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STATE OF WONDER

by Ann Patchett ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2011

Thrilling, disturbing and moving in equal measures—even better than Patchett’s breakthrough Bel Canto (2001).

A pharmacologist travels into the Amazonian heart of darkness in this spellbinder from bestselling author Patchett ( Run , 2007, etc.).

Marina Singh is dispatched from the Vogel pharmaceutical company to Brazil to find out what happened to her colleague Anders Eckman, whose death was announced in a curt letter from Annick Swenson. Anders had been sent to check on Dr. Swenson’s top-secret research project among the Lakashi tribe, whose women continue to bear children into their 60s and 70s. If a fertility drug can be derived from whatever these women are ingesting, the potential rewards are so enormous that Swenson has been pursuing her work for years with scant oversight from Vogel; the company doesn’t even know exactly where she is in the Amazon. Marina, who went into pharmacology after making a disastrous mistake as an obstetrics resident under Dr. Swenson’s supervision, really doesn’t want to see this intimidating woman again, but she feels an obligation to her friend Anders and his grief-stricken wife. So she goes to Manaus, seeking clues to Dr. Swenson’s location in the jungle. By the time the doctor turns up unexpectedly, Patchett has skillfully crafted a portrait from Marina’s memories and subordinates’ comments that gives Swenson the dark eminence of Joseph Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz. Engaged like Kurtz in godlike pursuits among the natives, Swenson is performing some highly unorthodox experiments, the ramifications of which have even more possibilities than Vogel imagines. Indeed, the multiple and highly dramatic developments that ensue once Marina gets to the Lakashi village might seem ridiculous, if Patchett had not created such credible characters and a dreamlike milieu in which anything seems possible. Nail-biting action scenes include a young boy’s near-mortal crushing by a 15-foot anaconda, whose head Marina lops off with a machete; they’re balanced by contemplative moments that give this gripping novel spiritual and metaphysical depth, right down to the final startling plot twist.

Pub Date: June 7, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-06-204980-3

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011

LITERARY FICTION

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by Ann Patchett

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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by Donna Tartt

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SEEN & HEARD

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

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State of Wonder by Ann Patchett - review

I n the disenchanted millennial world, the American search for wonder centres on the very large and the unimaginably small. At one pole, there's the globe as playground, the hunt through the shrinking wildernesses for whatever magic may somehow lie hidden beyond the totalising reach of GPS. At the other extreme, there's the seething world below eye level, the microscopic life of cells and bacteria. Ann Patchett's sixth novel, State of Wonder , merges the two kingdoms in the story of a pharmacologist, Marina Singh, who travels into the Amazonian jungle to spend time with the mysterious Lakashi tribe.

Marina's personal motivation for travelling to Brazil is to find out what happened to her colleague, Anders Eckman, who evidently died making the same trip before her; but her professional duty is to report back on research being carried out by Annick Swenson, who happens to be Singh's former professor. Swenson is an ethnobiologist turned gynaecologist turned immunologist who is committed to keeping the Lakashi's secrets. Fierce and driven, she refuses to communicate with her employer about the years she has spent putatively investigating why the Lakashi women are able to bear children into their 70s.

Patchett's novels typically derive their narrative energy from unlikely romantic entanglements that slowly unravel under the pressures of life. In her first novel, 1992's The Patron Saint of Liars , Rose is more than 20 years younger than her second husband, but the cause of their marriage's long dark night is really their shared fidelity to a code of silence. State of Wonder echoes the asymmetries of that book in the emotional complexity that frames Marina's journey. Like Rose, Marina is in a relationship with a significantly older man – at 60, Jim Fox, her boss at the pharmaceutical company, is 18 years older than she is – and their relationship is marked by silences, with both "too fundamentally alone in their thoughts to stay with the other".

Their silence has several functions, since wonder can mean uncertainty as well as awe, and through the quiet, Marina's deeper confusions are about herself. She works in statin development, the field of cholesterol management that relies on drugs known as reductase inhibitors, but her inhibitions extend beyond the professional realm. For much of the book she is a case study in repression, rarely entertaining her emotions on any deep level. When her first marriage ends, Marina wants to cry, but decides there isn't time. And the fact that she never manages to complete a phase of her journey without losing her luggage seems to be a clue to her emotional state. Patchett has built novels around emotionally sealed characters before – in the Orange prize-winning Bel Canto , for instance, the Japanese translator Gen suspects he has "the soul of a machine", but his repression is balanced by our access to the minds of other characters, whereas throughout State of Wonder we stay close to Marina's consciousness.

But if Marina is elusive, so too is the world in which she moves. The novel's geographic range is broad, but its visual spectrum is only intermittently enriched by its hemispheric crossings. In its broad outlines, the Amazon voyage animates a series of clichés – the insects come "down in a storm", there's a wrestling match with an anaconda, an encounter with another tribe brings poison-tipped arrows "raining down" – while the jungle itself is characterised by "screeching cries of death and slithering piles of leaves". Even when the novel seems to call for the enlarged field of reference brought on by unfamiliar sights, Patchett is strangely evasive, as when Marina tries to reflect on the jungle but thinks only of her own past: "She kept still, looking out through the top of the hammock . . . She thought about medical school, the fluorescent halls of that first hospital, the stacks of textbooks".

This would seem like a failure of the novel's imagination, but elsewhere in the book – particularly back in Marina's Minnesota – Patchett's phrasings capture the radiant details of small moments: "It wasn't a bright day but what light there was reflected off the snow and cast a wide silvery band across the breakfast table . . . Pickles leaned up against Marina now and . . . she reached down to rub the limp chamois of his ears."

Yet since the novel begins, suggestively, on 1 April, perhaps we should be wary of taking State of Wonder at face value. The inhibited central character and the relative descriptive restraint free Patchett to concentrate on larger metaphysical questions. Just as Bel Canto 's siege unstitches the old parameters – time, language, class – that govern the characters' lives, so the jungle in State of Wonder is a space in which the calendar, medical ethics and capitalist economics are suspended and then sliced open for further consideration. As such – and despite Marina's Indian ancestry – the southern hemisphere serves to highlight the way the northern hemisphere works, rather than existing as a place in itself.

State of Wonder is heavy with literary parallels (to Henry James, to Greek myth), but in this respect the strongest links are to Heart of Darkness , a novel that Patchett substantially rewrites, with Conrad's male text repopulated with female characters (Swenson is this book's Kurtz). It lacks the developed emotional core of Patchett's earlier books, but it is her most mature work to date, a novel that tries to be more alive to the nerve ends of philosophical life than to the simpler machinery of character motivation.

• Ann Patchett

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State of Wonder by Ann Patchett: Book Review

I have an affiliate relationship with  Bookshop.org  and  Malaprop's Bookstore  in beautiful Asheville, NC. I will earn a small commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase merchandise through links on my site. Read more on my  affiliate page .

Synopsis from GoodReads :

Award-winning “New York Times”-bestselling author Ann Patchett ( Bel Canto , The Magician’s Assistant ) returns with a provocative novel of morality and miracles, science and sacrifice set in the Amazon rainforest–a gripping adventure story and a profound look at the difficult choices we make in the name of discovery and love. In a narrative replete with poison arrows, devouring snakes, scientific miracles, and spiritual transformations, State of Wonder presents a world of stunning surprise and danger, rich in emotional resonance and moral complexity. As Dr. Marina Singh embarks upon an uncertain odyssey into the insect-infested Amazon, she will be forced to surrender herself to the lush but forbidding world that awaits within the jungle. Charged with finding her former mentor Dr. Annick Swenson, a researcher who has disappeared while working on a valuable new drug, she will have to confront her own memories of tragedy and sacrifice as she journeys into the unforgiving heart of darkness. Stirring and luminous, State of Wonder is a world unto itself, where unlikely beauty stands beside unimaginable loss beneath the rain forest’s jeweled canopy

It’s been a while since I read this, but I actually remember quite a bit of it. That’s a good sign. Details of books generally leave me pretty quickly. Still, bullet points will probably say it best.

• I wasn’t particularly fond of Marina but I don’t remember why.
• It was very slow to get started. Once Marina gets to Brazil, I didn’t think she was ever going to leave that first dirty, hot, hopeless town. Ever.
• The beautiful young people she finds to help her were irritating as hell.
• The drug that Dr. Swenson was working on left me sending stink-eye stares in the general direction I think my parents live in. “Don’t even think about it, Mama. Just don’t.” (I know you’re reading this and wondering if your feelings should be hurt. It’s nothing bad. Ask me about it and you’ll understand. You’ll be shooting stink-eye glances at Granny.)
• I read this just weeks after starting a job in clinical research. After all of my brand-new training in Good Clinical Practice and Human Subject Protection and all that, I was a little tickled to read something that I understood from that point of view, at least a little, and horrified by how all of those regulations were thrown out the window by this group of fictional scientists.
• Snakes. Snakes! Oh my gosh, possibly the most freaking-Jennifer-out snake scene I have ever read in my life! *shuddershuddershuddershudder*
• Once it got going, it was a page turner. My sister compared the plot to something Michael Crichton would write, and she loves his work. I can see where she’s coming from.
• The plot did fall apart a little bit toward the end. There was simply too much going on.

Let’s call this a thinking-person’s adventure story. I enjoyed it overall and recommend it if you’re looking for something of that description.

Read an excerpt .

Find author Ann Patchett on her website .

Buy State of Wonder at

If you’re anywhere around Asheville, NC, Ms. Patchett will be speaking at UNCA in conjunction with Malaprop’s on November 5, 2013.

I have an affiliate relationship with Malaprop’s , my local independent bookstore located in beautiful downtown Asheville, NC; and Better World Books . I will receive a small commission at no cost to you if you purchase books through links on my site. My opinions are completely my own.

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I love Michael Crichton, so I might have to give this a try 🙂 I hate when I go to write a review and don't remember the book any more, but I think you did a great job dealing with that!

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State of Wonder by Ann Patchett: review

Helen Brown is impressed by Ann Patchett's State of Wonder, an intriguing novel about an Amazonian tribe in which women remain fertile till their deaths.

I was baffled when Ann Patchett won the 2002 Orange Prize with Bel Canto . The novel — about an opera diva swept up in a Latin American terrorist siege — didn’t strike me as special enough to be raised above so many more strikingly original books.

But Patchett’s latest novel really is something special and worth considering for all the literary prizes, festivals and reading groups going this year.

In State of Wonder , the American novelist imagines a primitive tribe, living deep in the Amazon, where the women remain fertile unto death. In all other respects their bodies deteriorate normally with age. But their reproductive systems remain eternally youthful, allowing them to continue bearing children into their seventies and eighties.

If scientists working for the fictional pharmaceutical company, Vogel, can discover the Lakashi tribe’s secret and bottle it, then they could revolutionise the lives of women around the world and rake in the big bucks.

But there’s a problem. No matter how much money they pay her, the maverick researcher running the project refuses to report on her progress. Worse still, they don’t even know exactly where she is.

