It is a crowded and a steamy place that most people including me go to relax and think. Seems like a torture to go to a place like that. But the fact is that somehow the steam or vapor that this crowded space provides helps to alleviate the pain of a knotted muscle.
Quieting my mind gets more complicated as all those voices and sounds from a pair of friends speaking and whispering like in “codes messages” inside a steamy and crowded place spoils the whole purpose of my trip to the sauna. I feel that the connection between a place like this and the supermarket of “white noise” is the irony of both places because what is expected or intended in the first place often times is not what happens.
Sounds complicated – uh? Just like Don Dellilo writing in this book. His ironic mode stressed me out and makes me think several times the same passage and each time I can see and hear a different message. No wonder it is listed under the postmodern disaster novel in our syllabus because as I understand postmodernism is a complicated term with no clear idea and each reader interpret the text using her/his own experiences.
This book clearly illustrates this term because is full of ambiguities and contradictions. One of the positive features I found is its fancy language that appeals to the emotional senses. Exploring sad themes such us death or a cemetery in the Blacksmith village where “the power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time” (97) produces a powerful image in my mind. By observing the background in this crowded and steamy place, I found out that interpreting the “code messages” of all the different noises around me is not an easy task.