The Echo Maker

by Richard Powers

Winner of the 2006 National Book Award
The Echo Maker is "a remarkable novel, from one of our greatest novelists, and a book that will change all who read it" (Booklist, starred review).

On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter has a near-fatal car accident. His older sister, Karin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when Mark emerges from a coma, he believes that this woman--who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister--is really an imposter. When Karin contacts the famous cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber for help, he diagnoses Mark as having Capgras syndrome. The mysterious nature of the disease, combined with the strange circumstances surrounding Mark's accident, threatens to change all of their lives beyond recognition. In The Echo Maker, Richard Powers proves himself to be one of our boldest and most entertaining novelists.

Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Book Club, Literary Fiction, Novels, Literature, Contemporary

451 pages, Paperback

First published October 17, 2006

About the author

Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. His book The Overstory won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.

Librarian note: There is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads database.

Reviews

[Kate · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book stunk so badly that I left it on the seat of the train as I was leaving.

A woman behind me said, "Excuse me, I think you left your book."

And I said, "Yeah, I kind of wanted to leave my book, in hopes that someone else would come along and not hate it as much as I did."

This book was long, boring, rambling and had one plot twist that was moderately interesting, but didn't show up until about page 400 (out of 450).

Skip it. Seriously. Spend time reading a neurobiology book, or a book about the migratory habits of cranes. Because that's what makes up 90% of this book anyway. (The other 10% are two dimensional characters who are whiny, needy and dishonest.)

Still considering it? There's a copy on NJ transit for you somewhere.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

My wife is such a sweetie. She saw that my job had me knee-deep in numbers and thought maybe I’d appreciate more words in my life for ballast. With that in mind, she arranged for me to take an online writing class. We just started Week 2 – Show, don’t tell. One of the discussion prompts was to cite examples of a writer who “shows” particularly well. Turns out, I have a ready supply of quotable passages from books I’ve been meaning (for too long) to review. The set I had for this one just about ran my highlighter dry. So here were the examples I posted:

Mark: A child who, out of pity, always picked the worst players for his team. An adult who called only when weepy drunk.

The bathroom was a science-fair project in full bloom.

Nothing had the power to hurt her except for what power she gave it. Every barrier she'd ever chafed against was no more than a Chinese finger lock that opened the instant when she stopped pulling.

That's the thing about dogs. There isn't a human being in the world worthy of any dog's welcome.

She reddened again. Her skin was instant litmus.

Mark marveled at Weber's professional patter. "Man! If I could talk like you, I'd be getting laid on a daily basis." He launched into imitative psychobabble, almost convincing enough to earn him a comfortable wage somewhere on the West Coast.

The two of them ended up at a restaurant back in Kearney, one of those chains drawn up in Minneapolis or Atlanta and faxed around the nation.

Karin called Bonnie... She got the infectious answering machine -- I wish I was here to talk to you for real -- in that cheerful treble that sounded like the horn of a Ford Focus on mood elevators.

My brain, all those split parts, trying to convince each other. Dozens of lost Scouts waving crappy flashlights in the woods at night. Where's me?

I don’t know this for a fact, but my guess is that the instructor would have given him an A on any “show, don’t tell” assignment he submitted.

Powers, as I’ve opined elsewhere, is a bona fide genius. He merges science, language, arts, and humanity as seamlessly as anyone out there. This particular book delves into an interesting mental disorder, and features an Oliver Sacks-type character to diagnose/treat/exploit it. The plot is a good one and his characters are well-drawn. Metaphors abound. And his bigger points are touching and wise. But rather than “telling” you to read this gem of a book, I’ll rely on the examples above to “show” you glimpses of the phrenic delights you’d be missing if you don’t.

[Will Byrnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here we are again in the world of literature. Powers is a powerful writer. The length of the book (451 pps) does not really tell the length of this work. It is not a fast read. There is much content woven into the pages, a tapestry of imagery and meaning that enhances the action of the story.

Kearny, Nebraska is a way station on the central flyway, a place where thousands of cranes congregate every year on their way north and south, providing an industry for the town. The descriptions of the migration are quite wonderful. Mark Schluter is a twenty-something who crashes his truck and barely survives, suffering extreme head trauma. Karin Schluter, his sister, leaves her job to try to help with his recovery. Mark cannot accept her as his sister, believing that she is a copy. Karin seeks help from the famous neurologist, Gerald Weber, who comes to Kearny for a look see. Gerald struggles to figure out just what is going in with Mark’s brain. The case is very, very unusual.

There is a wonderful aide, Barbara, at the nursing home where Mark recuperates. She seems exceptionally tuned in and eager to help. She has a talent everyone can see but a past that she keeps to herself. Daniel is the local head of an environmental protection group, and was Mark’s best friend until they parted ways as teens. He also had a thing for Karin, and now Karin seeks his help for Mark.

Powers is after existential prey here. What is the nature of consciousness? What is reality? Does it have external constancy or is all reality just what our brains make of available input? Is the sequence always cause then effect? It is an invigorating ride. Is it connection to others that gives us anchors to life, keeps the drifting balloons that are our conscious brains from floating entirely away?

Along the way he offers us a few mysteries. Who is Barbara really? Why did Mark run off the road? Will the crane stopping point be saved? What will happen with Karin and Daniel? Will Mark ever return to his old self?

Payload is of crane behavior, river ecology, the climate of the area, water issues. A separate payload track is neuroscience. There is much in here that will not be found in the local paper about obscure brain malfunctions and their implications. This was an interesting and engaging read.

[Hugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I find the task of reviewing Richard Powers daunting and humbling. This is my third one, after Orfeo and The Time of Our Singing, and they are all brilliant in subtly different ways. One obvious difference is that there is much less music in this one, but there is a wealth of ideas - on the brain, on nature and evolution, on the nature of American society after 9/11, and on the nature of love and what it really means to know another person. Then there is the setting, the Platte river in South Nebraska, a spectacular staging post on the migration path of sandhill cranes.

The story starts with Mark, a young man in left in a coma after a car accident that almost killed him. His sister and only remaining relative Karin comes back to her hometown to care for him. This is just the start of a complex web in which nothing and nobody is quite what it or they seem to be. When Mark recovers consciousness, he is unable to accept that Karin is his sister, obsessing on minor differences between what he sees and what he remembers, illustrating what is known as Capgras syndrome. The case is brought to the attention of Gerald Weber, a writer about psychological disorders (who must be at least partially modelled on Oliver Sacks). Gerald becomes involved against his better judgment and the case causes him a crisis of confidence that leads him to question his professional integrity.

Interspersed with the story of Mark's disease, there are two other major strands to the story. Firstly Mark becomes obsessed with a mysterious note left at his bedside on the day of the accident, and needs to find out who wrote it, what they know, and how his friends were involved. Secondly Karin becomes involved with Mark's estranged childhood friend Daniel, who works on an environmental project protecting the cranes' habitat and fighting a development project that threatens it.

The material on the brain, how brain science evolves and what is known and not known about various brain disorders is fascinating, but perhaps overlong and a little too detailed for all but the keenest readers. The personal story is gripping, and some of the turns it takes are genuinely surprising.

I am still just scratching the surface of what could be said about this book, all I can really do is recommend it. Perhaps not quite as extraordinary as The Time of Our Singing, but it seems invidious to compare such different books, and my respect for Powers as a writer has only increased.

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Karin returns to her small town in Nebraska to care for her brother Mark, almost killed in a mysterious highway accident. When Mark regains consciousness, he insists that Karin is not his real sister and treats her as an impostor. In an attempt to cure Mark of his delusion, Karin contacts Dr. Weber--a neurologist modeled on writer Oliver Sacks--and asks him to examine her brother.

This is a fine novel with considerable narrative drive and a not unsatisfying conclusion. Its deeply philosophical narrative calls into question the meaning, the very existence, of the self.