Dr Swenson has convinced the company bosses that to protect both the unspoilt nature of her subjects and the value of the drug she’s developing, the location of the Lakashi must remain a secret. So when Vogel’s CEO finds the board pressing him for updates, he decides to send the Minnesotan researcher Anders Eckman in quest of news.

A keen birdwatcher, he kisses his wife and three small boys goodbye and flies off to Manaus with his binoculars, eager for a glimpse of the rainforest’s feathered glories.

Patchett’s novel opens in Minnesota as Eckman’s colleague, Marina Singh, receives the news of Eckman’s death from fever. “We chose to bury him here in a manner in keeping with his Christian traditions. I must assure you it was no small task,” writes Swenson. “As for the purpose of Dr Eckman’s mission, I can assure you we are making strides.”

Unsurprisingly, neither Vogel’s CEO or Eckman’s widow are willing to accept this is all there is to know.

Both turn to Marina for answers. A single, childless woman in her forties, who spent 10 hours a day in an office with Eckman, she has a personal investment in finding out what happened to him, and no ties to prevent her from making what now appears to be a dangerous expedition.

Though highly intelligent, Marina is a biddable woman. She doesn’t want to leave Minnesota. She has personal reasons for being anxious about a reunion with her former mentor, Swenson. But, when asked, she packs a bag and commences a course of malaria tablets that give her screaming nightmares.

Patchett’s account of Marina’s journey to the humid heart of the jungle grips slowly and steadily, like a python, as she develops her Atwoodian themes. Muscular layers of drama, ideas and psychology coil themselves slickly around the reader’s brain.

Although the pace often feels as slow, muddy and dreamy as the Amazon in its lazier stretches, it pulls you on with a powerful undertow of profound questions, compelling characters and startling revelations. There are many strange and difficult twists and truths tangled like roots beneath the surface of this story.

Marina is a wonderful heroine: she’s constantly seeking the kind and correct path, making mistakes and occasionally rebelling against her lot.

At 42, and in an uncertain relationship with an older man, she’s on the cusp of becoming the kind of woman who may need the pills her company is paying to develop. On the other hand, she’s free enough to jack in her safe, old life and begin a reckless new adventure.

The charismatic septuagenarian Swenson proves a fascinating, sharp-tongued eccentric who may have humanity’s greater good at heart but appears to care little for the individual humans around her.

Most moving, and surprising, are Marina’s post-mortem feelings for Eckman. He was one of her tribe. She aches for his fatherless boys and her own empty office.

Sleeping in his old bed in the jungle, she reads the fevered letters he wrote home and weighs the duty she owes to the people of Minnesota, the Amazon and the world. And the exhilarating ending really did leave this reader in a state of wonder.

Watch Ann Patchett discuss State of Wonder and read from the book

State of Wonder

by Ann Patchett

368pp, Bloomsbury, £12.99

Buy now for £11.99 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) from Telegraph Books

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'State Of Wonder' Deftly Twists, Turns Off The Map

Maureen Corrigan

State of Wonder By Ann Patchett Hardcover, 368 pages Harper List Price: $26.99

Read an excerpt.

It's not often that a novel leaves me (temporarily) speechless. But Ann Patchett's new novel isn't called State of Wonder for nothing, because that's exactly the state I've been in ever since I first opened it. The numbness has worn off by now, but for days, all I could say to friends who asked me about it was the one-word review "Wow."

If you're familiar with Patchett's work, particularly her most famous novel, Bel Canto, you know that her imagination roams far afield without sacrificing authenticity or lyrical power. The idea of terrorists invading the South American estate of an opera-loving Japanese businessman sounds like a premise for a disposable thriller; in Patchett's hands, of course, it turned out to be a riveting mediation on how love can reveal itself in unexpected human and artistic forms. State of Wonder revisits the South American locale and even features a key scene that takes place in the Manaus Opera House deep in the Amazonian rain forest of Brazil. Otherwise, the basic plot of State of Wonder is more directly indebted to those classic tales where Western explorers delve deep into the primitive "off the map" places left on the planet and in their own psyches. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is the main inspiration here, but old English majors will catch references to other "gone native" tales like Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust , where an adventurer marooned in the Brazilian jungle consoles himself, as Patchett's characters do, by reading a mildewed collection of the works of Charles Dickens.

Ann Patchett is the author of six novels, including Bel Canto , which won the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award. Melissa Ann Pinney hide caption

The gist of the storyline of State of Wonder is this: Dr. Marina Singh, a 42-year-old research scientist working for a pharmaceutical company in Minnesota, is sent to Brazil to locate the remains of her deceased lab mate — a nice family guy who was himself sent into the rain forest months earlier to find another employee, the reclusive Dr. Annick Swenson. Dr. Swenson has been in the wild 10 years, working to unlock the secret to the prolonged fertility of an isolated Amazonian tribe. The women of that tribe give birth well into their 70s, and if the fertility chemical found in a rare tree bark can be distilled and made available back in the States, it will be, as Marina's deceased co-worker once said, "menstruation everlasting ... the equivalent of Lost Horizon for American ovaries." Marina is an ideal candidate for what turns out to be a female explorer tale because she's so alone: Apart from a secret tepid affair with her boss, the most profound human connection she has had for years has been the daily small talk she shared with her dead colleague. With so little to lose, Marina sets off for the Amazon, dully suspecting that what awaits her there may well be "the horror, the horror."

Over half of State of Wonder is devoted to Marina's struggles in the rain forest, and one of the miracles of this novel — at least to a non-nature enthusiast like me — is just how inexhaustibly enthralling Patchett's descriptions of the flora, fauna, ants and anacondas are. Here's a snippet of a description of Marina walking out of the airport in Manaus and following her driver to his car:

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Review: an amazon adventure, replete with love, 'wonder'.

The outside air was heavy enough to be bitten and chewed. Never had Marina's lungs taken in so much oxygen, so much moisture. With every inhalation she felt she was introducing unseen particles of plant life into her body, tiny spores that bedded down in between her cilia and set about taking root. An insect flew against her ear, emitting a sound so piercing that her head snapped back as if struck ... They were not in the jungle, they were in a parking lot.

Similarly, the characters Marina stumbles upon in the Amazon are uncharted worlds unto themselves: There's a strange young slacker couple who act as gatekeepers for Dr. Swenson; a deaf native boy named "Easter" whom Marina comes to cherish as a son; and the imperious Dr. Swenson, the center of the mysteries, who holds herself and her colleagues to almost suicidally high standards of self-denial. Even with such a relatively limited cast of characters, Patchett keeps the plot twisting, turning, like one of those slithery anacondas, until the very last pages. This is a masterpiece of a novel about the awful price of love and the terror of its inevitable loss. As much as readers will surely come to admire Marina for her explorer's bravery, we should also applaud Patchett for her own fearlessness in expanding the terrain of the possible in storytelling.

State Of Wonder

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“State of Wonder,” Patchett’s sixth novel, is a riveting variation on that tightly plotted journey from darkness to light. The novel traces the steps of 42-year-old Marina Singh, pharmacologist at the Vogel Pharmaceutical Company in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Marina makes her way to a place deep in the bowels of the jungle, “somewhere on a tributary off the Rio Negro” in Brazil, and then must fight her way back home to the bright, frozen landscape of Eden Prairie.

Marina is sent to the Amazon by Vogel Pharmaceuticals in pursuit of a rogue scientist, Dr. Annik Swenson. Dr. Swenson’s research into the miraculous post-menopausal fertility of the women of the Lakashi tribe is so valuable to Vogel that the company funds Dr. Swenson’s secret work with an open checkbook and virtually no questions asked. Only a few months earlier, Marina’s lab partner Anders Eckman was sent to the Amazon on the same mission. But Anders never returned, leaving Marina to puzzle over the announcement of his sudden death and leaving Mr. Fox, the 60-year-old suit-and-tie-wearing Vogel CEO who is also Marina’s lover, to scramble for a “plan B.” Dr. Marina Singh will be this “plan B.”

In a matter of weeks, Marina is sailing on a pontoon boat “down a river into the beating heart of nowhere”, a would-be Charlie Marlow voyaging into Conrad’s heart of darkness. Patchett’s heroine leaves her comfort zone in Eden Prairie armed with little more than the talismans of Western civilization: a volume of Henry James, a back issue of the New England Journal of Medicine and a high-tech, GPS-enabled cell phone so sophisticated that it can “make a phone call from Antarctica”. She travels to the Amazon seeking answers for herself (about the mysterious circumstances of Anders’ death and about the meaning of her own life) and information for the Vogel Pharmaceutical Company (about Dr. Swenson and her progress in the development of a revolutionary new fertility drug).

“State of Wonder” is Marina’s interior, psychological journey back in time to confront her past, in the shape of her former medical school professor Dr. Swenson; and a vivid account of her travels through snake-infested rivers, malarial swamps and “thick walls of breathing vegetation”.

Unfortunately, if somewhat predictably, Marina’s luggage never makes it with her to Dr. Swenson’s remote research station in the jungle, leaving her with some serious chinks in her techno-scientific armor. This is a particular problem because the Brazil of “State of Wonder” is a perilous and threatening place. Patchett’s South American jungle is bursting with creepy-crawly people and insects, all of which pose a potentially lethal threat to the novel’s civilized scientific wayfarers. Swarms of bodies cycle anonymously through the novel and around Marina as her personal voyage unfolds. Dense clouds of insects clamor for blood, and armies of natives mass around the fluorescent lights of a storefront in a frenzy to get inside, or the lonely beam of a flashlight in the jungle. The insatiable, minimally rational and barely-human appetites that drive the indigenous people of the novel are, finally, best embodied by the tribe of sinister cannibals who keep the scientists on their toes as they hover menacingly just on the margins of the story, at least until the novel’s nail-biting eleventh hour, when Patchett propels them into position front and center.And yet, Patchett’s greatest strength, her imagination, ultimately gives shape to a host of platitudes about the primitive pleasures and dangers that lie out there in the jungle.

In “State of Wonder” Patchett writes with the confidence and authority of an author-explorer endowed with the power to imagine a universe divided into ill-mannered natives and the modern men and women from Minnesota who teach them table manners, instruct them in the art of wiping their feet before they get into bed, and train them to be docile subjects, “submitting themselves to constant weighing and measurement, allowing their menstrual cycles to be charted and their children to be pricked for blood samples”.

Unlike Marina or Dr. Swenson or Anders or any of the other figures who are temporarily transplanted from civilization to Amazonian wilderness, Patchett’s natives are only semi-human; they don’t possess civilized language, but make sounds “less like words and more like the call and answer of birds.” They swim in the river in packs with “their long throats stretched up like turtles” and they swarm in a beam of light like massive schools of oversized fish. Doomed to a life outside of the grand narratives of Western progress, left behind by the forward march of modernity, the Lakashi coexist with archaic creatures, like the “freakish brand of great white bird with a wing span of a pterodactyl” and are seemingly impervious to evolutionary change. Dr. Swensen explains, “They are an intractable race. Any progress you advance to them will be undone before your back is turned. You might as well come down here to unbend the river”. If “State of Wonder” falters, it is its tendency to rely on Western truisms about exotic lands and indigenous peoples and offer up a curiously clichead view of life beyond the knowable edges of home.

