Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.92 AVERAGE
3.92 AVERAGE
The idea behind this book, that a love story could be woven around dissertations on genetic mapping and music, turns out to be less appealing than you'd think. (That is, you might think it appealing if you had a more-than-average intellectual bent). But the result is neither fish nor fowl.
I can see why those who praise it like it. It's ambitious as hell, and sometimes the metaphors and wordplay are very apt and clever. But the book assumes that you either are a novice when it comes to the more technical material covered, and that you'll learn more about these things, or that you already have some expertise, and you're going to enjoy being lectured to. Neither is the case. The more you know, the more you're going to find the pages-long expositions tedious. And the less you know, the more you'll be lost in a less-than-clear literary muddle of fact, metaphor, and speculation. If you're in the latter camp, and you want to learn more about these subjects, I recommend the "...For Dummies" books.
However, I've heard Powers criticized for his characters being cyphers. I think that's a bit unfair. For me, the book flew along nicely when it dealt with the non-technical aspects of the lives of Jan, Todd, and Dr. Ressler, none of whom is in any way average, and none is indistinguishable from another, personality-wise.
I enjoyed the Q and A part of Jan's job. Trivia lovers will find a lot to enjoy in those segments. And it must be said that, when you finally get to them, there are a couple of very sexy set-pieces, although this book is by no means a bodice-ripper. This book was a literary sensation when it came out in 1992. I appreciate the ambition behind it, but its notoriety, I can't help but think, was only because there was little going on that year.
I can see why those who praise it like it. It's ambitious as hell, and sometimes the metaphors and wordplay are very apt and clever. But the book assumes that you either are a novice when it comes to the more technical material covered, and that you'll learn more about these things, or that you already have some expertise, and you're going to enjoy being lectured to. Neither is the case. The more you know, the more you're going to find the pages-long expositions tedious. And the less you know, the more you'll be lost in a less-than-clear literary muddle of fact, metaphor, and speculation. If you're in the latter camp, and you want to learn more about these subjects, I recommend the "...For Dummies" books.
However, I've heard Powers criticized for his characters being cyphers. I think that's a bit unfair. For me, the book flew along nicely when it dealt with the non-technical aspects of the lives of Jan, Todd, and Dr. Ressler, none of whom is in any way average, and none is indistinguishable from another, personality-wise.
I enjoyed the Q and A part of Jan's job. Trivia lovers will find a lot to enjoy in those segments. And it must be said that, when you finally get to them, there are a couple of very sexy set-pieces, although this book is by no means a bodice-ripper. This book was a literary sensation when it came out in 1992. I appreciate the ambition behind it, but its notoriety, I can't help but think, was only because there was little going on that year.
Many consider this to be Powers' magnum opus, so I am surprised to find that this one just did not interest me. I found the three main characters dry, and Powers repeated his metaphors over and over again until finally I had to say out loud, "I get it, dude." Another problem for me was that I was not interested in revisiting molecular biology to this degree. This is my third Powers novel, the previous two being his most recent works. I enjoyed those quite a bit so I will be coming back to Powers. This is not his magnum opus, in my opinion. I think Powers was still trying to find his stride at this point in his career.
Some reviewers write that this is a novel about love, but I prefer to think of it as a novel about genetics. The work oscillates between these themes, but so does the writing...
Powers just can't resist. Believe it or not, on p. 145 he wrote "...I remembered the woo we two too had started with..." (Google that one!). Then there's this gem: "How much worse, a millionfold more incomprehensible, the passage from monocot to monogamy" (p. 249). Another that is especially pithy: "Molecular rules are not fixed, but statistical..." (p. 398). And yet another: "Seven-pound Ivy Woytowich looks...exactly the way every newborn looks: a hive of tube worms attacking a soft-boiled beet (p. 448). [What does that even mean? In incomprehension I laughed till I stopped.]
Hence my sometimes ambivalence about this book and Powers' writing, which veers from trite to remarkable, sometimes practically in the same phrase.
This massive novel (639 pp.) explores art, biology, music, poetry, and computation. Enough for anyone.
Powers just can't resist. Believe it or not, on p. 145 he wrote "...I remembered the woo we two too had started with..." (Google that one!). Then there's this gem: "How much worse, a millionfold more incomprehensible, the passage from monocot to monogamy" (p. 249). Another that is especially pithy: "Molecular rules are not fixed, but statistical..." (p. 398). And yet another: "Seven-pound Ivy Woytowich looks...exactly the way every newborn looks: a hive of tube worms attacking a soft-boiled beet (p. 448). [What does that even mean? In incomprehension I laughed till I stopped.]
