This is a weird book. Bizarre characters, awkward dialogue, a barely present plot, and an overall pretentiousness make this a book you should skip.

The book is about a son and his father going to a facility somewhere in asia where they freeze bodies. In the future hopefully the bodies can be reanimated. The father's girlfriend is ill and chooses to be frozen. While at the facility our protagonist, Jeff, encounters a monk who engages him in awkward dialogue that goes nowhere. He also sees the creators of the facility give a rambling nonsense speech about the future. While walking the halls screens will occasionally drop down and play videos of random things. Sometimes monks burning themselves, sometimes people running, all of it nonsense. Dad's girlfriend gets frozen and they leave the facility.

For a brief period of time Jeff interacts with his girlfriend and her adopted son. It seemingly has nothing to do with the rest of book. Shortly after this his girlfriend's adopted son runs away. It's now been about two years since dad's girlfriend got frozen and dad decides he wants to get frozen as well. Back to the facility they go. While there, the video screen shows Jeff his girlfriend's adopted son getting killed in a battle. We learn about the new language they've developed. The founder of the facility gives another rambling speech that goes nowhere and serves no purpose. Dad gets frozen, the book ends.

Example terrible dialogue from page 113.
"Your father yes. And you're my son."
"No, no. I'm not ready for that. You're getting ahead of me. I'm doing my best to recognize the fact that you're my father. I'm not ready to be your son."

Not dialogue, but this line from page 231 gives you a good idea of what this entire book is like.
"One man, headless -- he had no head."

Reading this book was a chore. I'm not entirely sure why I finished it. If I had it to do over again I'd give up after about 50 pages. I thought it was just weird and would get better. It stayed weird and got worse. The ending does nothing to redeem it. It sounds like DeLillo has better books, but it will be a long time before I'm willing to give them a shot.

Another DeLillo opus on how hard it is to live on this planet without wanting to climb off. Revelations are false, hope is gone, and science has placed us in a position to know how desperate the situation is.

Don DeLillo has taken all the things we currently talk, read, and worry about. The big questions: When is the right time to die? Will we engage in wars that we can never walk back from? When is the pandemic coming? When we do decide to die, to pull that plug, what will happen then? As he is known to do, DeLillo takes the metaphysical mysteries and puts them together with characters that are believable and plots that sometimes make sense. The topic of death, who owns death, who controls death makes this a very important book for this time, right now, at this very moment.

Thank you to NetGalley, Scribner and Don DeLillo.

This may be a slim volume but it is a big book. Delillo often takes on big issues, and here he takes on the very biggest. What does it mean to be alive. This is no woowoo "what is the meaning of life" navel gaze. The question here is a literal one; "What defines being alive?" I think therefore I am? I speak therefore I am? I have no pulse and am cryogenically preserved so I have the possibility of a future therefore I am? Are we alive just because we eat dinner and take cabs? Are we defined by our relationships? I imagine these questions are very present for many octogenarians, but no one expresses them like DeLillo.

Delillo says things in ways that no one has ever said them. Yet, when you read his words, they are so perfect you can't imagine why everyone in history has not used those words. Precisely those words. The only other living person I ever say that about is Leonard Cohen. I love words, and so there is no way I could not love these perfect words. I listened to this on audio, and it was actually quite good, but I wanted to think more about the words so after I finished the audio I went out and got the print version and started over from the beginning. The words are that good. The humor and the well drawn story arc are a bonus.

lots of geology references, including discussion of the definition of rocks (at an art exhibit centered on a boulder), a statement that rocks are but not do not exist, use of the word petrology, mention of Precambrian rocks somewhere unspecified in Central Asia, and description of a wall made of fine-grained white marble

All the coded impulses you depend on to guide you. All the sensors in the room are watching you, listening to you, tracking your habits, measuring your capabilities. All the linked data designed to incorporate you into the megadata.

Imagine a collapsing DeLillo universe, a DD squared where each trope and character folds into itself. Such a potentiality is close to what I found here. Lee Harvey Oswald addressing his daddy issues while the priest from Underworld parses the constituent elements of a shoe. Then there's a monolithic system--one which predicts collapses in oil prices and suicide bombings, where does that lead? Well, to cryogenics, albeit without reference to Walt Disney and instead of father in sunglasses it is the prodigal son who is stuck in a traffic jam, alas this time, trapped in the Cosmopolis, he's in a cab not a limo, and the virtual tragedy of the Ukraine (alas in 2016) warns him that his means are exclusively remote, the Falling Man is forever a body without organs. Even the Molly Bloom soliloquy pissed me off. I would like to read this again, preferably on top of a mountain.

Re Publica Mortis:

“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?”

Don Delillo's latest novel is centered around the theme of Death. 'Life' and 'Death' are posited as merely opposite sides of the same spectrum with either one affirming the other instead of siloing them into mutually exclusive entities that are forever opposed to each other (as per the treatment meted out by our everyday language) .

In line with this argument, the plot unfolds at a subterranean Cryonic facility where frozen bodies of the dead are preserved at a temperature of -273.15 degrees celsius until a future time when biomedical advances will prolong human life indefinitely, thereby allowing mankind to finally realize the dream of immortality.

In keeping with the central theme, the storytelling too is marked with dark destructive images of terrorism, floods, fires, famines and plagues countered against the “mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth.” in the words of the protagonist. The characters are not well developed and, hence, one fails to sympathize with them.

This novel should only be recommended reading for those interested in the subjects of Death and Cryonics.

An interesting topic, but, at least as an audiobook, it was painfully slow. So much navel gazing. So much backstory. So much pseudo mystical nonsense