Part scientific thriller, part engaging personal odyssey, “State of Wonder” is a suspenseful jungle adventure with an unexpected ending and other assorted surprises.

Laura Ciolkowski teaches Literature at Columbia University. She is also Associate Director of the Columbia University Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference.

State of Wonder By Ann Patchett HarperCollins Books, 353 pages, $26.99

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State of Wonder

By ann patchett, a journey into the heart of the amazon.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett ( Bel Canto, The Magician’s Assistant ) tells the story of a doctor, Mariana, who is sent to Brazil, at the behest of the pharmaceutical company she works for, to locate an elusive scientist who was once her teacher, a Dr. Annika Swenson. Dr. Swenson has, for many years, been given a blank check to research and develop a new, groundbreaking drug involving female fertility. The key to her research is hidden in the secrets of the Lakashi tribe with whom she has been living among in this time. When the company receives news that another doctor sent to locate and monitor Dr. Swenson has died in the jungle, Mariana is sent in to check up the progress of the research the company has invested liberally and heavily in.

The story is in some ways reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness . Whereas Conrad’s Marlow is sent into the Congo to check up on the egomaniacal Kurtz, Patchett’s Mariana is sent into the jungles of the Amazon after the renown Dr. Swenson. There, she discovers a world of anacondas, tribal villages, shamans and lots and lots of wilderness. And like Marlow, pursuing her goal means facing up to uncomfortable truths.

As Mariana ventures forward, closer to her goal but also deeper into the jungle, she finds her past crashing upon her present. The anti-malarial pills she takes leave her screaming at night with nightmares of her father who left her family to move back to India; and locating her former medical school instructor dredges up and forces her to confront an old memory from a medical specialty she once abandoned.

I enjoyed Patchett’s Bel Canto and was expecting similar from this novel. Whereas Bel Canto was sweet but maybe a little divorced from reality, State of Wonder replaces that sweetness with a certain amount of grittiness and something a little more grounded. However, Bel Canto also had a charm to it that State of Wonder seems to be missing.

I thought it was interesting in parts, but it only seems to skim the surface of being substantive. Whereas Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , dives deep and hard into the ugly core of its story, Patchett’s novel kicks up some dirt and concludes. Ultimately, I finished the book without being particularly moved, though, like I said, I did enjoy some parts of it. With the exception of a few sections, I didn’t find it too difficult to stay interested. There is a fair amount of discussion of medical ethics in there, which some may find interesting.

I think for lovers of literary fiction, you might try giving it a shot anyway and perhaps something in it will speak to you moreso than it did me. It’s certainly not a bad book. Also, anyone interested in medical ethics might like it, though I didn’t think it said anything too earth-shattering, but I guess it depends on where you’re coming from prior to having read it. It’s one of those books I feel pretty sure won’t stick with me, but it wasn’t time wasted either. I’d probably recommend to give it a pass, unless you’re curious, in which case, what the hell, give it a shot.

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Suspend Your Disbelief

State of wonder, by ann patchett.

In her sixth novel, State of Wonder, Ann Patchett delivers an adventure story that still rests comfortably on the shelf of Literary Fiction. Researcher Marina Singh leaves her Minnesota lab for the Amazon to investigate a coworker's death and evaluate the research of a field team deep in the jungle.

by Jackie Reitzes

The woman is Marina Singh, a researcher in a Minnesota pharmaceutical lab who embarks on a mission to the Amazon. She is dispatched there to recover the details of her coworker’s recent death, and to evaluate the research of a field team deep in the jungle, a team headed up by her former mentor, Dr. Swenson. The checkered relationship between mentor and mentee, between student and teacher, is at the fulcrum of the novel’s central tension.

Deposited in the South American city of Manaus, Marina sets out to track down Dr. Swenson, whose work on developing a controversial new fertility drug suggests a  scientific quest for progress, and the invasion and potential exploitation of the Lakashi, a fictional population indigenous to the Amazon.

Throughout, Marina is plagued with nightmares—a reaction to the anti-malaria drug Lariam—and these nightly rebellions of the psyche provide a recurring connotative trope:

Even if she went home tomorrow she would have to take it for another four weeks. It was the drug’s way of reminding the patient that the trip isn’t over. The trip would be in the blood stream, in the tissues.  All the potential disasters of the place would continue to linger inside.

The persistence of the drug’s nightmarish side effects raises questions about what exactly medicine does, if the supposed “therapy” spawns new, harder-to-cure maladies (in this case, nightmares). Conversely, Marina ingests a shaman’s cup of river liquid to bring down a near-fatal fever, and after a delirious, death-like trance, is pretty much healed. This paradox of modernization versus preservation recurs throughout the novel.

The Lariam also acts as a metaphoric stand-in for how journeys linger in your blood, even after the trip is over, as a psychological breeding ground for illness or health. The idea that a place could live inside you, ripe with disaster or amelioration, internalizes the external arc of the story, layering conflict upon conflict. Good stories, too, are likely to linger, as this one does, even after the act of reading them has ended.

In the tradition of Heart of Darkness , State of Wonder proves the delineation between civilization and jungle is a murky one. Once among the Lakashi, Marina and Dr. Swenson face medical challenges and ethical choices about the boundaries of science and its rippling implications. As Dr. Swanson sums up, their work is a slippery slope between progress and dependency:

What happens to the girl whose brother cuts her after I’ve gone? Does the tribe still have faith in the man who sewed up heads before me? Has he kept up his own skills or was he too busy watching mine? I don’t intend to be here forever…

Through the formidable Dr. Swenson, Patchett challenges the assumption that progress be defined through academic or capitalistic objectives: Is a hot pharmaceutical commodity worth the human price exacted for its potential distribution? Is scientific innovation worth taking down an entire self-sustaining society? In posing questions such as these, State of Wonder cautions against easy answers.

One explanation offered between the jungle and civilization is the existence of art. Before trekking to the jungle, Marina comes to see the Manaus opera house as a kind of sacred space:

There was no real explanation for how such a building was conceived for such a place. Marina thought of it as the line of civilization that held the jungle back. Surely without the opera house the vines would have crept up over the city and swallowed it whole.

One would hope after having lived with the Lakashi, Marina’s definition of civilization and the jungle’s menacing reach of influence would surely be more measured and less imperialistic. However, the idea that art is what creates a society or separates civilization from savagery is notable:

In these past few days of fever, Marina had forgotten herself. The city was breaking her down along with the Lariam, her sense of failure, her nearly mad desire to be home in time to see the lilacs. But then the orchestra struck a note that brought her back to herself. Every pass of the cellists’ bows across the cellos’ strings scraped away a bit of her confusion, and the woodwinds returned her to strength. While she sat in the dark, Marina started to think that this opera house, and indeed this opera, were meant to save her.

Words and sentences, then, like bows and strings, can bring us back to ourselves. The act of reading is an act of salvation; narrative and expression are lifeboats on a meandering river.

Patchett’s magic is in weaving these details so effortlessly that they never register as constructed. Her use of language and voice; the development of a wide range of characters who differ in race, age, and gender; and the elements of mystery and suspense all contribute to a bona fide page turner, an adventure story that still rests comfortably on the shelf of Literary Fiction.

Her gift for capturing emotional nuance registers throughout, as in these two (of many possible!) examples:

At that moment she understood why people say You may want to sit down. There was inside her a very modest physical collapse, not a faint but a sort of folding, as if she were an extension ruler and her ankles and knees and hips wee all being brought together at closer angles. There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.

The character’s modest physical collapse and the thousand small pin-pricks of loss both register with instant clarity—the universality of the feeling is rendered in such a concise, precise way, that you wonder why nobody thought to express it as such before.

Great authors can infuse a physical setting with the emotional undercurrents of their story. State of Wonder , drawing from its “exotic” locale, capitalizes on this notion that the perception of our surroundings is inflected by our emotional state. A figure undergoing transformation, then, sees the strange as familiar, the familiar as strange:

Beyond the spectrum of darkness she saw the bright stars scattered across the table of the night sky and felt as if she had never seen such things as stars before. She did not know enough numbers to count them, and even if she did, the stars could not be separated one from the other, the whole was so much greater than the sum of its parts. She saw the textbook of constellations, the heroes of mythology posing on fields of ink. She could see the milkiness in everything now, the way the sky was spread over with light.

This de-familiarization is crucial to convey the change necessary for all protagonists – the idea that a truly powerful experience upends the very definition of what we think we know. Everything, down to “such things as stars” must be redefined. Old expectations are washed clean, and we’re left with something new and dangerous and beautiful.

The title is never fully explained, but we can infer that this state of wonder is in part a reference to the magical qualities of the jungle and its inhabitants. In addition, the concrete noun “state/statehood” mixed with the dreamy uncertainty of “wonder” offers a useful dichotomy for Marina’s predicament. She is a doctor, a scientist, but, inserted into the jungle, she possesses a child’s capacity for awe and terror:

She had had a good imagination as a child, though it had been systematically chipped apart by years of studying inorganic chemistry and charting lipids. These days Marina put her faith in data, the world she trusted was one that she could measure. But even with a truly magnificent imagination she could not have put herself in the jungle. She felt something slip across her rib cage—an insect? A bead of sweat? She kept still, looking out through the top of the hammock at the bright split of daylight in front of her… she excelled not through bright bursts of imagination but by the hard labor of a field horse pulling a plow.

Reading (or writing) a book is itself a kind of odyssey. Most writers would tell you the bulk of their work is not all bright bursts of inspiration and light, but something closer to excavation. You go down to find something, to suss something out, and you come back changed, different than you were before. It is more plow pulling and less harvest. But what is lovely about this particular paragraph, and, indeed, Patchett’s latest novel, is that, in a different setting, the everyday mechanics of charting lipids and a putting your faith in data take on a larger significance, their own poetic magnitude. A lab in the Amazon is not the same as a lab in Minnesota. The charts and studies come to carry their own sacred connotations, so much so, that even when you yourself have returned to the original state, the journey is still with you.  Perhaps by being dropped down into an entirely new environment, some of our chipped-away astonishment can be restored.

As readers, we allow ourselves to be transformed by the spell a good book casts, and, if we’re lucky, that spell puts us in a state of—yes—wonder.

Further Links and Resources

• Via NPR, read an excerpt from State of Wonder . Consider ordering your copy from fabulous indie bookstore Powell’s.
• On Ann Patchett’s website, read a brief bio of the author, learn about her other books , and listen to an interview . Book clubs: If you’re interested in reading one of Patchett’s novels—or her wonderful memoir, Truth & Beauty , this page provides direct links to discussion guides and tips on starting a reading group.
• We recommend this great recent profile of Patchett in the Guardian and this Weekend Edition interview with the author.
• In this video from Bloomsbury Publishing, Patchett discusses State of Wonder :

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State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

• Publication Date: May 8, 2012
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• ISBN-10: 006204981X
• ISBN-13: 9780062049810
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STATE OF WONDER

State of Wonder  is a world unto itself, where unlikely beauty stands beside unimaginable loss, a tale that leads into the very heart of darkness and then shows us what lies on the other side.

