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The Overstory: A Novel af Richard Powers
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The Overstory: A Novel (original 2018; udgave 2018)

af Richard Powers (Forfatter)

MedlemmerAnmeldelserPopularitetGennemsnitlig vurderingOmtaler
5,2912442,003 (4.07)486
Fiction. Literature. HTML:

A monumental novel about reimagining our place in the living world, by one of our most "prodigiously talented" novelists (New York Times Book Review).

The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing-and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by trees, are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest. There is a world alongside ours??vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.… (mere)

Medlem:cataloga
Titel:The Overstory: A Novel
Forfattere:Richard Powers (Forfatter)
Info:W. W. Norton & Company (2018), Edition: 1st, 512 pages
Samlinger:audio
Vurdering:
Nøgleord:fiction, nature, environment

Work Information

The Overstory af Richard Powers (2018)

  1. 51
    Barkskins af Annie Proulx (GerrysBookshelf)
  2. 31
    The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods af Julia Hill (Gwendydd)
    Gwendydd: One of the main characters of Overstory is loosely based on the life of Julia Butterfly Hill.
  3. 20
    Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest af Suzanne Simard (paradoxosalpha)
    paradoxosalpha: A book by the scientist who inspired the Powers character "Patricia Westerford."
  4. 10
    The Bone Clocks af David Mitchell (Cecrow)
  5. 10
    The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, Discoveries from a Secret World af Peter Wohlleben (anjenue, kaydern)
  6. 10
    The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning af Justin E. H. Smith (paradoxosalpha)
    paradoxosalpha: If you were confused or excited by the juxtaposition of silviculture and the Internet in The Overstory, Smith's book is good stuff, especially the second chapter, on "The Ecology of the Internet."
  7. 10
    The Monkey Wrench Gang af Edward Abbey (vwinsloe)
    vwinsloe: Environmental activist saboteurs star in each
  8. 11
    The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed af John Vaillant (Gwendydd)
    Gwendydd: These books both talk a lot about the giant trees of the west coast, logging, and anti-logging activists.
  9. 11
    Greenwood af Michael Christie (OscarWilde87)
  10. 00
    How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human af Eduardo Kohn (Cecrow)
    Cecrow: Related non-fiction
  11. 00
    North Woods af Daniel Mason (allthegoodbooks)
    allthegoodbooks: Episodic and focused on trees and people
  12. 00
    Falling Animals af Sheila Armstrong (allthegoodbooks)
    allthegoodbooks: Completely different themes but very similar structures: individual stories (lots of them) which come together to complete the whole.
  13. 01
    The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth af Richard Conniff (Sandwich76)
  14. 01
    River of Gods af Ian McDonald (paradoxosalpha)
    paradoxosalpha: The forest in Powers' book takes on the organizing and animating function of the river in McDonald's. Both of these novels also have a regard for artificial intelligence that de-centers it from the human perspective.
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» Se også 486 omtaler

Engelsk (235)  Fransk (3)  Hollandsk (2)  Tysk (1)  Alle sprog (241)
Viser 1-5 af 241 (næste | vis alle)
So many people recommended this book to me but I just didn't love it. It took me a long time to get through the first 1/3 of it. Interesting story lines and fun to see how they connected, but I'm sorry to say this one just didn't hold my interest. Too sprawling? I finished it, but it was a tough read for me. ( )
  rocketshackgirl | Mar 13, 2024 |
If you want your next book to be a challenge, look no further. This is a book of big ideas, too many to list. It is unusually dark and very heavy on the reader. The central theme is environmentalism, but it is a lot more than that.

While reading this my brain made a weird connection to Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. Not only because of the tree as the prevalent motif, but there is just something grandiose about these two works of art, something that will partly always remain unreachable to the audience, but you can sense that it is there. It is art pushed to the extreme, profound, but also insufferable at times. A lot is left to the interpretation of the reader.

Overstory touches on all the topics I love to read about, but it was still a hard work. It feels much longer than it actually is (around 500 pages). After the first part (Roots) that is a collection of stories through which we get to know the ten (!) main characters, things get a little complicated.
In the remaining parts of the book there are many superfluous descriptions, redundant characters and general lack of direction. Moreover, some ideas were really pushed too hard onto the reader through a black and white lens.

However, some paragraphs were so profoundly beautiful that it almost seems worth it. I kept rereading some sentences and have highlighted more paragraphs than in all the books I've read this year so far.

If the book had been edited and cleaned up a little more, I would have enjoyed it much more. It is a book you want to root for, you want everyone to read it. But, it is very inaccessible and I would be reluctant to recommend it to more casual readers. ( )
  ZeljanaMaricFerli | Mar 4, 2024 |
The book that got me into trees, which goes to show you the wondrous things that books can do. The Overstory seems to ask the reader to accept that trees have consciousness and can even make moral choices, and while I fully submit to the idea that life and reality are far, far more mysterious and wondrous than humans can yet understand, God bless us for trying so hard, I have my rather strong doubts about the claim. But still. Still. This novel shows us something big and true that most of us do not tend to see and that isn’t all that bad a description of great literature, it seems to me.

