The Echo Maker: Richard Powers

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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. There is much in here that will not be found in the local paper about obscure brain malfunctions and their implications. This leads Karin to renowned cognitive neurologist, Gerald Weber, known for solving unique neurological mysteries.

When a man suffers a traumatic brain injury and begins to believe that his own reflection is an imposter, his sister and a renowned neurologist must unravel the truth behind his condition. Weber may be a partial fictionalization of Oliver Sacks, 1933–2015, who was a neurologist, best-selling author, and professor of neurology at NYU School of Medicine. 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.Developers have their eyes on the land the birds use as their pit stop on their way up North, and in fact Karin’s ex-boyfriend heads the organization committed to preserving their wetlands.

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. Usually found only in schizophrenics, Mark's case is an extremely rare example of Capgras caused by injury. The Echo Maker” is not an elegy for How We Used to Live or a salute to Coming to Grips, but a quiet exploration of how we survive, day to day.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.

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. As a result, too many pages are filled with scientific elaborations, and the author uses too many uncredible twists to prove his point. 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. 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.Everything that happens is the most important thing that has ever happened and every character reacts that way. 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.

While he sleeps, Karin finds a mysterious note left at his bedside which reads: "I am No One / but Tonight on North Line Road / GOD led me to you / so You could Live / and bring back someone else. To me, that is the real strength of this book, and the actual plot and characters pale in comparison.

Then he goes deeper, lifting the cover and exploring the subparts, and how amazingly the system continues to function when they are damaged. Karin Schluter rushes back to her hometown to see her brother and discovers a strange handwritten note by his bedside: “I am No One / but Tonight on North Line Road / GOD led me to you / so You could Live / and bring back someone else. 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). 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.