Dr. Marina Singh, a research scientist with a pharmaceutical company, is sent to track down her former mentor, Dr. Annick Swenson, who seems to have all but disappeared in the Amazon while working on what is destined to be an extremely valuable new drug. Nothing about the assignment is easy: not only does no one know where Dr. Swenson is, but the last person who was sent to find her, Marina's research partner Anders Eckman, died before he could complete his mission. Plagued by trepidation, Marina embarks on an odyssey into the jungle in hopes of finding Dr. Swenson as well as answers to troubling questions about her friend's death, the state of her company's future, and her own past.

Once found, Dr. Swenson, now in her seventies, remains as ruthless and uncompromising as she was in her earlier days at Johns Hopkins. With a combination of science and subterfuge, she dominates her research team and the natives she is studying with the force of an imperial ruler. But while she is as threatening as anything the jungle has to offer, the greatest sacrifices to be made are the ones she asks of herself, and will ultimately ask of Marina. 

“ In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant. ”

Click to Purchase: PARNASSUS BOOKS  (signed) | INDIEBOUND | BARNES & NOBLE | HARPER COLLINS | listen on libro.fm

– Entertainment Analysis and Reviews

The Power of Ethics and Exploration in Ann Patchett’s “State of Wonder”

“State of Wonder” is a novel by Ann Patchett that was first published in 2011. The story follows Marina Singh, a scientist who travels to the Amazon rainforest to investigate the death of her colleague and retrieve data from his research on a fertility drug being developed by their pharmaceutical company. As Marina navigates the unfamiliar and dangerous terrain of the jungle, she encounters a host of characters who challenge her worldview and force her to confront the ethical implications of their work.

Patchett’s writing style is known for its lyricism, attention to detail, and empathetic characterization. She has won numerous awards for her previous works, including the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction.

In this article, we will examine the major themes, symbols, and characters of “State of Wonder,” as well as analyze Patchett’s writing style and the critical reception of the novel. Through this exploration, we hope to gain a deeper understanding of the significance of “State of Wonder” in contemporary literature and the enduring legacy of Ann Patchett’s writing.

State of Wonder Plot Summary and Characters

Themes and symbols of book state of wonder, style and language, state of wonder novel reception and criticism.

“State of Wonder” is a complex and multi-layered novel that weaves together various plot threads and explores the inner lives of its characters. The story is set in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, where Marina Singh is sent by her pharmaceutical company to investigate the death of her colleague, Anders Eckman, and retrieve data from his research on a fertility drug being developed by the company.

As Marina delves deeper into the mysteries of the jungle, she encounters a cast of characters who challenge her beliefs and push her to confront the ethical implications of their work. These characters include:

• Dr. Annick Swenson: The brilliant but enigmatic scientist who oversees the research project in the jungle and holds the key to unlocking the secrets of the fertility drug.
• Mr. Fox: The CEO of the pharmaceutical company who sends Marina on her mission to the jungle and has a complicated history with Dr. Swenson.
• Easter: A deaf boy who lives with the Lakashi tribe in the jungle and serves as Marina’s guide and translator.
• Dr. Nkomo: A doctor who works with Dr. Swenson in the jungle and becomes a key ally to Marina in her quest to uncover the truth.

Another important theme in the novel is the ethical implications of scientific research, particularly in the context of developing new drugs and treatments. Through the character of Dr. Swenson and her work on the fertility drug, Patchett raises questions about the balance between scientific progress and the potential harm that can be caused by unchecked experimentation.

The novel also features a number of symbols that add layers of meaning to the story. One of the most prominent symbols is the jungle itself, which represents both the beauty and the danger of the natural world, as well as the mysteries that lie hidden within it. The fertility drug is another important symbol, representing both the promise of new life and the potential for harm and destruction.

Overall, the themes and symbols in “State of Wonder” work together to create a complex and thought-provoking exploration of the human condition and the ways in which we interact with the world around us.

Ann Patchett’s writing style is characterized by its lyricism, attention to detail, and empathetic characterization. In “State of Wonder,” she uses language and imagery to evoke the lush and dangerous world of the Amazon rainforest, as well as the inner lives of her characters.

Some specific elements of Patchett’s style and language in “State of Wonder” include:

• Metaphors and similes: Patchett uses vivid and often surprising metaphors and similes to describe the natural world and the emotions of her characters. For example, when Marina first arrives in the jungle, she describes the heat as “a physical presence, like a hand pressing against her chest.”
• Sensory description: Patchett pays close attention to sensory details, particularly in her descriptions of the jungle. She uses vivid and evocative language to describe the sights, sounds, smells, and textures of the natural world.
• Interior monologue: The novel features a number of passages in which characters’ thoughts and emotions are revealed through interior monologue. This technique allows Patchett to explore the inner lives of her characters in depth and to create a sense of intimacy between the reader and the characters.
• Dialogue: Patchett’s dialogue is realistic and naturalistic, with characters often interrupting and talking over one another. This creates a sense of immediacy and realism in the novel.

In terms of language and style, “State of Wonder” has been compared to other works of literature that use similar techniques to explore the intersection of science and humanity, including:

• “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley: Like “State of Wonder,” “Frankenstein” explores the ethical implications of scientific research and the ways in which science can both create and destroy.
• “The Overstory” by Richard Powers: This novel also features a deep exploration of the natural world and the complex ways in which humans interact with it.

“State of Wonder” was widely praised by critics upon its release, with many lauding Patchett’s skillful storytelling, vivid imagery, and complex characters. The novel was a finalist for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and was named one of the best books of the year by numerous publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Some common themes in the critical reception of “State of Wonder” include:

• The novel’s exploration of complex ethical issues surrounding scientific research, including the exploitation of indigenous populations and the responsibility of scientists to consider the potential harm of their work.
• The richness and depth of Patchett’s characterization, particularly in the character of Dr. Swenson, who is both a brilliant scientist and a deeply flawed human being.
• The evocative and immersive nature of Patchett’s prose, which transports readers to the lush and dangerous world of the Amazon rainforest.

At the same time, some critics have raised concerns about certain elements of the novel, including:

• The pacing, which some readers found slow or uneven in places.
• The portrayal of the indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest, which some readers felt was reductive or overly simplistic.

“State of Wonder” by Ann Patchett is a compelling and thought-provoking novel that explores complex ethical issues surrounding scientific research, the natural world, and humanity’s place within it. Through her skillful storytelling, vivid imagery, and complex characters, Patchett creates a powerful and immersive reading experience that has captivated readers and critics alike.

Throughout this article, we have examined the key themes and plot points of “State of Wonder,” as well as the novel’s historical and literary context. We have also analyzed Patchett’s writing style and language, highlighting the techniques she uses to evoke the lush and dangerous world of the Amazon rainforest and to explore the inner lives of her characters.

In addition, we have discussed the critical reception of “State of Wonder,” including both the praise it has received for its exploration of complex ethical issues and the criticisms that have been raised about certain elements of the novel. Despite these criticisms, however, “State of Wonder” remains a powerful and influential work of literature that continues to resonate with readers today.

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Book Review: State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

This review for State of Wonder by  Ann Patchett has a couple of spoilers

I read the novel by Ann Patchett, State of Wonder , a few years back. I didn’t know anything about the book when I read it, a friend loaned it to me, and since I enjoyed Bel Canto , Patchett’s most well-known work, I decided to give it a read, and I’m glad I did. 

It is a fun read that takes place in South America’s steamy jungles. In a  place where discoveries can still be made. It also touches on a topic at the forefront of my mind at the time, fertility. But I am getting ahead of myself; let’s start from the beginning.

State of Wonder : The Plot

The story centers around a woman named Marina, who is a biochemical researcher for a sizeable pharmaceutical company. She is a rather uninteresting woman who does rather uninteresting work with cholesterol. She is neither a wife nor a mother and has centered her life around her career. In the first pages, she is thrust into an adventure in South America when her lab research partner and work-husband goes missing in the jungle where he has been doing research. She is sent to find out what happened and collect any research that he has left behind. 

Marina embarks on this journey and meets interesting characters along the way. Some could argue she finds herself through it all. It’s a storyboard template that was a pleasant summer read. The description of the jungle is so vivid it becomes its own character. Patchett’s story realistically describes the relentless heat, the supersized bugs, and the steamy breathlessness of the jungle. She is, obviously, a master of her craft.

As the novel progresses, Marina eventually finds her way to the remote location where her research partner went missing. She learns the details of what is being studied, and it is something that could change the world and the role of women in society.

The remote tribe has a secret where fertility can be extended. The female tribe members instinctively and ritualistic expose themselves to a natural component. It’s a thick bark at the base of a jungle tree, that allows them to continue fertility well into old age. 

While the book mostly focuses on Marina’s story and the fun descriptions of the cast of characters she meets and her fish out of water scenario as a city girl in the jungle, this fertility aspect caught my attention more than the bland protagonist. The book concludes with Marina finding a new sense of self and provides a firm conclusion that satisfies the reader.

But for me, the book raised questions about fertility that had been percolating in my mind. Questions that a 41-year-old woman might be considering as the door to her fertile years start to close. Questions, like, if we can continue having babies into old age, should we? 

I’m sure many women and older moms have focused on this question. The answer is different for everyone. But collectively, we are seeing the age of first-time moms going up, and it’s not as unusual as it once was to see older moms.

In the book, the component that can extend fertility is researched and sought after by scientists with dollars signs in their eyes, imagining bottling and selling this to a woman in the later stages of life. These desperate women thought they had missed their chance, a vulnerable group who would pay top dollar for this miracle drug. 

Patchett’s novel brought up many questions; Would this fertility extender be a great discovery? Would women buy it? What would be the ripple effect on society of a generation of older mothers, not just in their forties but in their fifties and sixties having babies? 

Reflections on My Own Fertility Journey

This wonderfully crafted novel gave me pause. It is harder being an older mother, and maybe that’s why nature doesn’t want us to have babies late in life. Nature knows that the mother instinctively does the child-rearing. Maybe that’s why men can impregnate well into their 70s because they don’t bear the weight literally and figuratively of the pregnancy and upbringing. 

Likewise, these themes that State of Wonder brought up resonated with me because I had my second child at 42 just a month shy of 43. I conceived naturally, but the toll it took on my body was much more than I expected. Being a mother is challenging, and being an older mother adds another layer of exhaustion. Of course, any mother would tell you it’s worth it.

In the end, I found the book a great read and a chance to explore the idea of fertility and parenthood.

Have you read it? What did you think?

Keri Anne Johnson

Keri has been teaching English and ESL for the past twenty years. She loves learning about new places and perspectives. She is an ex-expat and a mother to a teenager and toddler. She is slowly readjusting to life in the Pacific Northwest after twenty years in Mexico.