Hence my sometimes ambivalence about this book and Powers' writing, which veers from trite to remarkable, sometimes practically in the same phrase.
This massive novel (639 pp.) explores art, biology, music, poetry, and computation. Enough for anyone.
A librarian, Jan O'Deigh, and Franklin Todd, a computer technician, try to discover the story behind Frank's colleague, Stuart Ressler, who used to be a scientist on the cutting-edge of research into the mechanism by which DNA (its double helix structure recently discovered by Watson and Crick) controls genetic inheritance. As they learn about the Stuart's love affair, they themselves fall in love.
There are three narratives: Jan's present-day narrative, told in the first person; Jan's memories of the previous year when she and the now absent Frank tried to uncover Stuart's story, also told by Jan; Stuart's story from 1957, told from his perspective but in the third-person.
There are a lot of thematic correspondences:
The Gold Bug: a short story by Edgar Allen Poe about cryptography. Ressler's task is to decoding in the sense that he is trying understand which of the 64 possible combinations of triplets of RNA correspond to which of the twenty amino acids that build up proteins.
The Goldberg variations: a suite of musical pieces by Bach whose structure seems to mirror the combinations of the bases in the RNA triplets.
The fact the Jan is a librarian and DNA is, in a sense, a giant reference book of how to build proteins.
The fact that Frank and Stuart work with computers and computer programs are, in a sense, similar to DNA
The fact that Stuart gets cancer (not a spoiler, we learn this early): cancer is caused by inaccurate replications of DNA
Love as the drive towards reproduction and the problems this may have for some people
The fact that the story is about the love affairs bonding two pairs of people, as in DNA the bases are paired: A with T and C with G, unless there is an error in replication, symbolised in the book by infidelity.
It is the interplay of themes that is, one senses, most important for the novelist and he extends this to the idea that the text is also a coded message that the reader is deciphering into ideas; word-play is often used to show what might happen to the thoughts generated when the code is changed slightly: "Can all this babel come from the same idiot idiolect?" (Ch 12)
Godel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid by Douglas Hofstadter plays with similar ideas.
It is a fascinating book but it is long. If there is an excursion which can provide further illustration of the theme, the author does not hesitate to explore it. Thus, one character discovers that his daughter is colour-blind and, since he isn't, disowns her: classic red-green colour-blindness in carried on the X chromosome so that, for a girl to have it, she must inherit it from both her mother (where it could be recessive) and her father (where it couldn't). A computer malfunction has life-or-death consequences. But there are other aspects which seem less related to the theme. Do we need to know the profession of Jan's ex-partner? Do we need to learn about an obscure Flemish painter (Frank's dissertation is on art history)? These trees sometimes seemed to get in the way of my seeing the wood.
And Powers has a very long-winded style. One sentence is rarely enough: "She is a natural history, a sovereign kingdom, a theory about her environment, a virtuoso pedal-point performance. She follows a curve, a cadence, an animal locomotion he cannot help but lose himself to. Jeanette Ross is her own phylum." (Ch 11) It's certainly a virtuouso performance but I often felt that a little more precision, a little more succinctness, a little less prolixity ... it's catching!
This is an author who expects a lot of his readers: "A line runs down the office he shares with Lovering, straight as a surveyor's cut, an osmotic membrane separating the organization of Ressler's area from the entropic mayhem of his office mate. On Lovering's side, arboreal colonies of books, lush, vegetative pools of mimeograph, and ruminant herds of manila-enveloped crap creep up to the divide and abruptly drop off. On Ressler's side: the formal gardens of Versailles." (Ch 10) It's not just the need to have some sort of understanding of biuochemistry and thermodynamics and French history; you also need to be able to decipher sufficient of the unusual words (osmotic, entropic, arboreal, mimeograph, ruminant etc) to have the motivation to keep reading. On the other hand, the richness of the vocabulary and the ecstatic juxtaposition of so many ideas make reading this book a rewarding experience, even though it slows you up. But perhaps there's a happy medium, combining verbal and mental pyrotechnics with more conciseness, making the book an exhilarating romp up a hillside rather than an arduous slog up a mountain.
