The Names, Don DeLillo
Can’t say how much I got out of this one. I felt like an American corporate world-wanderer trying to find significance in places/things/people that just don’t matter. Digging through ancient societies to find mysteries that complicate the world, complicate and enlarge. The coalescence of cultures that haven’t changed in thousands of years with new societies and technologies. They fuse in this text, linked by language, by the names of things and places and people. Children have insight because the world is still small for them. The adults get lost in vast-universe thinking. The main character’s son speaks a new language, Ob, that his father doesnt understand, but his mother and a friend do understand. It’s all about these languages: what all the different people call all the different things. Knowing more than one exponentially complicates understanding.