Hi, I’m Keri. I am a freelance writer and ghostwriter. As a ghostwriter, I create an authentic voice for others.  As a writer, I write about parenting, food, travel, health, books, and education. I have excellent research skills and experience writing content in all niches. To learn more about me check out my About page .

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‘State of Wonder’

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By Ann Patchett

• June 1, 2011

The news of Anders Eckman’s death came by way of Aerogram, a piece of bright blue airmail paper that served as both the stationery and, when folded over and sealed along the edges, the envelope. Who even knew they still made such things? This single sheet had traveled from Brazil to Minnesota to mark the passing of a man, a breath of tissue so insubstantial that only the stamp seemed to anchor it to this world. Mr. Fox had the letter in his hand when he came to the lab to tell Marina the news. When she saw him there at the door she smiled at him and in the light of that smile he faltered.

“What?” she said finally.

He opened his mouth and then closed it. When he tried again all he could say was, “It’s snowing.”

“I heard on the radio it was going to.” the window in the lab where she worked faced out into the hall and so she never saw the weather until lunchtime. She waited for a minute for Mr. Fox to say what he had come to say. She didn’t think he had come all the way from his office in the snow, a good ten buildings away, to give her a weather report, but he only stood there in the frame of the open door, unable either to enter the room or step out of it. “Are you all right?”

“Eckman’s dead,” he managed to say before his voice broke, and then with no more explanation he gave her the letter to show just how little about this awful fact he knew.

There were more than thirty buildings on the Vogel campus, labs and office buildings of various sizes and functions. There were labs with stations for twenty technicians and scientists to work at the same time. Others had walls and walls of mice or monkeys or dogs. This particular lab Marina had shared for seven years with Dr. Eckman. It was small enough that all Mr. Fox had to do was reach a hand towards her, and when he did she took the letter from him and sat down slowly in the gray plastic chair beside the separator. At that moment she understood why people say You might want to sit down . There was inside of her a very modest physical collapse, not a faint but a sort of folding, as if she were an extension ruler and her ankles and knees and hips were all being brought together at closer angles. Anders Eckman, tall in his white lab coat, his hair a thick graying blond. Anders bringing her a cup of coffee because he’d picked one up for himself. Anders giving her the files she’d asked for, half sitting down on the edge of her desk while he went over her data on proteins. Anders father of three. Anders not yet fifty. Her eyes went to the dates — March 15th on the letter, March 18th on the postmark, and today was April 1st. Not only was he dead, he was two weeks dead. They had accepted the fact that they wouldn’t hear from him often and now she realized he had been gone so long that at times he would slip from her mind for most of a day. The obscurity of the Amazonian tributary where Dr. Swenson did her research had been repeatedly underscored to the folks back in Minnesota ( Tomorrow this letter will be handed over to a child floating downriver in a dugout log , Anders had written her. I cannot call it a canoe. There never were statistics written to cover the probability of its arrival. ), but still, it was in a country, it was in the world. Surely someone down there had an Internet connection. Had they never bothered to find it? “Wouldn’t she call you? There has to be some sort of global satellite—”

“She won’t use the phone, or she says it doesn’t work there.” As close as they were in this quiet room she could scarcely hear his voice.

“But for this—” she stopped herself. He didn’t know. “Where is he now?” Marina asked. She could not bring herself to say his body. Anders was not a body. Vogel was full of doctors, doctors working, doctors in their offices drinking coffee. The cabinets and storage rooms and desk drawers were full of drugs, pills of every conceivable stripe. They were a pharmaceutical company; what they didn’t have they figured out how to make. Surely if they knew where he was they could find something to do for him, and with that thought her desire for the impossible eclipsed every piece of science she had ever known. The dead were dead were dead were dead and still Marina Singh did not have to shut her eyes to see Anders Eckman eating an egg salad sandwich in the employee cafeteria as he had done with great enthusiasm every day she had known him.

“Don’t you read the reports on cholesterol?” she would ask, always willing to play the straight man.

“I write the reports on cholesterol,” Anders said, running his finger around the edge of his plate.

Mr. Fox lifted his glasses, pressed his folded handkerchief against the corners of his eyes. “Read the letter,” he said.

She did not read it aloud.

The rain has been torrential here, not unseasonable yet year after year it never ceases to surprise me. It does not change our work except to make it more time-consuming and if we have been slowed we have not been deterred. We move steadily towards the same excellent results.

But for now this business is not our primary concern. I write with unfortunate news of Dr. Eckman, who died of a fever two nights ago. Given our location, this rain, the petty bureaucracies of government (both this one and your own), and the time sensitive nature of our project, we chose to bury him here in a manner in keeping with his Christian traditions. I must tell you it was no small task. As for the purpose of Dr. Eckman’s mission, I assure you we are making strides. I will keep what little he had here for his wife, to whom I trust you will extend this news along with my sympathy. Despite any setbacks, we persevere.

Annick Swenson

From “State of Wonder” by Ann Patchett. Excerpt courtesy of Harper, the publisher.

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State of Wonder: A Novel Paperback – Large Print, June 7, 2011

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"Expect miracles when you read Ann Patchett's fiction."— New York Times Book Review

Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author Ann Patchett returns with a provocative and assured novel of morality and miracles, science and sacrifice set in the Amazon rainforest. Infusing the narrative with the same ingenuity and emotional urgency that pervaded her acclaimed previous novels Bel Canto , Taft , Run , The Magician's Assistant , and The Patron Saint of Liars , Patchett delivers an enthrallingly innovative tale of aspiration, exploration, and attachment in State of Wonder —a gripping adventure story and a profound look at the difficult choices we make in the name of discovery and love.

• Print length 544 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper Large Print
• Publication date June 7, 2011
• Dimensions 6 x 1.36 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 0062065211
• ISBN-13 978-0062065216
• Lexile measure 990L
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

“An engaging, consummately told tale.” — New York Times

“Emotionally lucid. . . . Patchett is at her lyrical best when she catalogues the jungle.” — The New Yorker

“This is surely the smartest, most exciting novel of the summer.” — Washington Post

“The Amazon setting is something Patchett does rather marvelously.… The book is serious, but also so pleasurable that you hope it won’t end.” — NPR

“Outlandishly entertaining…[with] a brilliantly constructed plot.” — Elle

“Packs a textbook’s worth of ethical conundrums into a smart and tidily delivered story. . . . Ms. Patchett presents an alluring interplay between civilization and wilderness, between aid and exploitation.” — Wall Street Journal

“The large canvas of sweeping moral issues, both personal and global, comes to life through careful attention to details, however seemingly mundane—from ill-fitting shoes and mosquito bites to a woman tenderly braiding another woman’s hair.” — O, the Oprah Magazine

“A spellbinder from bestselling author Patchett. . . . Thrilling, disturbing and moving in equal measures—even better than Patchett’s breakthrough Bel Canto .” — Kirkus Reviews  (starred review)

“A superbly rendered novel. . . . Patchett’s portrayal is as wonderful as it is frightening and foreign. Patchett exhibits an extraordinary ability to bring the horrors and the wonders of the Amazon jungle to life, and her singular characters are wonderfully drawn. . . . Powerful and captivating.” — Library Journal  (starred review)

“A thrilling new novel. . . . The world imagined in this novel is unusually vivid. . . . Reading State of Wonder is a sensory experience, and even after it’s over you’ll keep hearing the sounds of insects, and your own head will still be hot.” —

“A thrilling new novel. . . . The world imagined in this novel is unusually vivid. . . . Reading State of Wonder is a sensory experience, and even after it’s over you’ll keep hearing the sounds of insects, and your own head will still be hot.” — MORE Magazine

“Patchett makes the jungle jump off the page…This is Patchett’s best effort since The Patron Saint of Liars and, yes, that includes Bel Canto ” — Shelf Awareness

“Extraordinary. . . . Is there nothing the prodigiously talented Ann Patchett can’t do? . . . Patchett’s last knockout pages proceed full-speed ahead, with more twists and turns and trachery than the Amazon River. Nothing is as it seems, and the ending is as shocking as it’s satisfying.” — Boston Globe

From the Back Cover

Dr. Marina Singh, a research scientist with a Minnesota pharmaceutical company, is sent to the Amazon to find her former mentor, Dr. Annick Swenson, who seems to have disappeared while working on a new drug. No one knows where Dr. Swenson is, and the last person sent to find her died before completing his mission. Plagued by trepidation, Marina embarks on an odyssey in hopes of finding answers.

Now in her seventies, the uncompromising Dr. Swenson dominates her research team and the natives with the force of an imperial ruler. But while she is as threatening as anything the jungle has to offer, the greatest sacrifices are those Dr. Swenson asks of herself, and will ultimately ask of Marina, who finds she is still unable to live up to her teacher’s expectations.

Replete with poison arrows, devouring snakes, and cannibals, State of Wonder is a tale that leads you into the very heart of darkness, and then shows what lies on the other side.

About the Author

Ann Patchett is the author of novels, most recently the #1 New York Times bestselling Tom Lake , works of nonfiction, and children's books. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner, the Women's Prize for Fiction in the UK, and the Book Sense Book of the Year. Her novel The Dutch House was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and Time magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. President Biden awarded her the National Humanities Medal in recognition of her contributions to American culture. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is the owner of Parnassus Books.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Large Print; Large type / Large print edition (June 7, 2011)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 544 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0062065211
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062065216
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 990L
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.25 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.36 x 9 inches
• #10,427 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
• #13,776 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
• #45,733 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Ann patchett.

Ann Patchett is the author of six novels, including Bel Canto, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction. She writes for the New York Times Magazine, Elle, GQ, the Financial Times, the Paris Review and Vogue. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

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Customers say

Customers find the story engaging, poignant, and well-written. They praise the writing quality as wonderful, beautiful, and elegant. Readers also find the characters interesting and enjoyable. They describe the themes as intriguing and the book as thought-provoking. They mention it holds their attention throughout and is full of detail.

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Customers find the story engaging, interesting, and poignant. They also say the author creates a world that will captivate them. Readers also mention the book is gripping and offers a surprising conclusion.

"Ann Patchett is an awesome story teller who creates a world that will captivate . Her novels are mesmerizing. Read them all...." Read more

"...of what it is like to be a totally foreign environment--and it's fun to read , to boot." Read more

"...applaud Patchett, the skillful nuance of her art, and this engaging and human story . Her "gift of craft" gives us the gift of this story." Read more

"...It's an incredible read , full of detail about the lives of the Amazonian indigenous group Dr Swenson lives among...." Read more

Customers find the writing quality of the book wonderful, beautiful, and elegant. They appreciate the subtle artistry with words and the effortless flow of sentences. Readers also mention that the author's presence is hopeful and full of grace.

