicz in the original and wanting to be the kind of person who reads Gombrowicz in the original, and then muttering Gombrowicz, Witold Gombrowicz to himself the whole previous page.

Zero K is about language and what it means to be alive largely in the temporal sense; we have a protagonist who we want to call pretentious but who, like Don, gets away with it because a lot of his dispositions and interactions are quite endearing (the definition shtick is what I felt gave the novel it's breath). The plot of the book is almost secondary to the themes and ideas that DeLillo explores which, again, feels like it shouldn't work but somehow almost always does with trademark lexical architectonic.