[Phyllis · Rating 1 out of 5]

Mr. Powers, I have no doubt in your ability to write the sappiest story ever. Not only do you manage to force a sister-brother bond over whooping cranes and frost, you also manage to force a shameful-but-safe romance between said sister and said brother's successful counterpart. I hate you. Thanks to you I will never like a crane, I will never sympathize with head trauma victims, and I will never finish your dumb book. You may have fooled Oprah, but I've got your number!

[Jimmy Cline · Rating 2 out of 5]

"The issue of subjectivity is a hotly debated topic in the fields of philosophy and the cognitive sciences. But is subjectivity necessary at all? Why is it not just enough to see and react, as a robot might do? What advantage is conferred on the organism by actually experiencing something over just doing it? It is important to consider that animals may not have subjectivity but only react as if they do. Some in this field point out that because we cannot determine that animals do have subjective feelings (qualia), we can say that in fact they don't until it is demonstrated otherwise. It may be argued, however, that the burden of proof is on those who deny subjectivity in animals. For myself, I suspect that subjectivity is what the nervous system is all about, even at the most primitive levels of evolution. As an obvious corollary to that suspicion, I also suspect that consciousness as the substrate for subjectivity does not exist outside the realm of nervous system function or its nonbiological equivalent, if there is any."

-Rodolfo Llinás-

This quote is taken from Llinás' fascinating I of the Vortex; more specifically from a chapter on the concept of the self in relation to the human mind, and how this human pretense can be explained through physical states and activity in the brain. In his utterly fascinating exploration of brain plasticity and the way that neuronal signaling almost seems to communicate with various external environments to create physical movement, Llinás focuses on the perplexing psychological obsession that human beings have with the concept of an I, me, or a self. This preoccupation informs most of the troubling debates about the nature of consciousness, most importantly, the paradoxical notion of how a thinking self could ever objectively reflect on its own various mental states. Is matter responsible for the stuff of thought? Is there a ghost in the machine? These are all very complicated questions, even for someone such as Llinás, the preeminent neuroscientist of the twentieth century.

Now, take a second to consider the passage listed above, and a few more to consider the basic question of "selfness" or subjectivity. The Echo Maker by Richard Powers is a story almost predicated on this theoretical concern; one so central to the aims of neuroscience. Or even consider Capgras Syndrome, which is what Mark Schluter, the main character of the story, is inflicted with after a terrible and mysterious automobile accident. To paraphrase this interesting neurological complication; basically the patient becomes incapable of emotionally registering the faces or physical presence of loved ones. It's a strange form of agnosia, and while the person still retains all of their previous memories, just as lucidly as anyone else, they do not recognize close relatives. It's been suggested by a number of neuroscientists, such as V.S. Ramachandran, that because the brain is incapable of registering the faces of loved ones, it attempts to logically acknowledge their presence as that of an impostor or double. As Mark struggles with with this delusion, one brought on by a physical brain state (usually damage to the prefrontal cortex), a number of characters, the first and foremost being his sister, Karin, Powers meditates on how human beings deal with the suggestion that they are merely physical mechanisms responding in kind to the biological sublimity of the natural world.

To be fair, there is much more going on in Powers' book ... on a cultural level anyway. It's set in Kearney, Nebraska, which is clearly intentional on the authors' part. Powers is from Illinois, and he critically takes on this particularly barren midwestern landscape and culture with the voice of one who ostensibly resents it to some degree. Mark Schluter is sort of a redneck archetype who's as misunderstood as Bart Simpson. He's a relatively bright man, albeit something of a stubborn American cliche. There is a certain sensitivity to his character, but at the same time, Powers presents him (all of this after the accident of course) as something of a shit-kicking, Natural Ice slurping, Nascar fan. His friends Duane and Rupp, who may have had something to do with the accident, are even worse, something of an excuse for the degenerate path that Mark has chosen in life. His sister moved away from Kearney with the explicit intention of removing herself from these types of people, and pursuing a middle-upper class lifestyle, far away from the religious zealotry and backwoods paranoia of people like her mother and father. Now she must return because she is the only person that can take care of Mark.

Of course, the problem is that he can't recognize her, and he believes that she is an actress who has temporarily taken the real Karin's place. In many ways, it's really an incredible utilization of such a neurological disease as a paradoxical emotional ballast to the rest of the story. As Karin tries desperately to rehabilitate her brother back to normal, she enlists the support of a few old friends and a few outsiders. It's at this point that she revisits her old fling, Daniel, a local ecoterrorist-type who works at the bird sanctuary, and was alienated by both Karin and Mark in the past. At one point he does some research on Capgras and offers her a book by an Oliver Sacksesque neuropsychologist by the name of Gerald Weber.

The main focus of Weber's work as a neuropsychologist, as well as a writer of popular science books, was Capgras delusion. A man who is plagued by the thought that his work in the popular science writing industry is negatively affecting his true calling as a brain scientist, Weber initially feels over and done with exploiting case histories as fodder for publication material, but he is truly compelled when he discovers the rarity of Mark's case, as he has Capgras which was caused by closed-head trauma. So he flies out to Nebraska, eventually incapable of helping due to the crippling amount of insecurity he has developed from negative book reviews, about how much of a scientific hack he has become.

If Weber's character, or Mark's for that matter, don't come across as big enough symbolical stereotypes of specific kinds of narrowly defined people, then they most certainly do in a roundabout way after Powers has introduced all them. Especially as Karin reconnects with Robert Karsh (who she had left Daniel for as a teenager) and duplicitously sleeps with both men, all the while helping wage a war between the earnest idealism of Daniel and nature conservancies and the cold, progress-motivated force of Karsh and his development team. Even Karin, to a certain degree, could be seen as the sort of woman who - because she felt so alienated by her peers growing up - did everything in her power to escape the stultifying ignorance of her midwestern roots. The characters all seem like such mindless puppets, controlled by the whims of Powers' banal imagination and what he thinks their "type" should be doing within the story.

What's strange about The Echo Maker is that regardless of how solidly the narrative moves along, it's bogged down by various narrative techniques that just muddle up an otherwise simple story about a woman who is basically struggling to come to terms with the idea that the brain is a physical organ, merely responding in its damaged state. It's likely that her brother may never recognize her again, and after throwing her current lifestyle away for the sake of her brother, she'll be left with the realization that all of her efforts are in vain. Powers uses a lot of, what's been referred to as double voicing, a narrative technique in which a third-person narrator describes the mental state of the character in question, in a language that suggests that particular characters' style of thinking and speaking. Keep in mind, that Powers also has numerous philosophical reflections to make on the nature of the self, as well as the various mysteries of human consciousness. It's in this way that the narrative lurches along with a lot of cognitive science-oriented discussions of physical brain states and how these influence the way in which people think and act. When he's double voicing for Weber in particular, the narrative drones on like a bland version of Ramachandran's A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness, or some incredibly dull introduction to neuroscience.

While The Echo Maker contains a handful of profound moments of human beings struggling with the natural mystery of their own brains, and what they think makes them individualistic or special, it fails to deliver well on a story imbued with so much dense technical knowledge. Every explanation makes certain parts of the book read like non-fiction, which certainly isn't a good thing considering what Powers seems to be attempting to accomplish. More importantly, the probing questions about the nature of consciousness, and the abstract meditations on the ecosystems of Cranes, their brains, human brains, and the boorish march of progress that Powers seems to think that human beings are so notorious for, just overwhelm the book. Add to all of this, characters that are insufferable after ten or twenty pages, and all you have left is a really neat premise that gets carried away with its own ponderous lack of limits.

[brianna ♱]

has anyone else ever seen that one tyler the creator clip. pls tell me u get it🙏

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my fourth Richard Powers book in as many weeks. When the Austin paper reviewed The Echo Maker prior to its release, I was intrigued and drawn to this author with an immediate urgency to read him. First I read the beautiful and opera-like The Time of our Singing and followed with the tender Galatea 2.2, two very different stories that demonstrate Powers' narrative alacrity. (Now add to that The Gold Bug Variations, which I plan on reviewing as an equally powerful novel. )Then I read The Echo Maker.