"... Her novels are mesmerizing . Read them all. I think my favorite is Bel Canto." Read more

"...The book is full of external references , which in the hands of a less talented writer would be jarring, but which Patchett is able to pull off...." Read more

"...I, for one, applaud Patchett, the skillful nuance of her art , and this engaging and human story. Her "gift of craft" gives us the gift of this story." Read more

"... Patchett's sentences flow effortlessly , her timing is perfect. The book lingered in my mind for a long time. I thoroughly enjoyed it." Read more

Customers find the characters interesting and dedicated. They say the author is a gifted storyteller.

"... Patchett's character development is wonderful and we are with her main character through her confusion, sorrows, redemption and mistakes...." Read more

"...The book is plot driven, character driven , with landscapes and insightful themes worth pondering...." Read more

"...While Patchett did a wonderful job developing the characters of Singh and Swenson, as well as Anders Eckman, she short-changed the other doctors..." Read more

"...It's very heavily plot-driven, and as noted above, some of the characters are quite flat ...." Read more

Customers find the book thought-provoking, with an interesting idea and story. They appreciate the author's incredible imagination and consummate mastery of characterization. Readers also mention the book is full of surprises and provides an amazing introduction to Brazil.

"...There is a strong mentor/parent theme in the book. Dr. Swenson was mentored by Dr. Rapp. Marina was mentored by Dr. Swenson...." Read more

"...tribes creating a marvelous canvass which is rich, varied, yet interconnected and a thing of beauty...." Read more

"...This in itself was a very interesting and thought-provoking subject for me...." Read more

"The premise was intriguing and thought-provoking , character development wonderfully detailed, and the plot immediately absorbing and engaging...." Read more

Customers find the book engaging, entertaining, and compelling. They say it holds their attention throughout, is baffling, and drives them onward. Readers mention the journey and environment are breathtaking and mind-expanding. They also appreciate the humor, medical interest, drama, and location.

"...as deft with language as he is, but Patchett weaves an impressive, entertaining and thought-provoking novel of her own." Read more

"...wonderfully detailed, and the plot immediately absorbing and engaging ...." Read more

"...I gave the book 4 stars because I liked the book, it kept me interested and engaged ...." Read more

"...book I read to be wonderful but this book was a poorly researched and boring and bigoted." Read more

Customers find the book vivid, beautifully written, and full of detail about the lives of the Amazonian. They describe it as a well-realized world full of distinct characters. Readers also mention the book is persuasive with great local color.

"...It's an incredible read, full of detail about the lives of the Amazonian indigenous group Dr Swenson lives among...." Read more

"...The book is plot driven, character driven, with landscapes and insightful themes worth pondering...." Read more

"...Her eloquence and vivid imagery are a feast for the reader. While this is in no way an action-adventure story, it is difficult to put the book down...." Read more

"...then deep in the Amazon jungle, the book gives a vivid and beautifully written description of place ...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the plot. Some mention it's plot-driven, character-driven, and insightful. However, others say the story is unrealistic and off-putting. They also mention the ending is insultingly bad and the concluding scene in Brazil is disappointing.

"...The plot itself has some implausibilities that detract from the story: for example, the fact that despite having lived amongst the Lakashi tribe..." Read more

"Ann Patchett is an awesome story teller who creates a world that will captivate. Her novels are mesmerizing. Read them all...." Read more

"...Viewed literally, this story is quite unrealistic and perhaps may seem off-putting in the extreme to the literal minded...." Read more

"...The book is plot driven , character driven, with landscapes and insightful themes worth pondering...." Read more

Customers find the pacing of the book slow. They mention there are too many speed bumps in the storytelling and the writing feels rushed. Readers also say the book drags and falls apart after the midpoint.

"...leading to the moment when she informs his wife, are slow and excrutiatingly paced , which accentuates the impact, so that I almost had to put the..." Read more

"...I found the plot slow in many spots , and unbelievable in others...." Read more

"...I absolutely loved the story, the pacing , the characterizations and the complexity of surprises of the plot.But wait!..." Read more

"...whether I will read another Patchett book again; good story, distracting writing style ." Read more

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Review: ‘State of Wonder’ by Ann Patchett

One Sentence Summary: A young pharmaceutical scientist heads into the heart of darkness that is the Amazonian rain forest to find her lost coworker and confront a scientist on the loose.

One Sentence Review: Anne Patchett’s beautiful writing alone is enough reason to read this book.

Why I Read It: I have a special place in my heart of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , so hearing this one compared to it was enough to make me want to read it.

Long Review: When Dr. Marina Singh, a pharmaceutical research scientist, is sent to the jungle in search of an elusive colleague and former mentor, it looks like a lost mission. Dr. Annick Swenson is supposed to be working on a miracle fertility drug. Instead, she’s cut of communication with her funders and refuses to tell anyone where she actually is. Marina’s research partner, Anders Eckman, was sent to find Dr. Swenson first, but died before he could complete the mission. As Marina heads into the Amazon, it’s unclear what she’ll find and how she will be able to battle her own demons while dealing with complicated ethical questions and the ire of Dr. Swenson.

One of the big reasons this particular popular fiction title stood out to me was a repeated suggestion that Patchett has written the female Heart of Darkness . I mean, it’s almost impossible to read any professional review of the book and not have some reference to Joseph Conrad’s book. Even the book description from the publisher ends with the line, “It is a tale that leads the reader into the very heart of darkness, and then shows us what lies on the other side.”

In my view, that’s a good thing, since I’ve always held a special place in my heart for Heart of Darkness , but that’s not the case for everyone. While it’s possible my Heart of Darkness expertise is fading, I didn’t see much connection between the two other than the premise of the book — a person is sent into the Amazonian wilderness to search for a lost colleague and deal with someone that has, potentially, gone crazy out in the jungle.

Plot questions aside, this book is worth reading if only for Patchett’s beautiful writing. She had this way of moving back in forth in time and space, from Marina’s present to her past, from the Amazon to Minnesota to India, without ever missing a beat or leaving the reader behind. Her descriptions of people and the jungle were intense and captivating. I was drawn in throughout the entire story.

I’m not sure how I feel about the ending of the book or the questions it raised, or even, in some ways, what I thought of the book as a whole… but the writing, wow. I cannot wait to try another one of Patchett’s books to visit her beautiful prose again.

Other Reviews:   Caribousmom | Words and Peace |

If you have reviewed this book, please leave a link to the review in the comments and I will add your review to the main post. All I ask is for you to do the same to mine — thanks!

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Glad that you had a chance to read this one. I love the writing as well, and thought the story was good as well. Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

I’m glad we got to read this one as well, I liked it quite a bit.

I am reading this now and am loving it. It was a book club pick and I was hesitant because I couldn’t get through Bel Canto but this seems completely different to me.

I haven’t read Bel Canto , but I did pick up a copy while I was out shopping over the weekend. I’m curious about it now, especially since you say it’s different.

I completely agree with your review – her writing is gorgeous, and for that alone the book is worth reading. I was not fond of the ending at all. My review is here: http://www.caribousmom.com/2011/10/18/state-of-wonder-book-review/

I loved her writing, it was just so beautiful.

I read this book last summer and enjoyed it very much. At the same time, I listened to Bel Canto, so I reviewed them together. I think Patchett has a special thing for endings: http://wordsandpeace.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/bell-canto-and-state-of-wonder/

I don’t know what I thought of the ending… it didn’t seem like much closure, but I’m not sure if that matters much.

lots of other bloggers make a big deal about her conclusion, I mean, they usually say it’s lousy and they hate it. But I thought it was good in its originality, same thing for Bel Canto

I didn’t really hate it… I just wasn’t sure what to think. I have read lots of people who didn’t like it at all. I’m really curious about Bel Canto though.

I’ve never read Heart of Darkness but I do love Prachett’s writing, so am adding this one to my list.

I hope you like it!

This one is high on my wishlist and I have a gift card to burn, so it’s a good possibility I’ll be reading this in the near future.

Ooo, awesome. I thought it was beautifully written, easy to get drawn into.

I thought the writing was gorgeous, but I wasn’t crazy about the ending – it just seemed out of character for Marina. I also thought the middle of the book dragged a bit.

Yeah, I don’t know about the ending either. It seemed abrupt, perhaps, or just a little off.

I’ve had this one in my bookcase for a while and keep meaning to grab it, and I’m ashamed to say I’ve never read Heart Of Darkness ! I remember seeing it on our optional summer reading lists in high school, but I always chose something else.

Heart of Darkness is, I think, an acquired taste. It’s a very strange little book, but it has a special place in my heart.

Sometimes it is enough to read a book for the language alone.

For sure. Beautiful writing is key for me.

I loved this book too! The ending was a bit meh to me, but other than that, it was just beautiful!

Yes, totally agree. Her writing was just stellar.

I still can’t decide whether or not I want to read this. I even sat down with it in the bookstore for awhile and ended up leaving it behind. It didn’t grab me, but I’m still a little curious. I’m sure I’ll get to it, just not any time soon.

The beginning could have been a little bit slow, but I did think it picked up. And like I said, the writing was just gorgeous.

Sounds like the writing is well worth the ride!

Absolutely!

I enjoyed this book too! http://leeswammes.wordpress.com/2011/06/11/book-review-state-of-wonder-by-ann-patchett/

I thought the events towards the end were rather far-fetched. But I read this book less than 6 months ago and already I’m considering re-reading it, as I did enjoy it a lot.

I might reread this one, just to see if some of the plot pulls together better on a second read.

Seeing this book around has made me think I am going to have to check it out one of these days.

I hope you can give it a shot!

Thinking about the ending and whether this novel is like Heart of Darkness (I hadn’t read that before I read it, but react as you do, that it’s a surface similarity) makes me like the ending better. It’s a sort of satiric ending, I think, made to require the reader to make up her mind about how a modern woman should act in a first world country, based on what Marina learned in the jungle.

Hmmm, that’s a really good point. That makes a lot of sense. Smart as always, Jeanne 🙂

I haven’t read Heart of Darkness, but I know what it’s about and it’s major themes, and like you, I don’t really see how many/any of them apply to this novel. I think critics got overly influenced by the similar settings and so just ran with it, but I think this novel is really about other things altogether. I didn’t think it was perfect, but I did admire Patchett’s storytelling so I’m sure I’ll read some of her other works in the future as well.

Yes, I think it’s very much the setting, although the plot does have some similarities too (the whole heading into the jungle thing). I loved the way she was able to tell so many stories at the same time.

I with Jill on this one. It sounds like a great book and I’ll probably get to it someday but not soon. Great review.

I feel that way about quite a few books 🙂

I felt the same way – I like her writing even though this is not my genre, but her writing is very atmospheric. I don’t know how I feel about the ending either. Here’s my review: http://mentalfoodie.blogspot.com/2011/06/book-review-state-of-wonder-novel-by.html

Yes, atmospheric is exactly the right word for her writing.

I was impressed by the writing too, and enjoyed the book far more than I expected to. I am not normally sustained by beautiful writing. But I’m glad to hear you say that this doesn’t have as much in common with Heart of Darkness as everyone’s been saying! I haven’t read Heart of Darkness, and am not a hundred percent sure I want to, and I’m relieved to hear that my State of Wonder reading experience wasn’t necessarily damaged by that omission in my reading history.

