The Silence
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- CHF 5.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
'An apocalyptic novel for our times' – Guardian
'Horrifyingly resonant' – Observer
Superbowl Sunday, 2022. A couple wait in their Manhattan apartment for their final dinner guests to arrive. The game is about it start. The missing guests' flight from Paris should have landed by now.
Suddenly, screens go blank. Phones are dead. Is this the end of civilization? All anybody can do is wait.
From one of America’s greatest writers, The Silence is a timely and compelling novel about what happens when an unpredictable crisis strikes.
'The Silence is Don DeLillo distilled . . . a straight shot of the good stuff' – Spectator
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
DeLillo (Zero K) applies his mastery of dialogue to a spare, contemplative story of a group of New Yorkers and their response to a catastrophic shutdown of the world's computer systems on the night of the Super Bowl in 2022. While flying back to New York from vacation in Paris, Jim Kripps reads out the plane's altitude and speed from a screen while his poet wife, Tessa Berens, plumbs her memory for trivial facts and marvels at her ability to recover information without the assistance of a phone. Jim, an everyman whom the author describes as "nondescript," assumes the worst when the screens suddenly go blank. Their friend Max Stenner, who, with his professor wife, Diane Lucas, and her former student Martin Dekker, anticipate Jim and Tessa's arrival at their Manhattan apartment to watch the game, is deeply shaken when his own screen goes blank before halftime. Martin entertains Diane by reciting passages from Einstein's 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity, which lead to alternately profound and tepid discussions of the shutdown, the cause of which remains unexplained even after Tessa and Jim report to the group on surviving their crash landing and a ride through eerie, dark city streets. In the end, readers gain the timely insight that some were born ready for disaster while others remain unequipped. While the work stands out among DeLillo's short fiction, it feels underpowered when compared to his novels.
