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The Echo Maker: Richard Powers

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When he wakes up and begins his recovery, he accuses his sister – the two have always been very close – of being an impostor. When Karin contacts the famous cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber for help, he diagnoses Mark as having Capgras syndrome. The stuff about the brain and brain injury was interesting; I probably should have read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat instead. The language and metaphors of the book are powerful and the mystery of how the man was injured is interesting to watch unfold, but the one other major subplot -- the public humiliation of the cognitive scientist after his latest book comes out -- simply didn't ring true. Looking back from this book, it is easy to see links to The Gold Bug Variations, Operation Wandering Soul, Galatea 2.

Evolutionary throwbacks that have been congregating in vast flocks on the flatlands of Nebraska for five million years or more, they have no such burden of consciousness, acting only on ancient memory, performing basic cycles of birth and rebirth that humans forget at their peril.On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, 27-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His friends Duane and Rupp, who may have had something to do with the accident, are even worse, something of an excuse for the degenerate path that Mark has chosen in life. The Echo Maker focuses on neurological problems in humans and a sustainable habitat for the Sandhill Crane.

Had Iris Murdoch been born 30 years later and in America, these are the sorts of books she might now be writing. In The Echo Maker, Powers hopes to plumb the nature of consciousness, and he does so with such alert passion that we come to recognize in his quest the novel’s abiding theme—What it means to be human will forever elude us.This article argues that Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker (2006) offers a counter-narrative to American nativism and imperialism, which gained power after September 11, 2001. On the one hand, he is at work creating a new kind of American literary voice -- one fluent in the vocabulary of technology that anyone with a computer and a gadget fetish begins to incorporate into his or her discourse. There is much in here that will not be found in the local paper about obscure brain malfunctions and their implications. As an obvious corollary to that suspicion, I also suspect that consciousness as the substrate for subjectivity does not exist outside the realm of nervous system function or its nonbiological equivalent, if there is any.

There was a great book lurking in the manuscript of The Echo Maker, but Powers' editors didn't bother to help him find it. Daniel is the local head of an environmental protection group, and was Mark’s best friend until they parted ways as teens. No romantic relationship of her own has succeeded, nor have any of her attempts to run away from Nebraska.Firstly Mark becomes obsessed with a mysterious note left at his bedside on the day of the accident, and needs to find out who wrote it, what they know, and how his friends were involved. Thanks to you I will never like a crane, I will never sympathize with head trauma victims, and I will never finish your dumb book. The Echo Maker” joins my Powers favorites through the admirable harmony he achieves between his rhetorical strategies— on the life of the sandhill cranes, on the furrowed dynamism of the brain — and the travails of Mark, Karin and Weber as they try to navigate their altered territories.

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