El silencio

Super Bowl Sunday. Year 2022. Five friends are meeting for dinner in an apartment in Manhattan. A retired physics teacher, her husband and their former student await the couple who will join them after an accident flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from sports betting to bourbon to Einstein's 1912 manuscript on the theory of relativity. Suddenly, a blackout leaves the world in darkness and the digital connections that have marked our lives are cut off. Don DeLillo completed this novel a few weeks before the advent of Covid-19. Silence is the story of a different catastrophe and a twist on post-humanism as the central theme of his work: if we had already assimilated technology as an essential part of the human being, what remains of us, of our identity, if we see ourselves forced to give it up? From the Kennedy assassination to 9/11, DeLillo has been able to reflect in his novels the events that have marked each historical moment. Silence describes a society whose greatest threat has changed from something tangible to an invisible enemy, be it a pandemic, a cyber attack or financial chaos.