Gosh, this was hard work to read. But so worthwhile. I suspect that the verbal dexterity and the unquestionable polymathic brilliance of the author will mean that this book lingers in my memory long after easier but more trivial books have been forgotten.
There are three narratives: Jan's present-day narrative, told in the first person; Jan's memories of the previous year when she and the now absent Frank tried to uncover Stuart's story, also told by Jan; Stuart's story from 1957, told from his perspective but in the third-person.
There are a lot of thematic correspondences:
The Gold Bug: a short story by Edgar Allen Poe about cryptography. Ressler's task is to decoding in the sense that he is trying understand which of the 64 possible combinations of triplets of RNA correspond to which of the twenty amino acids that build up proteins.
The Goldberg variations: a suite of musical pieces by Bach whose structure seems to mirror the combinations of the bases in the RNA triplets.
The fact the Jan is a librarian and DNA is, in a sense, a giant reference book of how to build proteins.
The fact that Frank and Stuart work with computers and computer programs are, in a sense, similar to DNA
The fact that Stuart gets cancer (not a spoiler, we learn this early): cancer is caused by inaccurate replications of DNA
Love as the drive towards reproduction and the problems this may have for some people
The fact that the story is about the love affairs bonding two pairs of people, as in DNA the bases are paired: A with T and C with G, unless there is an error in replication, symbolised in the book by infidelity.
It is the interplay of themes that is, one senses, most important for the novelist and he extends this to the idea that the text is also a coded message that the reader is deciphering into ideas; word-play is often used to show what might happen to the thoughts generated when the code is changed slightly: "Can all this babel come from the same idiot idiolect?" (Ch 12)
Godel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid by Douglas Hofstadter plays with similar ideas.
It is a fascinating book but it is long. If there is an excursion which can provide further illustration of the theme, the author does not hesitate to explore it. Thus, one character discovers that his daughter is colour-blind and, since he isn't, disowns her: classic red-green colour-blindness in carried on the X chromosome so that, for a girl to have it, she must inherit it from both her mother (where it could be recessive) and her father (where it couldn't). A computer malfunction has life-or-death consequences. But there are other aspects which seem less related to the theme. Do we need to know the profession of Jan's ex-partner? Do we need to learn about an obscure Flemish painter (Frank's dissertation is on art history)? These trees sometimes seemed to get in the way of my seeing the wood.
And Powers has a very long-winded style. One sentence is rarely enough: "She is a natural history, a sovereign kingdom, a theory about her environment, a virtuoso pedal-point performance. She follows a curve, a cadence, an animal locomotion he cannot help but lose himself to. Jeanette Ross is her own phylum." (Ch 11) It's certainly a virtuouso performance but I often felt that a little more precision, a little more succinctness, a little less prolixity ... it's catching!
This is an author who expects a lot of his readers: "A line runs down the office he shares with Lovering, straight as a surveyor's cut, an osmotic membrane separating the organization of Ressler's area from the entropic mayhem of his office mate. On Lovering's side, arboreal colonies of books, lush, vegetative pools of mimeograph, and ruminant herds of manila-enveloped crap creep up to the divide and abruptly drop off. On Ressler's side: the formal gardens of Versailles." (Ch 10) It's not just the need to have some sort of understanding of biuochemistry and thermodynamics and French history; you also need to be able to decipher sufficient of the unusual words (osmotic, entropic, arboreal, mimeograph, ruminant etc) to have the motivation to keep reading. On the other hand, the richness of the vocabulary and the ecstatic juxtaposition of so many ideas make reading this book a rewarding experience, even though it slows you up. But perhaps there's a happy medium, combining verbal and mental pyrotechnics with more conciseness, making the book an exhilarating romp up a hillside rather than an arduous slog up a mountain.
Gosh, this was hard work to read. But so worthwhile. I suspect that the verbal dexterity and the unquestionable polymathic brilliance of the author will mean that this book lingers in my memory long after easier but more trivial books have been forgotten.
reflective
slow-paced
150, 330-335, 336, 341, 347, 429, 432, 444-46
Makes you think differently about wonder and will stick in memory but too long / I didn’t understand a third of the book
Makes you think differently about wonder and will stick in memory but too long / I didn’t understand a third of the book
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
informative
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
At times I loved this book. At times I wanted to quit it…much of it was way over my head even with the explanations included as part of the story. It helps to have a science and/or music background—but all in all, I’m glad I finished if for no other reason I can get in with my life.
Content Warnings
Minor: Infertility, Infidelity