Read the first few pages of the book. If you are not hooked, then this is not your type of literature. I was so swept up by his magnificently poetic description of the sandhill crane migration on the Platte River in Nebraska that I was compelled to study more about these birds on my own. The cranes are both a reflection of the story's concern of species preservation and are also allegorical, metaphorical. Powers' generous mind and renaissance intelligence weaves the story of the crane migration into issues of neuroscience and neuro-cognition as it soars into the mystery thriller plot of the story.

This is a Pulitzer-worthy novel, perhpas too intelligent for what passes as Pulitzer these days. It is easily one of the best contemporary novels I have ever read, along with his books The Gold Bug Variations, Galatea 2.2, and The Time of our Singing.

I am so driven to tell others to read this beautiful story that although I can not give the description it deserves, I must persuade readers to purchase it. It is a combination of naturalist concerns(the preservation of the cranes and the physical descriptions), neuro-science, dysfunctional family (with utter compassion and insight) and suspense thriller.

Although there is an ethereal glow that swirls in every page, there is a definite, concrete and suspenseful plot. Powers has been compared to DeLillo; I agree only surfacely. Both are linguistically erudite and have dense meaning packed between words and thoughts, but DeLillo is more elliptical and ambiguous, while Powers has concrete fasteners to keep the plot driven. Additionally, he has more heart, the heart of Marcel Proust. It would be difficult to make a film of any of DeLillo's books I've read, but Powers has an immediacy, a muscular story that would transfer well to cinema (where of course they could ruin it if they made it too linear).

The Editorial reviews reveal enough of the outline of the story; my intention is to tell readers just how profound is the experience of reading this novel. I was literally and literarily transported while reading and was engaged deeply by the third sentence. I am an RN that works in a neuro-psychiatric treatment center on an adolescent ward, so I usually avoid the subject matter in novels and look for different experiences; however, this story transcends the subject matter. Powers takes an aerial view of the life of an individual, the loneliness and solitude, while the characters strive to bridge the gap and explore the gap of connectedness.

There is not one false note or sliver of self-consciousness in this exquisitely constructed story. Pathos without any treacly sentiment, startling science written poetically, and ancient rhythms humming all over. Powers has an amazing grasp of the utter incomprehensibility of time, and as in his previous novels, time is a major theme. I could read this story for the passages about time(and the cranes and the imagery) alone. However, there is a solid suspense mystery thriller, also, that keeps you on the edge even while you fall in love with the writing itself and go back and read passages just for its beauty.

Mark Schluter suffers a closed-head injury after his truck veers off the road. He is then the first diagnosed case of Capgras syndrome sustained from injury rather than psychiatric etiology. Powers uses Capgras syndrome (the neurological disorder causing inability to recognize those closest to him while perceiving others accurately) to explore philosophical issues of memory, human fragility, and the vague recognition of the human brain. He delves into consciousness, reciprocity, the two-way valve between the head and the heart of the self, and the division between the human and the natural world. Powers' theme is dualism--familiar vs defamiliarization, and how that echoes in our perceptions of self and our relationship with our family and our environment, both personal and ecological.

Mark feels exiled from his sister Karin, whom he no longer recognizes, and Karin in turn feels exiled from her brother, shattered at the way this disease symbolizes her separateness from her own self and the world around her.

Powers' explorations of neurology and ecology render a chilly warmth to the story. His heart pumps clearly throughout the pages, and he bridges the (DeLillo)authorial distance by making accessible the burning concerns of everyman. The coldness of Nebraska and his virtuosity in geological and georgaphical descriptions is heated by the eerie passion of the story, the tenderness of the characters and the haunting allegorical presence of the cranes.

This book has circulated through my dreams on several occasions; The Echo Maker certainly lives up to its title. Also, the characters are well drawn and sympathetic, and you care deeply about what happens to them. Interestingly, although the author's main protagonist in Galatea 2.2 was named Richard Powers, I felt him undulating enigmatically in this novel even more so than the former.

There is something so powerful and reverberating and epic about The Echo Maker that you want to embrace the author, who you feel breathing and bleeding and searing through the most spiritual parts of your being. It is utterly and unassailably elegant, peerless, sublime, soulful, exalting, eternal, and yet grounded and accessible, palpable and wet.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Flowers for Algernon for the new millennium!!!!!

Okay, not really, no. Well, maybe a little...?

The best parts of this book were those written from the perspective of a character with severe traumatic brain injury. The rest of it was good too, but the characters were never quite convincing enough for me to suspend my disbelief and actually care what happened to them. Of course, I was helplessly distracted the entire time by the Man Behind the Curtain. Does Richard Powers do all his own research? Where does Richard Powers live? Does he live in New York? Did Richard Powers haunt the neuroscience journal stacks of Columbia for two years while putting together this book? Because that is kind of what I was picturing. Also, for those who do not already know this, Richard Powers DOES NOT TYPE his novels. He hasn't in years. No, Richard Powers DICTATES his novels, using VOICE RECOGNITION SOFTWARE!!!

How can I POSSIBLY focus on what's going on in the novel, when I'm grappling with an image of THAT the whole time???

None of this is meant to imply that The Echo Maker is not engaging and absorbing fiction, because it definitely is. It is just not quite as engaging and absorbing as the idea of Richard Powers.

But let's face it, that's some stiff competition.

Does Richard Powers *really* know everything? Is Richard Powers a happy man? Is Richard Powers Richard Powers's real name? Does Richard Powers have children? Does Richard Powers have a dog? Does he love his dog? Does he love it more than he loves the children? Does Richard Powers really have the capacity to love, or is this somehow unusually difficult for him? Does Richard Powers feel smarter than everyone else? Does he feel smarter than his characters? If he really does know everything, it must be strange to write about people who do not. Can he empathize with them? Does he pity them? Or is he.... strangely, powerfully (!) jealous?

Is it a great burden knowing everything? When Richard Powers was in elementary school, did some other kids call him a know-it-all? When he was younger, did Richard Powers smoke cigarettes? Has Richard Powers ever taken drugs? What are Richard Powers's friends like? Are they also famous writers? Is Richard Powers pleased when he is referred to as being a "writer's writer," or do you suppose he sometimes wisfully dreams of being more of a "reader's writer"....?

Reading The Echo Maker will not definitively answer any of these questions. But if you read carefully, I'm sure you will notice some pretty big clues.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 2 out of 5]

From a literary point of view, this rather is a disappointment: no sparkling prose, no warming story, no characters that you can or want to identify with, also no stylistic delights or ingenious changes in perspective, as in “The Time of our Singing”. This book seems conceptual and constructed, through and through, built around the problem of self-image, of the personal identity and how this is constructed by our brain.

Powers in this book uses three protagonists: Mark Schluter, a Midwestern guy who, after an awful crash with his truck, went through a very difficult modification of his character and of the way of looking at the world; Mark's sister Karin, who from one day to the next, puts her life completely in the service of her brother, but by whom she’s is not really recognized anymore (the Cappgrass syndrome), and lastly, the celebrated psychology professor Weber, - perhaps the real protagonist of this book- , who is going through a serious midlife crisis.

Agreed, Powers covers very fascinating themes, but in my view he's not really succesful in offering a credible story: it is a bit too didactic and too constructed. Powers obstinately wants to prove how strange, erratic and changeable the human mind is. As a result, too many pages are filled with scientific elaborations, and the author uses too many uncredible twists to prove his point. On the benefit side, there is a rather sympathetic portrait of the Midwest, and some beautiful pages on the mystery of bird migration (in this case, the millions of cranes that come to Nebraska, every spring).

