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Do you remember any of the things you talked about on board a plane? The conversations in the air go according to an almost automatic process, perhaps required by the unnatural and a little scary in the situation. I’ve spent maybe five weeks on the air myself, but I remember at most a quarter of a total conversation.
Don DeLillo mentions this strange circumstance right at the beginning of his new novel “El silencio”. It has the ability to break through to post-industrial awareness. The ability to find little petitesses in everyday life that really have enormous meaning for who we are and who we are.
So the novel begins with a couple on a plane back to New York from Paris. He sits and maniacally reads on the screen in his chair: altitude, time to destination, outside temperature. Try to write and remember what Celsius was called by his first name.
And then the whole planet begins to shake. The captain yells in French over the speaker and the screen goes black. “Are we scared now?” He states, instead of asking.
The motto of Don DeLillo’s novel comes from Albert Einstein: “I do not know with what weapons the third world war will be fought, but the fourth will be fought with sticks and stones.” It’s a relatively slim, 116-page novel and the first DeLillo has written since the fateful 2016 presidential election.
Given the changing election, many have been excited about how DeLillo would react. On the one hand, he is the great intellectual upper-middle-class analyst who can be said to have lost the election. On the one hand, he has earned a reputation as a haunting prophet, where things like populism, mass movements, techno-terrorism, and astonishing consumerism have filled his writings. Anyone who wants to track down predictions specifically about the World Trade Center in ruins after a terrorist attack can find their Nostradamus in DeLillo.
When the plane leaves Paris, three people sit in front of the television in the Burgundy Upper East of Manhattan and wait for the football final. Superbowl LVI in 2022. It is the academic couple Diane and Max and their former physics student Martin. They discuss the mid-term meal, the potential benefits of European football, and other topics that come up during the waiting period. Martin is concerned about Einstein to the extent that he has copied his manuscript for the special theory of relativity. He knows it by heart.
All three also wonder when the travelers from Paris will arrive. Too bad they miss the start of the game.
“What is the name of the arena?” Diane wonders. “What company or product is it named after?” Reflect for a moment and guess for yourself: “The Benzedrex Nasal Decongestant Memorial Coliseum.” Don DeLillo’s highly educated characters are easily ironic towards the world in which they participate themselves. They mark with a sky that they know very well.
This novel formally feels more like a play. A really rough piece.
Soon after, the TV begins to flicker. They try it with the remote control, they test the cell phones, the computer and the landline. Dead. Max goes out to talk to the neighbors. It is the same for everyone. Electronics is dead.
This novel formally feels more like a play. A really rough piece. It would be easy to dramatize with just the living room as a place; a giant black television screen in the background.
From the claim that something went very wrong, the three of them sink into each other’s bubbles. Diane and Martin continue to talk to each other, but they become more and more monologues. Max sits in front of the television and begins to comment on a game that does not exist, with clichés, phrases such as “And now he’s going to get a report from us from the left field” and also advertising breaks. At some point, he stands up and silently imitates a player just before the pitch.
It’s a lurid image of a man automatically advancing into disaster, ritual and attractive.
The couple from the plane finally arrive. They have miraculously dealt with some injuries and walked the dark avenues where people have begun to congregate and the tumult is increasingly threatening. The novel ends with the five each receiving a final monologue. Everyone except Martin, who sits quietly and stares at the black screen.
Of course, “The Silence” can be seen as an allegory for the changing situation of the polarized Western world in general and the United States in particular. The safe classes that are suddenly deprived of the foundation on which they have always been able to stand, albeit with constant sarcasm. Now everything is uncertain.
Despite the slim format, Don DeLillo finds the right words and lines to capture something bigger. Martin mentions the Solvay Conference in Brussels in 1927, when the world’s leading physicists (Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Marie Curie, and others) met to discuss the new quantum theory. Martin and Diane discuss scientific concepts, but then move on to new concepts that sound like laws of nature: data intrusion, cryptocurrency, counter-surveillance, drone wars. All this: dead. The unspoken question is what comes next. Sticks and stones?
And those who want prophecies can absorb a line towards the end of the novel, which was completed a month before the outbreak of the pandemic: “But still in everyone’s memory, viruses, plague, the steps through the airport terminals, masks, deserted city streets. “
It is a fascinating and very scary period document.
Don DeLillo’s novel will be published in Swedish translation in February by editor Albert Bonnier.
Read more Jonas Thente texts and more current book reviews on DN Kultur