Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say "an uncertain farewell" to her as she surrenders her body. "We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn't it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?" These are the questions that haunt the novel and its memorable characters, and it is Ross Lockhart, most particularly, who feels a deep need to enter another dimension and awake to a new world. For his son, this is indefensible. Jeff, the book's narrator, is committed to living, to experiencing "the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth." Don DeLillo's seductive, spectacularly observed and brilliant new novel weighs the darkness of the world-terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague-against the beauty and humanity of everyday life; love, awe, "the intimate touch of earth and sun."
he wisest, richest, funniest, and most moving novel in years from Don DeLillo, one of the great American novelists of our timean ode to language, at the heart of our humanity, a meditation on death,
Tutto inizia con un cadavere: quello di un uomo vestito da donna, abbandonato in un cantiere. La polizia fa ipotesi banali, solo un certo Lightborne, negoziante e collezionista di curiosit erotiche, crede di sapere la verit. La vittima sarebbe venuta in possesso di un documento unico: il filmato di un'orgia con Hitler protagonista, nel bunker sottostante il Reich, pochi giorni prima della fine del nazismo. Diverse persone - una giornalista di estrema sinistra, un agente segreto, un gallerista coinvolto nei traffici della pornografia, tre reduci del Vietnam - si lanciano alla ricerca del misterioso film.
Partiendo de una sencilla y simple anécdota se va hilvanando una historia que recorrerá los últimos cincuenta años de la historia americana. El 3 de octubre de 1951 tuvo lugar en Nueva York un partido de beisbol en el que un bateador consiguio un golpe extraordinario, el mismo dia la Union Sovietica llevaba a cabo su primera prueba nuclear. Delillo parte de una anecdota y propone al lector una inmersion en los ultimos 50 años de Estados Unidos.