I think I'm starting to see a pattern in Powers' work: there’s always a main character that initially is full of confidence and ambition, but whose self-image is crumbling as a result of events; this man/woman has to experience the nakedness of existence (in this book the rather coincidental working of the brain), and then has to make the best of it. To a greater or a lesser extent, that is an existential challenge that we all have to face. Powers has embarked on important stuff, but the way he worked out this book, didn't completely captivate me.(rating 2.5 stars)

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've always had mixed feelings about Richard Powers. On the one hand, he is at work creating a new kind of American literary voice -- one fluent in the vocabulary of technology that anyone with a computer and a gadget fetish begins to incorporate into his or her discourse. It's a burning, living, thoroughly modern idiom that most writers -- pale and sheltered one sees them -- have ignored, maybe even with some disdain. But on the other hand, Powers has always been a writer uncomfortable with emotion -- human interactions tend to feel robotic in his work. And he's terrible with endings. In The Echo Maker, Powers tries hard to bring humanity and the tiny horrors of intimacy into his work. Whatever success he has with this -- and there is some -- is entirely undermined by the shockingly bad, cliched, and embarrassing dialogue. Working class Midwesterners sound exactly as you'd expect them to sound -- in a sitcom. That is, in between standing in for Powers himself, when they sound as though the narrator has briefly entered the souls of his creation. It's a distraction, but not one without ironic reference to some of the book's themes: the physical mind under assault following a car wreck. Language, perception, relationships all fall under question. Characters struggle to articulate. Richard Powers struggles (and fails) to give their voices authenticity.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

SLIGHT SPOILER ALERT: I'm not giving away the ending here, but the following does give away some of the plot developments.

This won the National Book Award last year, and is by an author who has received one of the MacArthur "genius awards." Did it deserve it?

In the end, I can't endorse the choice, even though there is much to commend in this book. The basic story: a Nebraska factory worker flips his truck on a cold winter night, and when he wakes up, he believes that his sister has been swapped for a look-alike imposter -- a brain defect known as Capgras syndrome.

That brings a famous Oliver Sacks-type cognitive scientist to the scene, where he encounters not only the patient and his nearly hysterical sister, but a nurse's aide who is far too savvy and knowing to seem to be in the right place.

The book charts the long journey of the accident victim trying to make sense of his surreal world, and carries a couple relationship subplots along with it, along with a growing fight between preservationists who want to save the sand crane nesting area nearby and developers who have other plans. (The sections describing the sand cranes and their annual migrations are some of the most evocative in the book).

The language and metaphors of the book are powerful and the mystery of how the man was injured is interesting to watch unfold, but the one other major subplot -- the public humiliation of the cognitive scientist after his latest book comes out -- simply didn't ring true. Not only did it seem unlikely he would be subjected to that kind of peer disdain, but his reaction to it and the unraveling of his marriage made no sense to me, and was a major flaw in the novel and one that held it back from being as meaningful or sweeping as it was meant to be.

Too bad.

[Kim · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't finish this slow, overly descriptive, not-at-all intriguing, boring novel. It was a book-club pick and only two people finished it, one kicking and screaming.

The book is about a man in his mid-20s who's in a car accident and spends two weeks in a coma. When he wakes up and begins his recovery, he accuses his sister – the two have always been very close – of being an impostor. It's a disorder called Capgras syndrome, and it's very rare.

The neuroscience and psychology in the book are fascinating. Imagine what it would be like to think the person or people you love the most have been replaced by replica robots, aliens or government agents. On the flip side, imagine if someone you love thought you were an impostor. That would right and royally suck.

And you know, the sister in the novel is pretty much a suck of a main character. Powers just dropped the ball on developing her beyond a whiny, scarred-from-childhood sot. He hints at why she's that way but he doesn't follows through (or maybe he does eventually, but I couldn't get there). So instead of finding her sympathetic, I eventually just wanted to punch her in the face.

Anyway. Lots of novels are about extraordinary people. This novel is about ordinary people in an extraordinary circumstance during which neither the characters nor the writing lives up.

I found the writing maddeningly self-indulgent. The prose simply isn't crafty, skilled or beautiful enough to warrant its quantity. The story concept is a good one, and the science is, as I said, fascinating. Unfortunately, the pacing just didn't do them justice.

Save 400 pages of your time for another book – it's almost certain to be more enjoyable.

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my second time through this book, this time as part of a “project” to re-read all of Powers’ books in publication order, one per month for a year. As this is book number 9, there is a good body of work behind this that I have now read at least twice, plus some foreknowledge of what Powers will write after this one (I have read Generosity once and both Orfeo and The Overstory twice).

I’m a bit conflicted after completing this re-read of The Echo Maker. Somehow, it was simultaneously better than that the first time through and also not as good. I’m not sure how that can work, but it is how I felt on completing it.

This is a very different book to the 8 Powers’ novel that precede it chronologically. The narrative style is very different: for at least three-quarters of the book, the writing is fairly straightforward story-telling with little of the erudition and complexity that has marked earlier works. Powers sort of makes up for that in the final quarter, though.

Cranes (the birds) and their migration are central metaphors for the book. The opening pages show us cranes arriving at a site they visit every year as part of their annual migration. Their roosting is interrupted by a car crashing off the road and into a ditch. Having put the idea of migrating birds into the reader’s head, Powers then jumps off into his main, human, story. The driver of the crashed car is Mark and he is pulled from the wreckage after it is called in anonymously. When he comes round in hospital, we learn that he is suffering from Capgras syndrome, a brain condition that means sufferers come to believe that loved ones have been replaced by lookalikes and refuse to acknowledge them as the people they actually are. This is bad news for Mark’s sister Karin who has driven a long way to be at his bedside only to discover he thinks she is an imposter. The other thing found at Mark’s bedside is a mysterious note the text of which makes up the headings for each of the five sections of the book.

From this point, several stories spread out. As Mark’s condition develops, it comes to the attention of Gerald Weber, a famous neurologist and author of several popular books on the subject of the brain. Weber’s story is the other main narrative thread. Mark’s condition and Weber’s involvement with it cause Weber to start to doubt himself.

Then there is Barbara, a nurses’s aide in the hospital who several of the characters think they might have seen somewhere before. Barbara and the note are the two mystery elements that propel the story along, although the book is clearly about a lot more than just a simple mystery to be solved.

I’m not going to say anything more about the plot. But I will add a few comments about my experience of reading the book.

I think the reason I found it “not as good” as the first time through is that change of style. For much of the first part of the book, it almost doesn’t feel like a Powers’ novel, so different is the writing. It took me a while to adjust to that. But, at the same time, the book gradually adjusts as it progresses so that, by the end, we are reading what we have come to expect from Powers. It’s a little disconcerting.

But then the reason why I found it “better than the first time through” is because of all the layers I began to uncover. This was partly helped by the fact that I have read the book before. Knowing where you are going means you notice some of the signposts more clearly. But, also, I jumped onto the Internet a few times to check out some thoughts and, in doing so, uncovered some other ideas about the book which then informed my reading as it progressed.

For example, I started to make notes about references to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. That lead me to start wondering if the book was, in some way, re-telling that story. I started to try to map characters in this book to the, rather more famous, characters in L. Frank Baum’s novel. Then a quick dip into the Internet quickly showed me that Margaret Atwood was many years ahead of me and has already written an article about exactly this. I can’t access the whole thing as I am not a subscriber, but I think this is the article:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2006...

Then I started to wonder about the central metaphor of the cranes and their migration. There’s another article that I can’t access more than the first two pages of on brill.com which opens like this:

This article argues that Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker (2006) offers a counter-narrative to American nativism and imperialism, which gained power after September 11, 2001. Interweaving seemingly disconnected discourses and phenomena – ecology, neuroscience, and 9/11 – the novel makes a strong argument for the reinvigoration and preservation of America’s psychic mobility and migratory consciousness, which involve tolerance and open-mindedness. A central link between these seemingly disparate aspects of the novel is the concept of transmigration, which may refer to wandering souls as well as to migrating birds and people. Powers plays with this ambiguity of transmigration and adapts it to his ends by inventing a protagonist who not only inherits the liberal spirit of (trans-)migratory birds, the eponymous echo makers or sandhill cranes, but also becomes an outspoken opponent of homeland security and the war on terror.