Nah, I don’t think so. Maybe if I reread Heart of Darkness I’d think differently, but being dull on the details didn’t seem to hurt my reading experience any.

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Book Review - 'State of Wonder' by Ann Patchett

A pre-covid story about big pharma's experiment in the jungle.

At times, a state of perplexity

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett is undoubtedly literary fiction, albeit with elements of thriller and mystery.

Research biochemist Dr. Marina Singh has been dispatched by Vogel Pharmaceuticals, her Big Pharma employer, on a mission to the Amazon jungle in Brazil. Her lab partner Anders Eckman had been sent there to support pioneering fieldwork undertaken by Dr. Annick Swenson, a blustery, eccentric, and secretive older woman who had mentored Marina in medical school.

State of Wonder: A Novel by Ann Patchett (Harper)

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Five Books That Conjure Entirely New Worlds

The best-written stories can make readers feel as if they have passed through mundane states of being and been brought over to another universe.

A whole world can exist within a single brain. But the boundaries between one mind and the next are usually unbreachable—except in fiction. A writer’s task is to bridge the gap between their reader’s experience and the consciousness of their characters so well that the audience intimately understands the world their protagonists live in, even if that world is utterly fantastical. No matter the setting, the best-written stories can make readers feel as if they have passed through mundane states of being and been brought over to another universe entirely. These sites may at first feel unknowable or overtly strange, because they reflect perspectives radically unlike our own. Yet, through the intervention of fiction, we may come to recognize them, even understand them—although what feels concrete and certain to you may feel porous and surreal to someone else.

This feeling of encountering another world is multifaceted. It can be an imaginary place or a glimpse of another reality. It may also simply exist in the tension between comfort and estrangement. The books on the list below dream up another world by acknowledging that fantasy is a state of mind, and even the most outlandish invention is anchored in some aspect of reality as we know it. Each pulls us out of our comfortable understanding of our surroundings, in ways both joyful and unsettling. Read any of these five titles before you go to sleep, and you’ll soon find yourself somewhere else, at least for a time.

Pale Fire , by Vladimir Nabokov

Perhaps the most effervescent and elegiacal of Nabokov’s novels, Pale Fire famously consists of a long poem written by John Shade, an English professor at a small fictional college, which is explicated in extensive endnotes by his new neighbor and self-proclaimed close friend Charles Kinbote, who has come to rural Appalachia from a country he calls Zembla. The poem itself conjures up hints and glimpses of a place after death, while Kinbote’s ongoing commentary builds up a rich and detailed story about an exiled king, an assassination plot, and an unknown European land. But Kinbote’s references and allusions, over time, become more and more unreliable, and the shape of the novel reminds us that what we think of the truth is at times completely dependent on whose perspective shapes our view of events. Pale Fire opens out beyond its central verse into a wider space that asks us to decide what is fantasy, what is fact, and whose reality to live within.

Primeval and Other Times , by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

In a series of interwoven vignettes that roam from character to character, the fearless Nobel Prize–winning novelist Tokarczuk explores how folklore, ritual, and strife shape the minds of the inhabitants of a village appropriately called Primeval, over a long period starting in 1914. Dreamlike and yet viscerally real, the book feels like what you might recall in that space between sleep and wakefulness, when people are more in touch with otherwise-hidden instincts and emotions; meanwhile, the roving from one point of view to another recalls the technique of the avant-garde filmmaker Luis Buñuel. The author touches on key events in 20th-century Polish history while also introducing unreal phenomena, such as archangels who watch over the village and seem truly alien. You may never know what it was really like to live in a village in Poland during the period in question, but in Tokarczuk’s skillful hands you receive something both more intimate and more fulfilling: an understanding of the life of the mind in a different time.

Read: The science fiction that came before science

Brodeck , by Philippe Claudel, translated by John Cullen

The past is another country, as the famous saying goes. But novels can help us enter territories otherwise closed off to us. In Brodeck , a stranger arrives in a remote French village in the mountains, disturbing the everyday existence of its inhabitants, who have secrets to hide. Brodeck, a nature wanderer who has himself returned to the village after time away, then assembles a “report” on the clash between the world the stranger brings to the villagers and the world they try to force him to accept—a disconnect that creates a dramatic, tragic conflict between the past and the present. But Brodeck’s own experiences outside the community begin to influence the telling of the tale. As the stranger suffers from the clash of two crucially different views of reality, the report becomes an indictment and a record of human folly with political undertones. By the end, Claudel’s novel is a heartbreaking and stunning work of fiction about provincialism and secrets that I think about frequently, unable to escape the unknowable place it documents in such meticulous yet compassionate detail.

The Ravicka novels, by Renee Gladman

In understated prose, Gladman’s dispatches from an imaginary city-state remake the very idea of architecture into a new concept. One of the four books in the series, Houses of Ravicka , chronicles the quest of the city comptroller to find a house that has disappeared from its set location, while an invisible house begins to appear elsewhere. Similarly, other stories set in Ravicka address odd physics, ritual, logic, and illogic in peculiar ways that nevertheless feel modern and relevant. In a sense, Gladman defamiliarizes our world to show us how it works, and her novels wrench this kind of fantastical fiction into the 21st century by referencing the mundane municipal roles often left out of other works. It’s no wonder, then, that her exploration of Ravicka has spilled into her nonfiction and visual art, because the sociological and philosophical questions she poses feel as if they require expression in other media as well.

Read: One of the best fantasy novels ever is nothing like The Lord of the Rings

Dark Matter , by Aase Berg, translated by Johannes Göransson

A work of phantasmagorical, erotic, postapocalyptic unease by one of Sweden’s most important poets, Dark Matter exists in a nightmare state that entangles nature and the pollution of human-built environments in unsettling ways. A hybrid composition of prose and poetry, the book has a tactile quality that colonizes you without mercy. “I now slowly fold myself like a muscle against the wet clay to press the flesh against the sleep-gland’s mouths,” Berg writes, the terrain fusing with the speaker’s body. “I will sleep now in my bird body in the down, and a bitter star will radiate eternally above the glowing face’s watercourse.” Despite the way Berg implicates the reader in what amounts to body horror, by some alchemy she ends up transforming the reader’s initial fright into feelings of febrile fascination. Berg pulls in string theory, folklore, references to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre , and what appear to be H. R. Giger–esque flourishes, meshing them with a contaminated yet still powerful view of nature. There is no way to describe this trenchant, uncompromising view of a transformed landscape other than to continue to quote from it: “But time runs on time and starvation and the weakness carries me in across the gray regions. And the soul’s dark night will slowly be lowered through me.” This is the ultimate other world, created from broken pieces of our own.

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On the Great Plains, a story of land and loss and redemption

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The Mighty Red: A Novel

By Louise Erdrich Harper: 384 pages, $32 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

In “The Mighty Red,” Louise Erdrich’s enthralling ode and elegy to the people of North Dakota’s Red River Valley, climate change, Big Ag and economic hard times have ravaged the landscape in and around the small town of Tabor during the late aughts. Many of its inhabitants are descendants of the Ojibwe, Dakota and Métis tribes, whose acreage was lost to them in a series of cession treaties over the centuries; they now scramble to make a living, toiling for others on land that was once theirs.

This backdrop could make for a mournful tale of intergenerational trauma and displacement, but Erdrich has other plans for her characters, whom she imbues with the grit and optimism to rise above their challenging circumstances.

Crystal Frechette, for one, works the 12-hour night shift, hauling beets from the Geist farm to a sugar processing plant. It’s backbreaking labor, and sometimes her mind veers dark, until she reminds herself to “Tune your thoughts to a better station.” Crystal devises ingenious ways to stretch her family’s limited budget: She is the breadwinner, as her partner, Martin, has a taste for items like Italian silk ties but earns next to nothing as a traveling theater arts teacher. She’s an expert thrifter and gardener. Rumor has it that her family eats weeds because they’re poor, but to Crystal, one particular “weed,” lambsquarters, is a delicacy: “If only they knew. She clipped the youngest plants, pulled off the leaves. Then she went inside and sauteed them in her most extravagant household purchase — extra-virgin olive oil.”

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Crystal named her daughter Kismet “to attract luck and lightness of heart.” Though most of Tabor’s residents are decidedly earthbound, Crystal and Kismet believe in mystical phenomena such as prophecies and omens. And Crystal has a premonition that misfortune is around the corner.

Kismet is a high school senior — intelligent and suddenly popular now that she’s dating Gary Geist, quarterback of the football team. Like her mother, she’s resourceful and no-nonsense, bent on escaping Tabor for college. Despite Kismet’s restlessness and her growing attraction to a bookish friend, she impulsively agrees to marry Gary, who has been haunted after the gruesome deaths of two teammates in a snowmobiling accident. It’s only when he’s with Kismet that the specter never appears. The pair persuade each other they’re in love.

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But calamity continues: Kismet’s father absconds under suspicious circumstances, prompting the FBI to swoop in. Most of the townspeople then shun Crystal, suspecting she may be in cahoots with Martin. Crystal, though, is mystified by his disappearance, and enraged when she learns that their already precarious financial picture may be verging on disaster.

It’s 2008, and local businesses are closing, houses are being foreclosed upon, cars are being repossessed. In interviews, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Erdrich has said: “I don’t think about politics when I write. … My novels aren’t op-eds.” But for at least one of this novel’s characters, the faltering economy can be traced back to the budget director under President Reagan, who Erdrich writes “decided to suddenly accelerate, or call in, loans that farmers had previously had decades to repay.”

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Winnie Geist, Gary’s mother, knows well the “secret shame of losing all you love.” Her family’s land and home were foreclosed upon, and then taken over by her future husband’s family. Since their marriage, “she had pretended to be a Geist, to live at a level of prosperity that she didn’t believe would last.” But since the snowmobile accident, “some part of her had plunged down that pasture that once belonged to her farm” and “into the river with those boys.”

Erdrich is at her best — as she is here — when she draws on her deep connection with the Great Plains and its Indigenous people. She herself is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, and themes of American Indian deprivation and injustice often fuel her storytelling. So do the zest and fortitude of her characters.

It’s also true that in Erdrich’s literary universe, there are few who are beyond redemption. If the villains of “The Mighty Red” are greedy landowners who are poisoning the environment with their herbicides and pesticides, the author doesn’t see them that way. By the end of the novel, Gary is plotting to persuade his dad that a shift to scalable organics is viable and necessary, and we sense that the father’s good nature will lead him that way.

There is an amiable, inviting quality to all of Erdrich’s 19 novels that in part explains how it is possible to be hugely entertained while learning why farmers require increasingly powerful pesticides or what our collective sweet tooth is costing the planet. That accessibility, though, in no way diminishes Erdrich’s unparalleled ability to conjure a scene or a character, or to portray the natural world with awe.

