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Title: Operation Wandering Soul by Richard Powers ISBN: 006097611X Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: April, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.83
Rating: 4
Summary: One of our Best Living Authors
Comment: The more I read of Powers' work, the more I believe that he is a writer people will be studying a century from now. While I don't think this novel is quite as good as Plowing the Dark, it is still better than most contemporary novels I read by several orders of magnitude.
The plot follows a doctor named Kraft who is in rotations and serving as a surgeon in a children's ward in a poor section of Los Angeles. Most of the action concerns him and his interactions with Linda--a physical therapist and his love interest--and several patients, including mostly Joy Stepaneevong, a refugee on whom he operates. Kraft is as mentally wounded as his patients are physically, and is near a breakdown through most of the novel. His psychological situation is partly explained by his surroundings and partly by extended flashbacks into his childhood. He was raised in several different countries where his father was apparently part of raising instabilities for the U.S. government. As a result, Kraft has almost no sense of connectedness to anything. Amid all this, Powers weaves allusions to virtually every story involving children--from historical events like the Children's Crusade and the evacuation of London to fictional works like Peter Pan and the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
Stylistically, Powers writes lush, vivid prose. If your ideal prose writer is Hemingway, with his spare and well-honed sentences, then Powers isn't for you. He is more like John Barth or even Sir Philip Sidney than plain style authors. Here's a representative passage, in which Powers describes Kraft and how someone who likes post-modern fiction has latched on to him:
Something about him must emanate this Mr. Potato Head plasticity. Chief of Surgery Burgess, dying a slow, half-century death in this city where reading span is sorely stretched by the instructions on microwave popcorn, instantly imagines that in Kraft he has found a kindred literate spirit, a simile son. Dr. Purgative, as Plummer rechristens him, keeps farming out these convoluted, epistemological novels by Kraft's obscure, young contemporaries. Plow through and report on, over sherry this afternoon, a postmodernist mystery thicker than the Index Medicus where the butler kills the author and kidnaps the narration. Damn thing includes its own explanatory Cliffs Notes halfway through, although the gloss is even more opaque than the story...
That combination of stylistic virtuosity and dead-on humor is Powers' signature, and to my mind he writes this brand of fiction as well or better than anyone writing today.
Rating: 5
Summary: Moving, lyrical, painful, and beautiful
Comment: A book that made me look at the world differently. Transforming. I think Children are more precious, more vulnerable, and yet more sturdy than ever before. I read the world as a harsher place with stronger people in it than I did before. A vivid, racking, and ennobling book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Live Revelation Relief: Apocalypse Aid.
Comment: This is the third book by Mr. Powers I have read recently, the options I have at this point are to either, let my mind heal before starting another of his works, or read only a few pages a day. I cannot begin to imagine where he harvests these ideas, or by what type of neural net hat trick he uses to store them, so they can be recalled in the sequencing he desires. He must remember everything his five senses have ever identified without any detail filtered, none at all.
The menagerie that is his Pediatric Ward, the holding pen for the "Pedes" makes George Lucas's Cantina at Mos Eisley look like the local coffee shop. And while there is no music there is "the Rapparition" who not only rhymes but also when he moves, he, "concocts this elaborate triple-level, supersyncopated, free-falling gymnastic routine". And that's about as slow and mellow as this book ever gets.
This is the most emotional book of his I have read. Previous works held the possibility of futures that were none too pleasant, and pasts that may have stung, but this time the tale is in real time. The assault is constant, no quarter given. The Pied Piper of Hamelin fame makes his appearance, but compared to the hopelessness that Dr. Kraft presides over, the Piper is Opera Buffa, comedic relief. The 13th century tale of terror first becomes a light story, and then a play with the real world's broken children of Angel City playing their fictional counterparts. No method acting just be your broken self.
Richard Powers portrays a world that deserves nothing but condemnation. A world where the Children would be better off were they lead away rather than live the lives they have. Adults have done nothing but inflict damage, including our 5th year resident Dr. Kraft.
He supplies this book with questions for further study at the end of a chapter, and then a literal word-by-word definition of the story of Peter Pan. And yes you guessed it, a child whose body is ten times its age in appearance while maintaining the age appropriate size. A girl named Joy who never experiences the feeling as she is gradually taken apart.
This is as about as up close and personal to a Richard Powers nightmare as this reader would like to get. I have no claim on a particularly vivid imagination, but the Author drills down so vividly he could disturb the victim of a coma.
A unique Author with a very unique mind.
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Title: Prisoner's Dilemma by Richard Powers ISBN: 0060977086 Publisher: HarperCollins (paper) Pub. Date: April, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers ISBN: 0060975008 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: January, 1994 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Plowing the Dark by Richard Powers ISBN: 0312280122 Publisher: Picador Pub. Date: August, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance by Richard Powers ISBN: 0060975091 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: May, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Gain by Richard Powers ISBN: 0312204094 Publisher: Picador Pub. Date: 26 May, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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