And this leads to another key underlying theme. The book is set a few months after 9/11. It makes reference to that day but also to the aftermath and the war on terror. This theme was far more dominant for me in this second reading than I remember it being in my first reading.

And then there’s the place of this book in the overall collection of Powers’ novels. Looking back from this book, it is easy to see links to The Gold Bug Variations, Operation Wandering Soul, Galatea 2.2 and Plowing The Dark. I think others have argued for links to other Powers books. But that collection of five books (including this one) is an intense examination of what it is to be human. Gold Bug examined genetics (as did OWS from a different perspective) and seemed to me to argue that life is more than a random collection of genes: more inexplicable, more complex, more wonderful. Galatea 2.2 looked at machine intelligence compared with human intelligence. And now The Echo Maker examines the working of the human brain and seems to want us to realise that people are far more complex than we might be tempted to make them: science sometimes tries to reduce people to a set of rules, whereas Powers seems to think there is more to us than that. He is particularly interested in human creativity (and explored this in some depth in Plowing The Dark). Whilst thinking about this, I came across this quote from slate.com:

Part of the point of Mark’s delusion, and of Powers’ novel—of all Powers’ novels—is that all reality is virtual: The mind, like it or not, is its own world and can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of any flawed home. The arts, for Powers, are a special case of the general function we might call world-making, the maneuvers the brain undergoes in creating, out of a mass of facts, the terrain we navigate each day. What matters is not so much whether that world is the right one, but whether it can be shared: whether we can get other people to believe in our virtual realities, our family jokes, our hopeful life projects, and whether we can believe in theirs. Compassion, for Powers, is a form—the highest form—of imagination, since it involves imagined connections between our own and other people’s heads: “Of all the alien, damaged brain states” Weber’s books “described, none was a strange as care.”

And then this morning I opened this week’s (5 July 2019) copy of The Week magazine to read:

Artificial intelligence, we need to recognise, is as much an ideology as a process. Siliconvalleyism we might call it. No matter that the very idea that the human brain is a kind of computer is, in the words of the great neuroscientist Gerald Edelman, “one of the most remarkable misunderstandings in the history of science”; no matter that human judgement and creativity are not the output of a series of syntactical rules. Silicon Valley makes huge profits by seeking to persuade us that they are – to make us, like the architects, the servants of whatever their algorithms dictate. It isn’t that artificial intelligence is becoming more human. It’s that human intelligence is becoming more artificial, more conformist, more rule-bound. Siliconvalleyism and the flight from critical judgement is a greater threat to the liberal ideal than anything in Putin’s armoury.

Just on the basis that this book has triggered such a variety of thoughts, in the same way that the narrative splits and divides into different stories, I feel that I have to give the book 5 stars despite the fact that something about it wasn’t as amazing as first time I read it.

---------------
ORIGINAL REVIEW
---------------

Mixed emotions as I finish this book. About halfway through, I realised that I didn't want to be a person who has read all of Richard Powers' novels as much as I wanted to be a person who still has one (or more) Richard Powers novels left to read. Still, be that as it may, I have now read them all and they form, in my opinion, a formidable body of work: I think he is now firmly established as my favourite author.

This book is no exception to Powers' normal high standards. To be honest, I am tempted to give all his books (well, nearly all) 5 stars, but there has to be a way to identify the ones you really, really love as opposed to the ones you just really love.

It all starts with a car accident when Mark Schluter ends up in a ditch. He comes out of a coma suffering from Capgras delusion: he believes that his sister isn't actually his sister but is a clever copy. And no one can persuade him otherwise. This forms the platform to launch into a story that investigates both identity and memory. What makes us human. Is there any coherence to it or is it just a random conglomeration? Oh, and cranes (the birds, not the machinery) are a central metaphor. Then, to add spice to the mix, we get a good old-fashioned mystery. Who wrote the note that Mark finds at his bedside in the hospital? Why were there three sets of tyre marks on the road at the scene of the accident? The comforting thing about reading Powers is that you know all your theories will be wrong and that he will come up with a far cleverer ending than you could imagine. And he does.

This is perhaps one of the most accessible books Powers has written. Compared with, say, Operation Wandering Soul, it's a walk in the park. It doesn't pack quite the emotional punch of The Time of Our Singing which remains Powers' masterpiece as far as I am concerned, but it is a fascinating story that is expertly and beautifully told.

I think all of Powers' books go straight on to my "to be re-read" list.

[SCARABOOKS · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ad un certo punto si autodefinisce: “romanzo neurologico”. E tale è, alla maniera di Powers.
Cioè con un’immersione integrale, che totalizza in un linguaggio ed in un orizzonte da neurologo il modo di sentirsi, di vedersi e di pensarsi dell’uomo del nostro tempo, nell’America dell’anno delle Torri Gemelle. Impressionante la serie di stranissime sindromi neurologiche che tira fuori.

Solo scommesse a poste elevatissime con Powers. E regge sempre il livello. Più o meno.
Cioè con tutti i pregi (soprattutto l'esattezza), grandissimi della sua prosa. E con tutta la capacità che ha di stimolare la riflessione, sulle visuali che propone, mai banali, dei temi che tocca. Ma anche con tutti i suoi difetti di “troppo”: troppo pieno, troppo denso, troppo labirintico e zigzagante. Rispetto al “Tempo di una canzone” meno coinvolgente dal punto di vista emotivo. I personaggi restano tutti un po’ avvolti in una nube, in un sospetto di artificio.

Però resta il merito maggiore di questo romanzo, che è un altro. I grandi romanzieri del passato a leggerli oggi, alla luce di quel che si sta scoprendo sul funzionamento del cervello, hanno avuto una straordinaria capacità di intuizione. E’ tempo che il romanzo faccia un salto di qualità acquisendo i dati che ci stanno arrivando dai laboratori di ricerca sui fenomeni della percezione, della coscienza e dell’autocoscienza, dell’emozione e dell’empatia. E rinnovi temi, linguaggio e postazioni da cui raccontare le storie degli uomini. Powers ci prova e in parte ci riesce anche.

[Stacy Pershall · Rating 5 out of 5]

The number of two-star reviews here amazes me! Please, if you've never read Richard Powers before, are considering it, and are put off by these reviews, take the chance and read his work anyway. As a writer, I go back to his books over and over when I need to be reminded exactly how beautiful writing works. His stuff is dense and intellectual, which can make it difficult, and yeah, his dialogue can be stilted, like he's so smart he has trouble making his characters less erudite than himself. But The Echo Maker is one of his more accessible works, so it's a good place to start. If you don't give him a chance, you're truly missing out. There's nobody else like him; not even close.

[Daniele · Rating 3 out of 5]

Non si sfugge alle proprie radici, nemmeno negli incubi.

Il mio primo Powers.
Ho apprezzato la scrittura e l'impegno nella ricerca, ogni malattia citata, ogni caso particolare, sono andato a verificarlo su internet per vedere se fosse realtà o finzione narrativa (sfortunatamente ogni malattia descritta nel libro è reale ed esistente anche se si stenta a crederci...).
Detto questo, escluso Mark , non sono riuscito a "legarmi" a nessuno dei personaggi.
In alcuni tratti Powers è un po' prolisso ed il finale mi ha lasciato un po' d'amaro in bocca....
Tutto sommato comunque una piacevole lettura, ci rileggeremo prossimamente Richard!

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the fourth Richard Powers novel I read. After being so impressed by The Overstory last year, I decided to read one of his novels every month in reverse order of publication. I usually read an author in order of publication so doing Powers's books this way is giving me the weird sensation of experiencing an author devolving. In fact, so far I have liked each novel just a tiny bit less while remaining in awe of how he ties science and/or the arts to stuff that happens in real life.

