Reincarnation of Stephen King strictly physiognomic (even for his glasses, although ultimately impossible being both contemporaries), also sinks its feet into the shifting lands of the strangest fictions. Only with very different will, tools and ends.
I mean a Richard Powers that makes the fantastic sophistication and the scientific and even technological a tool with which to cut through the grounds of our reason to end up sowing fascinating uncertainties.
If international prizes for the power of the 2019 Pulitzer novel are of any use, it is to invite us with that favorable lead of the recognition of a work that could otherwise go unnoticed. Because the forms and substance of Richard Powers must be given that opportunity as literature with greater pretensions than mere entertainment but that ends up entertaining as a constant intellectual challenge in an ever-living action. The perfect balance between a bestseller and a writer with dregs.
Little by little we can get closer to Powers' work in Spanish. And so we discover his power of conviction as an atypical chronicler, as a spectator determined to make us see the details of life more than life itself (and in the end everything happens due to details that escape us). So take advantage and don't miss anything new from Powers...
Top Recommended Novels by Richard Powers
The clamor of the forests
A tree that falls in the middle of the lonely forest produces the same sound whether or not it is perceived by the human being. The question that raises the doubt is the certainty of our most unbearable egocentricity. Zen dilemma solved. But it is that the forest cries out much more in a time that is much less relative for each of its centennial trees than for any of us, and Richard Powers knows it ...
An Air Force cargo chief in Vietnam is shot through the sky and saved by landing on a banyan tree. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same cursed American chestnut. A college party girl gets electrocuted in the late eighties, dies, and is brought back to life thanks to creatures of air and light. A scientist with hearing and speech problems discovers that trees communicate with each other.
These four characters and five other strangers, all summoned by the trees in different ways, meet in a last and violent battle to save the few acres of virgin forest that remain on the American continent. A compelling and exalted tale of activism and resistance, which is also a dazzling evocation, and praise, of the natural world.
From the roots to the tops and back to the seeds, The clamor of the forests, set in various eras, takes place in concentric circles of intertwined fables and explores the essential conflict on our planet: that between humans and non-humans. There is a world next to ours, a vast, slow, interconnected world, full of resources, ingenious to the maximum and almost invisible to us.
Orpheus
Orfeón, by Orfeo, of the sum of voices capable of lulling beasts and consciences to sleep. Voices, Music with capital letters and genetic manipulation. Premises to end up raising a singular sound from a reading of this holistic novel. Because music is energy and consciousness is chemical and essences can transform everything.
With a touch of erudition committed to the plot itself, Powers' musical wisdom enriches with knowing how to extend captivating nuances for music connoisseurs and laymen eager to immerse themselves in super-novel visions about what music brings out of us.
In "Orpheus", the composer Peter Els opens the door of his house one afternoon to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab, his latest experiment in his life's career finding music in surprising patterns, has raised the suspicions of Homeland Security.
Panicked at the raid, Els escapes, earning the nickname "the Bioterrorist Bach," and devises a plan to transform that disastrous collision with the state of security into an unforgettable work of art that will rediscover the sounds of its environment.
The echo of memory
A story between mystical and insane. A novel with a touch of transcendent fantasy, but at the same time very attached to a context about the human condition and the anchors of reason through defenses, routines or eccentricities, in the event that madness is perhaps the courage to pretend escape to the known.
One winter night, Mark Shluter's truck rolls over on a deserted stretch of road in Nebraska. An anonymous call notifies of the accident and Mark is transferred to the hospital, where, after an initially optimistic diagnosis, he falls into a coma. Karin Shluter, who has spent her entire life trying to escape her hometown, rushes back to care for her brother.
The first night he discovers an anonymous handwritten note with a strange message: "I am nobody, but tonight on the North Line highway, God has led me to you so that you could live and bring someone else back". The causes of the accident are not clear and the only witnesses are half a million cranes that stop on the banks of the Platte River during their migratory flights.
When Mark awakens from his coma, doctors diagnose him with Capgras syndrome, a disorder that makes him believe that his Karin is not his sister but an impostor. Desperate, Karin turns to Gerald Weber, a celebrated neurologist from the East Coast, for help, who agrees to visit Mark. Meanwhile, the latter, provided only with the anonymous note, tries to find out what happened the night of his inexplicable accident. Who is the author of the note? How do you explain the three sets of tire marks at the crash site? Did Mark see something he shouldn't have that night on the road? What do cranes have to do with your accident?
En The echo of memory, Richard Powers unfolds, with a perfect sense of rhythm, a range of small enigmas and smoke screens, and, with a brain disorder as a pretext, reflects on the fragility of what we usually understand as our identity.
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