After reading The Overstory, Richard Powers’ remarkable novel about trees, forests, and how the fate of humans, the environment and the planet is bound to them, I decided to explore some of his other work.
This much older novel weaves a gripping mystery out of the results of a young man’s late-night car crash, and the rare mental condition he suffers from the accident, where he can’t recognize the people and things closest to him.
In the course of this unusual but masterful story, a number of different characters and elements are drawn into the mystery, including the beloved sister he can’t recognize, an alienated older popular neuroscience writer and academic, an old girlfriend of the crash victim, the fate of a local migratory crane population and the river site they visit each year, and other pieces.
The book didn’t look that large or long, but it did seem to last and last, with a slowly unfolding story that held my rapt attention throughout, even though I frequently had no idea where it was leading. A neurological, philosophical and ecological mystery of the first order. Recommended.
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