Powers won the National Book Award for this one and it was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Mark Schluter lives in a remote Nebraska town. He has been a slacker most of his life but due to his first steady job in a meatpacking facility, he has managed to purchase a mobile home at the age of 27. Though he spends most of his off time getting drunk and stoned with his buddies, he feels he has got something pretty close to his dream life.

Then he has a near fatal car accident in the middle of the night while driving his pickup truck on a deserted road, leaving him in a coma from a severe head injury. Enter his older sister Karin, who has always been his protector. She moves into his mobile home and spends her days by his bedside. When Mark finally comes out of the coma, he is convinced that this woman, who looks and talks and sounds just like his sister, is an imposter.

He remembers very little about his accident but a mysterious note left by an unknown person seems to him to be the key to recovering his memory and finding out what happened.

Karin, who despite having only bad luck with men, is an intelligent person. Not satisfied with the doctors on Mark's case she does her research and contacts a famous cognitive neurologist, Gerald Weber. This man comes from New England to take a look and diagnoses Mark with Capgras syndrome; the delusion that people in one's life are doubles standing in for the real person.

After this the story gets stranger by the page. Gerald Weber is having a midlife career crisis. Karin takes up with an old friend who is involved in a green initiative to save the local river basin from business investors. The basin is a stopping off place in the migration path of sandhill cranes. Karin's old boyfriend is involved with the investors. Mark falls in love with one of his nurses, but Weber is convinced he has met her somewhere before in his life.

I read this while I had the flu so in some ways the convoluted plot fit in with my semi-delirious state. Richard Powers has stated in an interview that his intention was "to put forward...a glimpse of the solid, continuous, stable, perfect story we try to fashion about ourselves, while at the same time to lift the rug and glimpse the amorphous, improvised, messy, crack-strewn, gaping thing underneath all that narration."

Well, yes he did that at the same time the flu was doing that to me. So I don't know. Maybe it was the best time for me to read The Echo Maker. Everything gets worked out by the end of the book, except that none of the main characters remain the same as they used to be. Kind of the way I felt when I got better.

[Anastasia Hobbet · Rating 3 out of 5]

About half-way through this book, I grew so weary of its repetitious and academic tone that I checked out the Goodreads and Amazon reviews, wondering if my reaction to it was just me. I'm vulnerable to that paranoia; but I found I had lots of company. Some people were ranting mad in their disappointment over this book. For some reason--stubbornness--I kept reading and ended up admiring the book. No, I don't think it didn't deserve the National Book Award, but there's mystery, keen and beautiful writing, and compelling speculation about the human mind and identity. As a birder, I loved the crane info too, tho I can see why it all the poetic images of them might seem blithering to many. Overall, the book fails. Powers fell prey after Gold Bug, I think, to a problem common to many phenomenally successful authors: His early brilliance intimidated his editors. They let him wander and detour and maunder on. They didn't keep him honest and true, didn't force him to put real life in his characters or think through his plot clearly. Powers' characters in this book--particularly Gerald Weber--are mere simulacra of real people. In Weber's case, this is a literal shortcoming, since Weber is based on the eminent neurologist Oliver Sacks. Neither Sacks nor his readers (Full disclosure: I love Sacks' books; his recent autobiography, Uncle Tungsten, is one of the finest I've read.) would recognize him here but for the rip-off of his appearance, his book titles and many of his case studies. If Powers had been doing the full work of imagining this character, Weber wouldn't be based on Sacks but inspired by him. Weber's head would be stuffed with human thoughts, not the cold substitutes Powers offers: case study after case study after case study. There was a great book lurking in the manuscript of The Echo Maker, but Powers' editors didn't bother to help him find it. Where's a brave editor when you need one?

[Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mark Schluter flips his truck on a cold winter night. Amazingly he survives, but he suffers brain trama. He thinks his sister, Karin, is an imposter, as well as his dog. He thinks his house has been replaced with a replica. Mark’s personal tragedy is somehow connected with efforts to preserve the natural habitat of the Sandhill Crane, in the vicinity of Kearney, Nebraska. There is mystery here, although relatively low-key, as you don’t know how much of the unknown is actual versus just perceived by Mark in his impaired state.

I found myself initially pulled into the story and was confused by some of the low ratings in Goodreads. Although I continued to enjoy the story, I ultimately felt the novel was much longer than it needed to be; there simply wasn’t enough plot to justify the number of pages. I also found I was not very empathetic towards Mark or his sister, although logically I felt should be.

I read The Overstory in 2020, so this was only my second by Richard Powers. I noticed some similarities in how he structures his novels, at least across the two I have read. He takes a scientific topic, blends in a subject from the natural world, and builds a story that connects the two while allowing him to explore those topics thoroughly. The Echo Maker focuses on neurological problems in humans and a sustainable habitat for the Sandhill Crane.

Although I enjoyed The Echo Maker, I can’t give it a strong recommendation given the weaknesses I have noted. Towards the end I was ready for it to be done.

[Iulia · Rating 2 out of 5]

O carte foooooaaarte lungã ṣi care nu mi-a plãcut prea tare. Nici nu ṣtiu ce nu a mers prea bine, poate personajele de care nu m-am putut ataṣa (*Powers e chiar talentat în privința asta, parcã a avut un scop în sine de a-i face pe toţi ipocriți, mincinoṣi, falṣi sau toate la un loc), poate cã atâta mister m-a cam zăpãcit de cap ṣi prea mulți termeni medicali s-au combinat încât am ratat poanta = rezolvarea cazului. Dar ṣtiu sigur cã am ronțãit paginile cu ṣi despre cocori (*aṣa puține câte sunt, ele susțin scheletul întregului roman) ṣi cã mi-au trezit interesul/admirația fațã de aceastã familie de pãsãri mari.
E chiar trist cã dupä 600 de pagini nu simt vreo satisfacție, de nici un fel, deṣi rațional vorbind îmi dau seama cã miza cãrții este una serioasã = un semnal de alarmã pentru fiecare ocupant al planetei ãsteia. Naturã, ecologie, interese financiare, coruptie, mari corporații, faptul cã am ajuns într-un punct în care pare cã noi oamenii vrem doar sã ne distrãm si sã consumãm timpul, timp de calitate (*tot aud sintagma asta de ceva timp, dar e aṣa de plinã de interpretãri ṣi miza e mare, cã zãu cã nu are un sens cu adevãrat), corect!, dar ambalajul ṣi abordarea greoaie nu au ajutat deloc ṣi au frânat bruma aia de interes pe care mi-a trezit-o accidentul lui Mark. Domnul Powers este foarte ambițios ṣi îi plac spațiile întinse, dar eu m-am rãtãcit cu succes pe acolo.

[Tony · Rating 2 out of 5]

My guess is that Powers, an erudite fellow, learned a lot about the human brain from pouring through neuroscience literature, and then tried to write a novel (since he's an novelist) where he could forward what he learned to his audience. He adds to the plot with an intersection of more things he learned about migrating cranes in Nebraska. Pitting commercial developers (the bad guys) against environmentalists (saintly vegans), he manages through liberal logic (cf: God is love; love is blind; therefore God is Ray Charles) to deduce that every fight in America is over water just as every fight in the Middle East is over oil. Conspiracies abound. True, I wanted to know how the plot would end, but the journey was tiresome. You know: enough already; who wrote the damn note? The plot resolution was convenient, as convenient as his political theories. The characters are stereotypical or just plain maddening for their inability to act, adding implausibilities to the contrived plot.

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alright, I'm convinced. Richard Powers is a rambler. He rambles, extensively, through characters, plot, images. On and on. When he lights upon something interesting, he'll stay awhile (often too long), pressing into the depths with occasionally gorgeous sentences. But it's never really clear why he pauses, or why he keeps going -- it's just kinda the drawn-out, barely-coherent stories of some pretentious middle-aged white guy.

