The Echo Maker: Richard Powers

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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. 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. The Echo Maker" is a compelling exploration of memory, identity, and the mysteries of the brain, and it won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2006. 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.

A psychological thriller, a flawed love story, a study of authenticity in emotions, a commentary on America's relations with itself and the world, humanity and ecology. First I read the beautiful and opera-like The Time of our Singing and followed with the tender Galatea 2. To me, that is the real strength of this book, and the actual plot and characters pale in comparison.

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. No romantic relationship of her own has succeeded, nor have any of her attempts to run away from Nebraska. proffers a heavily philosophical debate about the nature of intelligence, artificial or not, but it's also an almost shy retelling of Pygmalion .

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. I found myself initially pulled into the story and was confused by some of the low ratings in Goodreads. 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. The mysterious nature of the disease, combined with the strange circumstances surrounding Mark’s accident, threatens to change all of their lives beyond recognition. 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.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. But as luck would have it, his pilgrimage out West coincides with a disturbance in his professional life: the critics have turned on him. He adds to the plot with an intersection of more things he learned about migrating cranes in Nebraska. As they delve into the complexities of the mind, they uncover surprising connections between the man's delusions and the natural world.

The novel delves into how memories shape our identities, and alternately, how the loss of memory can lead us to question our sense of self. Sometimes Weber’s musings on the byways of neuropsychology overelucidate ideas and themes explored with more concision and subtlety in other sections, but small potatoes, that. 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. 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. 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.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. 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. 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.

After a near-death experience on a wintery rural road in Nebraska, he now struggles with Capgras syndrome: post-traumatic affliction leading him to believe that his sister, Karin, is an imposter. The] aim in The Echo Maker is to put forward, at the same time, a glimpse of the solid, continuous, stable, perfect story we try to fashion about the world and 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.Although there is an ethereal glow that swirls in every page, there is a definite, concrete and suspenseful plot. I was literally and literarily transported while reading and was engaged deeply by the third sentence. 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.