At a friend’s barbecue, Kismet is captivated by the interplay of birds and insects in the prairie field adjoining their backyard: “The sun was low and the light was a golden barge floating through the trees. … As the heat rose off the earth insects rose too, and the black arcs of birds began to feed with such swiftness and intensity that Kismet’s eyes could scarcely follow. … By the time the air cooled and the swallows began to swoop away to their nests, she felt wobbly and strange, as though she too had been flying.”

Erdrich calls on us to heal our frayed bond with the earth, and to regard it, as she does, with wonder.

Leigh Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.

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Letters to the Editor: There is no fighting Mother Nature. Palos Verdes landslide shows that

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Journal of Materials Chemistry A

Breaking the symmetry of sulfur defect state via atomic substitution for enhanced co2 photoreduction.

Conventional sulfur vacancy, characterized by a symmetric coordination of metal cations (M1-SV-M1), typically serves as a catalytic site for CO2 chemisorption. However, the symmetric SV site, with a uniform charge distribution across adjacent metal sites, enables sluggish electron transfer kinetics for CO2 activation and dissociation, as well as a low defect-band center that renders photoexcited electrons less energetic. Herein, we introduced Cu dopant into SV-rich SnS2 nanosheets (Cu-SnS2-SV) to construct the asymmetric Cu-SV-Sn sites, which effectively steer CO2 photoreduction into CO with a production rate of 48.6 μmol g-1 h-1 in the absence of photosensitizer and scavenger, 18-fold higher than SnS2-SV with symmetric Sn-SV-Sn sites. The experimental investigations combined with theoretical simulations reveal that asymmetric Cu-SV-Sn structure, compared with symmetric Sn-SV-Sn structure, allows an upshift of the defect-band center, which significantly mitigates the energy loss associated with the electron relaxation from conduction band to defect band. Moreover, the advantages of the Cu-SV-Sn sites over the Sn-SV-Sn sites are demonstrated not only by the increased Sn-S covalency, which facilitates electron transfer from catalysts to adsorbates, but also by the improved ability to stabilize the COOH* intermediates, which lowers the activation energy barrier of the rate-determining step.

• This article is part of the themed collection: Journal of Materials Chemistry A HOT Papers

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Y. Ma, H. Tao, X. Guo, P. Yang, D. Xing, V. Nicolosi, Y. Zhang, C. Lian and B. Qiu, J. Mater. Chem. A , 2024, Accepted Manuscript , DOI: 10.1039/D4TA06622G

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Catholic Worker Movement

Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion (Book Review)

Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion is a lively, colorful introduction to the life of Dorothy Day, the 20th century Catholic social reformer and co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement.

Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion

by Jeffry Odell Korgan (author) and Christopher Cardinale (illustrator)

Paulist Press (September 3, 2024)

Paperback: ‎  112 pages

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎  978-0809157105

Reviewed by Rosalie G. Riegle

This probably shouldn’t be the first book about Dorothy Day that you read, but it certainly won’t be the last.  A graphic novel, it moves quickly and excites readers with Day’s lively action as she seeks to live Christianity to the fullest.  You’ll be enthralled by Korgen’s descriptions of her radical devotion to God and to living out His message by founding the Catholic Worker movement, so you’ll want to learn more and to read what Dorothy Day wrote as well as Peter Maurin’s Easy Essays and other books about the Catholic Worker movement. [1]

Dorothy always identified herself as a writer, and I don’t think founding a movement was what she had in mind when she and Peter Maurin wrote and sold the first edition of a newspaper called The Catholic Worker in Union Square, New York City on May 1, 1933. They just wanted to get their words out.

It worked. People read the paper, and it changed their lives.  People in need came to her for food and solace and others listened to her message and adopted her ideas, some coming to live with her, and some simply starting their own houses of hospitality.  Before long, there were Catholic Worker houses across the entire USA.

There wouldn’t be a Catholic Worker without Peter Maurin.  Dorothy had long been attracted to Catholicism and after giving birth to her daughter Tamar, conceived while living with Forster Batterham, she had her daughter baptized and then became Catholic herself and left Batterham.  But she continued to write for radical publications and while covering a hunger march in Washington DC, she prayed that she would find a way to unite her new Catholicism with her radicalism.

She returned home to find Peter Maurin on her doorstep, sent there by Simon and Shuster.  Her prayers were certainly answered: he introduced her to the social teachings of the Catholic Church and talked indefatigably for months, stressing the academic backgrounds of his three principles: cult (houses of hospitality), culture (clarification of thought in round table discussions, which would initiate action), and cultivation (Catholic Worker farms).

Dorothy took it all in and together they scraped up the money to publish The Catholic Worker every month.  Soon she was engulfed in hospitality and fund-raising, and always, always busy but still finding time for daily Mass, much prayer and reading.  As the movement grew, Dorothy traveled a lot, visiting Worker houses and speaking to thousands. She often returned home to find the work in disarray.

This graphic novel doesn’t go into many of those problems, but instead tells fascinating stories of the New York community and its troubles and triumphs.

I’d never read a graphic novel before and Christopher Cardinale’s art work takes a little getting used to for those like me who don’t read graphic novels. His art doesn’t look like a cartoon and the character’s looks change as they mature. Korgen has inserted a few interesting graphics, such as pages from Day’s long FBI file.

Korgen, who coordinated the local phase of Dorothy Day’s canonization movement, probably knows more about Day than anyone else, but he selectively chose events from her life to craft an enticing and easy read.

A long first chapter tells of her tumultuous early life: her first arrest as a suffragist, several love affairs, and the birth of her daughter Tamar.  Near the end of the book, he includes the beautiful ending of Day’s must-read memoir, The Long Loneliness . Two pages of “Making Saints” chronicle the U.S. parts of the process and a final page gives readers a small glimpse of the Catholic Worker houses across the world.

My hope is that you’ll read this book and be inspired to read more and to act. If you can, visit a Catholic Worker community near you or travel to one, help them as a volunteer, and donate funds. Perhaps you will want to actually become a Catholic Worker, as I did for ten years, giving up income and accepting voluntary poverty as you share with the poor.  It’s not easy, but it’s a sure way to live in community and to follow the Gospel, as Day and Maurin and their co-Workers did.  Or explore other options to live fully as a Christian.  Let’s hope that Korgen and Cardinale’s book inspires you in some way to Day’s radical devotion.

Related: Dorothy Day…Superhero? New Graphic Novel Tells the Story of Her ‘Hero’s Journey’

Rosalie Riegle has collected and edited four oral histories of Catholic Workers and other nonviolent resisters who work for peace. In 1995, she and two friends co-founded the Mustard Seed Catholic Worker community in Saginaw, Michigan where they cared for and loved the unhoused women and children who came as guests. After co-founder Jeannine Coallier died, it became two communities and our original house became the Jeannine Coallier House in her honor. In 2004 Rosalie moved to Evanston, Illinois to help a daughter care for her twin babies, but she remains active in the larger CW movement. She is professor emerita in English at Saginaw Valley State University and serves as books editor for CatholicWorker.org.

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A life of images | Review of Booker Prize-shortlisted ‘Held’ by Anne Michaels

There are several ghosts in the novel and we can sense them even if the characters cannot.

Published - September 27, 2024 09:30 am IST

The key axiom underlying Canadian author Anne Michaels’s  Held  is that the world is akin to photographic paper, which when washed in the developer fluid, reveals objects coalescing into negative being, silver particle by silver particle. Indeed, this ontological metaphor is made explicit early on in the story. Going for a night walk by the river, John — the character who opens the story — thinks: “The moonlight — silver iodide. The photographic plate — a supernatural lake, waiting for a reflection.”

This conception is also reflected in the novel’s structure: each chapter is set in a specific year, not in sequence and perhaps even simultaneous, and with some slow-moving waterbody — the Escaut in France, the Esk in North Yorkshire, the Westbourne in London, the Orwell in Suffolk. It cleaves the narrative landscape and holds the characters together. Characters who appear, hold our attention, and then disappear. They are related but not always by blood. An interaction is sometimes just an interaction — for example, one character comes to pick up a hat made for her father; it isn’t turned into an encounter by having plot wheels grind to advance the story to some pre-determined outcome. But because we remember the characters and their backstories, the story acquires a certain haunted quality. We can sense the ghosts, even if the characters cannot. We know their dead mothers and grandfathers, the siblings who were never born, and the secret history of the objects the characters possess: a hat, a painting of a large orange, a set of photographs.

The role of error

Naturally, this is a ghost story. It could not be anything else. However, there is an interesting deviation from the genre’s expectations, and for me, it felt like an intended one. It’s no spoiler to reveal that there are several ghosts in Michaels’s novel, shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. The book’s back flap divulges with quiet dignity how “the past erupts insistently into the present” as John develops his clients’ photos and unexpected strangers emerge from the emulsion. In a regular ghost story, John would have to get to the bottom of the mystery. This being a literary endeavour, however, the author feels no obligation to entertain the peasants. John is able to photograph ghosts, and that’s that. John merely proceeds to go for solitary night walks and get drippy about moonlight and silver iodide and such, thus managing to avoid thinking about his war trauma. It’s the sort of thing Iris Murdoch would have savaged in critique and then duplicated in her own novels.

In other words, Michaels’s novel does not need its Victorian ghosts. The story is already all misty and dreamy and disconnected and infused with death and loss. So what are they doing?

I believe they are deliberate imperfections. The reason we can take photographs using silver halide crystals is because the crystals aren’t perfect. Their imperfections are vital to the process. Michaels references the role of error in manifesting love, when she describes the women by the river Escaut in Cambrai, France, who weave deliberate errors into the sweaters of their menfolk. Why? Because the fishermen sometimes drowned. “…his widow could claim his beloved body by a distinctive talisman — the deliberate error in a sleeve, a waistband, a cuff, a shoulder, the broken pattern as definitive as a signature on a document.” The novel’s ghosts are, one might say, deliberate errors.

Author Anne Michaels | Photo Credit: Getty Images

Counting imperfections

The novel also has unintended imperfections. In the pursuit of elevated prose, the author sometimes piles hazy abstraction upon hazy abstraction: “…as if Alan had always been meant to arrive at their door, a stranger; he could not have formulated his need for this shelter in all its idiosyncratic exactitude and yet, in the broken world of generosity and dispossession, bereavement and blind luck, without any credit in the bank of belief, he had been found by them.” In other words, they made Alan feel welcome.

The novel has about half-a-dozen protagonists, but they all sound, think, feel and act alike. This is easily seen if we interchange who is saying what in the dialogues. They don’t exhibit “idiosyncratic exactitude”. As with Diego Velázquez’s painting  Las Meninas , all the actors wear their creator’s face; they never achieve their freedom from their author. That too is a kind of death.

There are worse problems for a novel to have. It is not often that a novel comes along that so thoroughly reifies its central conceptual metaphor. Such a book requires a reader willing to offer that rare sensibility, to be the text’s emulsion, to be the medium through which the paper people come to life.

The reviewer is an author, most recently of  The Coincidence Plot .

Anne Michaels

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