The ‘ intimate calm tinged with hysteria’ that makes for an anxiety-ridden tone becomes a brilliant playing field for an examination of language and the way we perceive each other and the reality around us through it. Much will be made of the fact that he completed this novella just before the Covid-19 lockdowns and that it tells the story of a mysterious disruption of normal lives that leaves city streets empty and silent while everyone huddles in their homes.
The Silence is a odd but intriguing novella that manages to perfectly encapsulate our growing existential anxieties in a data-driven society where just sheer recall of ‘ a missing fact emerges without digital assistance’ is a rare satisfaction. ‘ Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ĭon DeLillo has a special ability to find the pulse of modern anxieties in the moment and use it like a metronym to which his stories find their rhythm. Never have DeLillo's prescience, imagination, and language been more illuminating and essential. Never has the art of fiction been such an immediate guide to our navigation of a bewildering world. What follows is a dazzling and profoundly moving conversation about what makes us human. Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein's 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris.
Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Its resonances offer a mysterious solace. The Silence is the story of a different catastrophic event. From one of the most dazzling and essential voices in American fiction, a timely and compelling novel set in the near future about five people gathered together in a Manhattan apartment, in the midst of a catastrophic event.ĭon DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of Covid-19.
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