Don DeLillo’s 2010 work Point Omega is a short novel on the Iraq War and how military planners are desensitized to the deaths they create thousands of miles away. Richard Elster is a retired "defense intellectual", whom the Bush administration brought in with a request to plan a short and sweet war. Jim Finley is a filmmaker, who wants to create an hour-long documentary on Elster, which will consist only of the old man talking in front of a blank wall. Elster invites his would-be interviewer out to his house in the remote Californian desert to talk about the project. While there, Elster’s daughter also visits and disappears. A man who could coldly plan a war affecting millions of lives breaks down when he loses a single person dear to him.

Bookending this central drama are two sections where a patron at an art museum watches “24-Hour Psycho”, a real-life installation by Douglas Gordon that slows Hitchcock’s famous film down so that it takes exactly 24 hours to play. Presented in such a light, the violence of the Bates Motel loses its horror, and instead DeLillo’s unnamed viewer starts to consider only the other details of the film like the actor’s choreography. It’s an apt metaphor for Elster’s defense planning days, when the bloody fates of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians took a back seat to dreams of an effective strike followed by glorious nation-building.

If you’ve read a lot of DeLillo before, you’ll find this work features much less of the meaningless conversations of his pre-millennium works (which depict a society overwhelmed by information and trivia), and rather more of the meditative, psychological studies of his first post-millennium work, The Body Artist. However, for me Point Omega is written in far too spare a tone, trimming everything down to novella size where dialogues and scenes are abandoned almost as soon as they’ve begun. After his mammoth 1998 masterpiece Underworld, DeLillo has been reluctant to take on anything of that size again and has been working at shorter spans. However, Point Omega needn’t have been a big book, I think it could have worked better just the length of the average novel. Elster talks about wanting "a war like a haiku, a three-line war", and DeLillo seems to have conceived the book as a homage to the haiku’s miniature, three-part format, but perhaps only because he couldn’t find it in him to take the book all the way.

Perhaps, I should have taken the time to read this novel in one sitting. Certainly there isn't much to say about the length of the book; it's between a short novella and an overly long short story - easily read in a couple of hours time.

If I read it an one sitting perhaps I would have pulled more from the pages. It was thin. And I'm not just talking about the length. About the only thought I took away from this novel was wishing I could see "24 Hour Psycho" at MOMA. Apart from this piece of art, I can tell little about the novel. Wait, don't visit the desert in the midday heat. It is uncomfortably warm.

There was Elster, an advisor of sorts to Desert Storm Part Deux. The main character, whose name I can't remember even though I finished it less than 24 hrs ago, a filmmaker desperate to Elster on film. And, lastly, there's Jessie, Elster's daughter, whose soul seems to have left the premises. The interaction between the characters seemed inhuman. Frankly, I didn't like them - they tasted like cardboard.

Dellilo, however, can construct a few nifty sentences and perhaps that is what continues to pull me to him. I'll like read more. Still, Underworld remains his greatest achievement. That ain't a bad one to have.

absurd and frustrating yet fascinating; boring yet somehow still intriguing; little to no action yet still compelling; mercifully short; ***SPOILER ALERT***as you read it, you know it will not have a satisfactory ending that brings the narrative thread to a neat, tidy ending, and you are, of course, correct: you get this sense almost from the first page, and you tell yourself that you shouldn't waste any more time reading this novel, but it is so short that you decide read it through nonetheless, and the more you read, the more bored you become, the more in the grip of the story you become; and the film scenes from "Psycho" that bookend the novel become the novel itself: excruciatingly slow progress in which you already know what will happen; absurdity and the tragedy of being are "Psycho", are this novel, are life as all three arc together into the Omega point in which we all become, in the protagonist's words, stones

A Very Serious Book, perhaps a little bit too serious. Pretty cover.

I've been trying to write some sort of reflection or at least a summary of this novel for the past half hour but I just can't. The experience of reading this is impossible for me to describe. So much is said and so much unsaid. There are elements of critiques of the Iraq War, American propaganda, elitist apathy and vain self-loathing; there are reflections on the power and meaning of art; there are characters I loathe (all of them) but whose perspectives I find fascinating. I don't know what to say! This shit is only 117 pages and the font is huge! How is it this good??? Is this what Don DeLillo novels are usually like???

"Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field."

Uma leitura fácil de compreensão complexa.
Não atingi o Ponto Ómega; entendo o sentido da vida à velocidade de 24 fotogramas por segundo.