So in The Echo Maker, some of the sentences (and images) are certainly gorgeous -- but everything surrounding them is convoluted and frustrating. And like, okay -- as with Galatea 2.2 -- you could make excuses, oh you could make excuses. This is real smart. It's about consciousness and neuroscience and I don't really understand what he's doing, so it must be real smart, right? WRONG. It doesn't have to be real smart just because the author is real smart and knows how to turn a phrase. It can be a convoluted, confusing, boring mess! It can be! It doesn't mean you're stupid or I'm stupid or the person who legitimately liked this book is stupid -- it just means the book isn't a fucking masterpiece.

Powers irritates me. I don't like feeling I have to make excuses for authors -- the work should stand on its own. But I can't get swept into Powers' works, nor do I find them particularly inspiring or innovative or interesting. They've got some stunning verbal beauty and some well-crafted moments, but not enough to prop up the flailing plot, opaque themes, and absurd characterization. The Echo Maker offered some conversation pieces and several writing prompts, but any impact will fade quickly. It's already on its way out.

[Litbitch · Rating 2 out of 5]

I cannot believe this won the National Book Award. What kind of crap was it up against? I finished it because, well, that's what I do, and because there was a bit of mystery, but I found the relationships and dialogue utterly unbelievable, the characters less sympathetic with every chapter, and the supposedly deep, intimate struggles simply dull.
The stuff about the brain and brain injury was interesting; I probably should have read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat instead.
Seriously, how did this win an award?!?
Checking the NBAward website, I see that Only Revolutions was a finalist in 2006. I haven't read it, but the structure of Danielewski's book alone is more original than this overwritten, amateurish tome.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 1 out of 5]

Aborted at p. 126, 27.9%. I just couldn't waste any more time trapped in a book with this writing and these people. One sentence that set me off: "She fisted her skirt hem." No elaboration is given. Does this mean our co-protagonist Karin inserted her fist inside the hem of her skirt? Because hems are sewn down. Even if her hem had become unsewn, hems aren't usually deep enough to stick your entire fist in. Why would she be doing this anyway? This seems to be indicating that Karin is distracted or uneasy. Find a different way to express this rather than "fisting" which just makes us all think of anal sex. There was more fisting: "He fisted the paper and stared at it." "He turned back to Mark and fisted his shoulder."

Then there was Karin in a "rumpled bouclé skirt." Bouclé is a thick, nubby fabric that doesn't usually rumple, perhaps it could if you've been lying on a sofa with the skirt scrunched up around your waist for 24 hours. But Karin was freshly dressed.

Powers doesn't know his verb tenses. The simple past tense of sink is SANK, not SUNK. The simple past tense of shrink is SHRANK, not SHRUNK. So yes, that movie should be called "Honey, I Shrank the Kids."

There's a married couple who call each other "Man" and "Woman."

This is a National Book Award-winning novel and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. It has a GR average rating of 3.44, which is pretty low for award winning fiction. The writer and the critics should ask themselves why.

[Thomas Paul · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you spent a week reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat while watching the Hallmark Channel, you might end up writing this novel. Mark Shluter has crashed his truck and his sister, Karin, quits her job and dumps her boyfriend to take care of him. But Mark suffered a brain injury in the accident and insists that his sister is not his sister but someone pretending to be his sister. A famous neurologist, Gerald Weber, arrives to see Mark so he can write about him in his next book. And some cranes fly through town on their way to Alaska.

The main problem with the story is that Powers does nothing with the story. His characters are uninteresting to start with and are completely unbelievable. They don't react to situations, they overreact. Everything that happens is the most important thing that has ever happened and every character reacts that way. And Powers doesn't tell a story, too often he tells us about a story. For example, when Weber goes on a television show, we only find out that he embarrasses himself during the interview but not what he said that was so terrible that it destroyed sales of his book. Weber, a crucial character in the story, is the weakest written character in the book. It is virtually impossible to justify or understand his actions. And if two people have sex in the mud, don't you think they might want to shower or at least change their clothes before going off to lunch and then on to some tourist attraction?

There are some good parts of the book. The mystery of the letter left at the hospital is interesting and is wrapped up quite nicely. In a clever and effective technique, Powers writes alternating sections from the point of view of the various characters. But the book would have been much better if Powers had reduced the length by about 200 pages. I found myself becoming bored with the characters and the story. Serious editing and the elimination of certain story threads could have kept the book short enough to make us not care that the characters are completely unlikeable and unbelievable. But at 450 pages, the holes in the characters shine through.

[piperitapitta · Rating 4 out of 5]

La lingua perduta delle gru.

«Siamo tutti potenziali fossili che recano ancora nel corpo le asperità delle esistenze precedenti, i segni di un mondo in cui le creature viventi scorrono da un'era all'altra senza molta più consistenza delle nuvole.» - Loren Eisley, The immense Journey, "The Slit"

Per cercare di capire cosa possa spingere qualcuno in una gelida notte di febbraio a mettersi al volante del proprio furgone e lanciarlo a velocità folle lungo la North Line nei pressi di Kearney, Nebraska, consiglio di aprire Google Maps, e poi Street View, e guardare la North Line, prima, Kearney, poi, e infine iniziare a spostarsi lungo quelle strade che si susseguono geometricamente e ortogonalmente nei centri abitati, che di centro hanno veramente poco, per perdersi nel nulla che da Kearney, lungo la North Line, attraversa il Nebraska, fino a fuggirne per centinaia di miglia che, sempre uguali a se stesse, sembrano non portare mai da nessuna parte, in quelle settimane di aria sottozero incrostata di neve, i venti che si riversavano dal Dakota senza niente a rallentarli per centinaia di chilometri.
Eppure c'è chi torna in questi luoghi, a dispetto dei tanti che se ne allontanano sperando che sia per sempre; sono le centinaia di gru che ogni anno, e da migliaia di anni fedeli al loro passato, ripercorrono miracolosamente sempre lo stesso itinerario, rispettando un istinto primordiale, che si tramandano sin dalla nascita, che le obbliga a ripercorrere sempre quella stessa strada segnata solo nella loro mente, per arrivare fino a lambire Kearney, una intera città che vive in una continua amnesia retroattiva, a incendiare i cieli che si aprono infiniti sopra il fiume Platte e alle sue acque sempre più povere, per popolare quelle terre, strappate con un trattato truffa oltre cento anni prima ai nativi, ora prese di mira dalla speculazione edilizia locale.
È qui, in questo scenario, che si svolge la storia di Mark, giovane operaio in una fabbrica, vittima di un misterioso incidente automobilistico lungo la North Line, e di sua sorella Karin, che la ripercorre da Sioux City per tornare in suo aiuto.
La storia di una malattia, la sindrome di Capgras, che colpisce Mark dopo l'incidente, che impedisce a chi ne viene colpito, di riconoscere le persone più care, fino a sospettare che le stesse, che riesce a riconoscere fisicamente ma non emotivamente, siano state sostituite da impostori, o da robot programmati da chissà chi, o da alieni che si muovono nella sua vita come in un videogames che ha lo scopo di distruggerlo.
È la storia di Mark, che si perde, e dei circuiti impazziti del suo cervello, ove tutto, all'improvviso, diventa caos, ed è la storia di Karin, che ha provato a mettere ordine nella sua vita, allontanandosi da Kearney, e che invece, risucchiata dal caos della mente del fratello è costretta a tornare per ricominciare ad affondare lentamente nel proprio.
Ma è anche la storia di Weber, il neuroscienziato scrittore di fama nazionale che torna nel Midwest dopo esserne fuggito tanto tempo prima, che chiamato a cercare di ricollegare le sinapsi bruciate della mente di Mark, scopre lentamente nuovi circuiti mentali, che affollano la propria, capaci di mandarlo in corto circuito.
È la storia di un ordine geometrico, quello delle strade e di un luogo in cui nulla sembra essere stato costruito in maniera casuale, che si oppone al mistero e alla confusione che sembrano regolare la mente umana, dell'alienazione di vite vissute in case tutte uguali che si scontrano con quelle delle centinaia di uccelli che sembrano tornare dalla preistoria e che scelgono di tornare proprio lì, in quel luogo, per rivendicarne la proprietà e il diritto di appartenenza.
È un romanzo in cui tutto quello che sembra ordinato, geometrico, rigoroso, perpendicolare, è invece confuso e aggrovigliato, mentre quello che sembra essere apparentemente regolato dalla casualità e avvolto dal mistero, il ritorno delle gru, il cervello umano, i sentimenti che uniscono e allontano gli attori di questa storia, è regolato dagli equilibri della natura che, come un perfetto meccanismo a orologeria del quale si fatica inizialmente a sentire il ticchettio, sincronizza all'unisono verità e bugie, in una sincronia invisibile e incomprensibile a protagonisti e lettori, l'eco di una lingua capace di parlare e di accordare le menti e i cuori.
Un romanzo ambizioso, questo di Richard Powers, forse ancor più ambizioso del precedente, "Il tempo di una canzone", ma che non è stato in grado di rapirmi ed emozionarmi allo stesso modo, con una scrittura e una storia che alternano momenti di rara bellezza a momenti in cui la storia sembra perdere il ritmo, smarrirsi anch'essa fra i meandri della mente umana, o fra il reticolo delle strade di Kearney, in cui il romanzo, da psiconeurologico drammatico e intimista, cambia natura per diventare quasi un giallo, prima, un'inchiesta e una denuncia ambientalista, poi, per tornare, infine, al suo centro.
Ma qual era, poi, il centro? Ecco, io mi sono un po' persa, e insieme a me, nonostante tanta bellezza, è caduta una stella.

