This felt like a sequel, or "companion piece" to The Names...American intelligence agencies, American interference in the middle east, film and filmmakers playing a big role, murder, violence first conceived abstractly that then horrifyingly becomes real. And the style is very similar, too...they both have a really hypnotic rhythm going.
So...what's the point of Point Omega? It came out 30 years later, but I don't think it adds much to what The Names did. Strip out the technology and references to Iraq and it could've been written in the 80s. Am I missing something?
I think Point Omega is about the desire to abstract war and plays a lot with an examination of time as a parallel, like the abstracted violence of 24 hour psycho and the long timeless days of the desert. which is not what I got from the names.
i loved both books though, so even if there's a little retreading of ground, I'm glad point omega was written
>>7715568
Delillo can describe cinema so damn well.
>>7717488
yes this. he should be an avant garde filmmaker in his final days.
>>7717496
I think he prefers the Borgesian "why make a thing when you can describe it?"
>>7716707
Some bits on time (and film) from The Names. Similar idea of places somehow having their own time or being outside time.
>He’d arrived late, making the customary remark about normal time and Greek time.
>Always the self finds a place for its fulfillments, even in the Cretan wild, outside time and light.
>Rodents, earthworms turn the soil. She senses the completeness of the trench. It is her size, it fits. She rarely looks over the rim. The trench is enough. A five-foot block of time abstracted from the system.
>It is one of those imprinted moments, part of him now, contained in island time.
>There is time and there is film time. It was a natural extension, the barest of transferals, to make the crossing, to leap into the frame. Film was implied in everything they did.
