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duvallmel 's review for:
Gold Bug Variations
by Richard Powers
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.