Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Galatea 2.2: A Novel by Richard Powers ISBN: 0060976926 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: May, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.85
Rating: 5
Summary: Pygmalion Meets Douglas Hofstadter!
Comment: Without question, Richard Powers is my favorite living author - and reading this intricately crafted, Byzantine book only served to buttress my conviction that Fiction is yet endowed with the capacity to be a vital, compelling art form. Powers has an uncanny ability "to delight and instruct," and in Galatea this is evidenced by his musings on the moebius-twisted attempts of consciousness to unravel its own hidden workings (see pages 28, 218, and 276). He very effectively interweaves his Pygmalion story with a narrative built around an artificial intelligence (I'd wager that he's been greatly influenced by Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach - one of my personal favorites), and, as in Gold Bug Variations, populates his tale with complex, well-educated characters who lead ambiguous, interesting lives. In casting himself as the book's protagonist, Powers alternately comes across as a self-indulgent and a self-effacing writer; however, this works in giving the reader a glimpse into an Aphrodite-molded imagination. I read this novel after I read Gain, his latest, and was more impressed with Galatea's plot and characters. His trademark shimmering wordplay (I find it refreshing that he allows his readers to make their own associations, connections, and conclusions through this device) is in abundance here. All in all, a bracing read!
Rating: 4
Summary: Moving and compelling, but in the end, hollow
Comment: While I was reading Galatea, I was entranced. The book tells two stories side by side. In one, the protagonist (not coincidentally also named Richard Powers) is a washed-up author enlisted by a computational neuroscientist to train a artifical neural net to parse, understand, and comment on English literature. The others is Powers' fictionalized autobiography, describing his ultimately failed 10-year relationship with the unnamed woman C.
Both stories are beautiful. They warn you in advance they are going to break your heart, but they proceed to do so with such an honest approach to human inadequacy and regret that although the end is filled with sentiment, it has earned the right to that sentiment. There was not a character in the book I did not love.
In the science fiction storyline, Powers uses a highly novel approach to the genre: actually writing about science and scientists. The story of discovery proceeds incrementally through several tweaks and re-implementations of the developing artificial intelligence. It is one of the few novels I have read that adequately captures the feeling of doing research in a highly speculative field, but does so without becoming tedious. Similarly, the scientists Powers works with have fully developed lives outside their research. One gets the feeling that these are real people that you would like to know yourself, people with lives that the book only scratches the surface of.
The autobiography is also well-conducted, being about himself without being self-indulgent. From the beginning of his relationship with C., Powers simply expresses regret over his inability to be the person C. needed him to be at any given time until the assymetry of their relationship hollows it out and kills it. He often dwells on what he would have liked to have done at each step in its decay, and how far short his actual actions fell of those unvoiced desires. This part of the story is simply an honest look at the fear of living up to one's intentions and regret for having not done so.
After I finished, though, I was unsatisfied. Each part of the book raises difficult, important issues: What does it mean to have consciousness? What is meaning, anyway? What role does literature have in the modern world? How can people let the ones they love know that? To what extent can we really know another human being? Is there hope for human civilization? Yet in each instance, Powers not only shies away from trying to answer, but refrains from even giving hope that an answer might exist. All he can say is that he would like to make some moving, profound statement, but is either powerless to act or inhibited from doing so.
Though a pleasure to read, both for its wit and its heartbreaking honesty, in my final analysis, Galatea disappoints. This book is like a nervous suitor who stands on the doorstep of profundity, poises his knuckles to rap on the door, and then, after several long seconds of silence, walks away without having knocked.
Rating: 5
Summary: One of my favorite novels
Comment: Richard Powers is my favorite contemporary novelist and this book is easily one of his best. For their combination of intelligence and emotional complexity, his books have no rivals. In Galatea 2.2. I was once again immersed in a world rich with ideas and human desire, a world where the emotional rawness of C. and the philosophical curiosity of the neural network Helen illustrate the vast range of our age-old need for understanding. In the end, this novel illuminates not only the power of narrative, but our absolute need for it. It reminds us how greatly we depend on stories to understand the world, and to understand ourselves. The narrator Richard's best shot at explaining the world to Helen is by sharing the story of his own life -- the one true story he really knows. Powers suggests that our most intimate stories are carried through life as beautiful burdens -- narratives with the power to haunt, but ultimately save us. This book, like all of Powers' novels, will move you and inspire you. It's a hard one to shake from your mind.
 |
Title: Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers ISBN: 0060975008 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: January, 1994 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
 |
Title: Prisoner's Dilemma by Richard Powers ISBN: 0060977086 Publisher: HarperCollins (paper) Pub. Date: April, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
 |
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 |
 |
Title: Gain by Richard Powers ISBN: 0312204094 Publisher: Picador Pub. Date: 26 May, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
 |
Title: Plowing the Dark by Richard Powers ISBN: 0312280122 Publisher: Picador Pub. Date: August, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