Il destino, dici? Cinque centimetri più a sinistra e la tua vita è quella di un altro.

«Conosci quel verso di Whitman?» le domandò. «"Quando hai esaurito tutto quanto ti offrono gli affari, la politica, la convivialità e via dicendo - quando scopri che niente di tutto questo soddisfa davvero o resiste a lungo - che cosa rimane? La natura rimane".»

[D'Ailleurs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Δεν ξέρω πως να αρχίσω για αυτό το βιβλίο: Η Κάριν, μια νεαρή κοπέλα ενημερώνεται ότι ο αδελφός της, Μάρκ, ο μόνος συγγενής που της έχει μείνει, βγήκε εκτός δρόμου με το φορτηγό του και είναι σε καταστολή. Σπεύδει στο νοσοκομείο για να τον βρει σε κώμα με ένα ραβασάκι δίπλα στο κρεβάτι του το οποίο έχει ένα περίεργο μήνυμα. Όταν ο Μάρκ συνέρχεται, παρά τη ταχεία ανάρρωση του αδυνατεί να αναγνωρίσει τη Κάριν: είναι βέβαιος ότι για κάποιο λόγο η Κάριν έχει αντικατασταθεί από κάποια ηθοποιό, μια κατάσταση γνωστή και ως σύνδρομο Κάπγκρας. Απογοητευμένη η Κάριν απευθύνεται στο γνωστό συγγραφέα νευρολόγο Τζέραλντ Βέμπερ. Τρελό στόρυ που αναπτύσσεται σε πολλά επίπεδα: η ιστορία του Μάρκ, το ταξίδι των γερανών κάθε χρόνο το ίδιο, η προσπάθεια μιας ομάδας οικολόγων να σώσουν ένα ποτάμι όλα μαζί προσπαθούν να δημιουργήσουν μια σημειολογία για την συνείδηση, την ταυτότητα και την μνήμη: είμαστε οι αναμνήσεις μας αλλά αν οι αναμνήσεις χαθούν τότε είμαστε κάποιοι άλλοι, δρούμε βάσει ενστίκτου όπως οι γερανοί ή συνειδητά με κύριο άξονα τις αναμνήσεις μας;

Αρκετά περίπλοκο, ιδιαίτερα ενδιαφέρον και πολύ απαιτητικό: ο Πάουερς το κάνει ακόμα πιο βαρύ προσθέτοντας ένα σκασμό ορολογία της νευροιατρικής, κάνοντας κοιλιά στη ροή του βιβλίου, ενώ το στόρυ του Βέμπερ είναι ιδιαίτερα ντεκαυελέ (παρακαλώ όχι άλλοι μεσήλικες πανεπιστημιακοί με "τέλειο" γάμο που περνάνε κρίση ηλικίας ήμαρτον πια). Σίγουρα θα το πρότεινα αλλά θέλει αρκετή υπομονή: όταν ξεκινάνε τα νευροιατρικά πιείτε ένα ποτήρι red bull με νες να μείνετε ξύπνιοι γιατί παρά την υπέροχη πρόζα του γίνεται εκνευριστικά βαρύ.

[Kremena · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book for its study of the human brain at different zoom levels; from the evolutionary scale of millions of years, our reptilian brain and deep-rooted animal instincts connecting us to the cranes, the intriguing species Powers has chosen to present his case. The narratives intertwining observations about the cranes, the water ways, and the human relationship to them (at once primevally close and irreparably distant) are beautifully woven and provide plenty of thought-provoking material. A nice example, which I won't include because it may possibly be a plot spoiler, is at the end of pg. 416/ top of pg. 417.

Powers zooms in on the brain at the system level -- "unsponsored, impossible, near-omnipotent and infinitely fragile", it forges a coherent picture of the self, completely unique to each individual ("The man who had taught her than any life one came across was infinitely nuanced and irreproducible"). Then he goes deeper, lifting the cover and exploring the subparts, and how amazingly the system continues to function when they are damaged. Yet another level down to the neurons, the coldly scientific chemical reactions (eg -- Bonnie's distress at reading about the God module and the belief switch) and then in a circle back to the origin of everything, the chemical spark which created life in a single cell.

I found many fascinating topics in every level of this examination, from discussions about empathy and our connection to other people, to the deeply personal perception of ourselves, seemingly continuous and stable yet scattered, fragile and mind-bogglingly complex underneath the surface.

The reason I didn't really like this book is because of the characters and their stories. I get the feeling that they are mere vessels for the subjects I described above. The siblings with a bad childhood, the selfless environmentalist, the jerk who the girl keeps running back to, the mystery woman with a secret -- all of these are sort of flat stereotypes one finds in many American films/books/TV shows. The 'damaged', highly emotional, self-absorbed characters are a contrast to the intricate observations made about the functioning of the brain and humans in general. I liked the story of Gerald Weber and his wife a little better, maybe because it felt a bit more real to me.

Lastly, I find the style of writing too choppy -- I often had to reread sentences and almost struggle to string together the meaning in a paragraph. The presentation lacks subtlety and has an in-your-face quality that sort of matches the state of disarray the characters are going through, but which does not make for smooth, continuous reading. As a result, it took me quite a while to finish this book, and there are probably many things I missed (for example, I was oblivious to the whole The Wizard of Oz theme until I read it in the Wikipedia entry after finishing the book... however, perhaps this is probably due to my own mediocre powers of observation). I think the writing style, together with my feelings about the characters, made it feel a little bit like I was plodding through a gray story, from one gem section about cranes or neuroscience to another. However, I should note that I thought the way the story was presented, switching between the perspectives of the main characters, is masterfully done (in the sense that Powers captures his characters' voice well, even though I may not appreciate the characters themselves).

To conclude -- I would recommend this book to someone who is interested in neuroscience and the study of the way our brain functions and perceives the 'self' (especially from a more anecdotal, artistic perspective, rather than a purely clinical one), and who appreciates the higher-level exploration of topics such as the human connection with other species (in this case, the cranes) and with the environment (in this case, the inevitable exploitation of the river which is the cranes' migratory route stop). To me, that is the real strength of this book, and the actual plot and characters pale in comparison.