I feared for a long stretch of the second half of this doorstop novel that Powers was, after starting out so brilliantly with a series of character sketches linking his human creations to the natural world in ways seen and unseen, sending me off on Google searches to learn more about chestnuts and banyans and mulberries and elms, well, I feared he was descending into heavy handedness and mind closing didacticism. Jack booted police psychopaths operating in the service of corporate capital and state power may be a thing but it makes for an eye rolling scene in literature. And it seemed he was heading for a grand finish of nihilistic doomsdayism. But no, he branches off away from that future, sends out a bud of new life, that left me rising out of my chair in gratitude for this mighty work.

Might should be a 5 star then, but considering my enthusiasm for it hit a drag for a couple hundred pages, it gets a 4. For now. ( )
  lelandleslie | Feb 24, 2024 |
Like the mycelium that wrap around tree roots beneath the soil, providing a symbiotic transfer of nutrients, the stories Powers conjure rise to form a single overstory of grand limbs that only nature could conceive. ( )
  ben_r47 | Feb 22, 2024 |
Have you ever heard the old saying “You can’t see the forest for the trees.”

In his novel, “The Overstory,” Richard Powers kind of turns the saying upside down. He wants you to focus on the trees themselves.

Part polemic on the destruction of biodiversity, part Thoreauvian love-letter to the backwoods, The Overstory is nothing if not in the tradition of apocalyptic fiction, although something of a quiet, mystical apocalypse.

And it is very disquieting because there’s no happy ending.

Here’s what I get from the story: human development is killing the goose that laid the golden egg, our ancient old-growth forests. This much is pretty well a given.

So how do we get out of this mess?

1. Non-violent civil disobedience. We stop the clear-cutting by getting in the way of the saws.
2. We educate the masses, make them understand that pulling up the forests now is short-term gain for long-term pain
3. We follow this path to its logical conclusion, but along the way we “bank” our biodiversity and wait until the day when civilization has done its worst and re-build the world from its DNA up.
4. Why not encourage people to substitute their physical desires with cyber pleasures. Instead of making it easy to fly halfway across the world releasing tons of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, we give them a VR helmet and tell them to fly there virtually. Use technology to find ways not to clear cut our forests.
5. We go to the substantive roots of our legal system, the right to own property, and prevent people from disturbing the commons.

Like I said above, there is no happy ending and none of the above solutions proves feasible. Mankind doesn’t reform itself and the author, in my opinion, stalls about two-thirds of the way through his story about where to take his characters.

So much of what he feeds us about the trees is now pretty much based on scientific knowledge.

Trees do communicate amongst each other. They provide common defences against biological invaders. They exchange minerals for sugars with fungi. And they have a remarkable hydrolic system for getting water up trees hundreds of feet high.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the COVID-19 pandemic it’s that there’s a lot more we can do virtually that we don’t need to do in person. We can do without literally millions of polluting car trips to and from an office if we put our minds to it. ( )
  MylesKesten | Jan 23, 2024 |
Viser 1-5 af 241 (næste | vis alle)
“Literary fiction has largely become co-opted by that belief that meaning is an entirely personal thing,” Powers says. “It’s embraced the idea that life is primarily a struggle of the individual psyche to come to terms with itself. Consequently, it’s become a commodity like a wood chipper, or any other thing that can be rated in terms of utility.” [...]

“I want literature to be something other than it is today,” Powers says. “There was a time when our myths and legends and stories were about something greater than individual well-being. "
tilføjet af elenchus | Redigerlithub.com, Kevin Berger (Apr 23, 2018)
 
Acquiring tree consciousness, a precondition for learning how to live here on Earth, means learning what things grow and thrive here, independently of us.

We are phenomenally bad at experiencing, estimating, and conceiving of time. Our brains are shaped to pay attention to rapid movements against stable backgrounds, and we’re almost blind to the slower, broader background drift. The technologies that we have built to defeat time—writing and recording and photographing and filming—can impair our memory (as Socrates feared) and collapse us even more densely into what psychologists call the “specious present,” which seems to get shorter all the time. Plants’ memory and sense of time is utterly alien to us. It’s almost impossible for a person to wrap her head around the idea that there are bristlecone pines in the White Mountains of California that have been slowly dying since before humans invented writing.
 

» Tilføj andre forfattere (25 mulige)

Forfatter navnRolleHvilken slags forfatterVærk?Status
Richard Powersprimær forfatteralle udgaverberegnet
Allié, ManfredÜbersetzermedforfatternogle udgaverbekræftet
Bierstadt, AlbertOmslagsfotograf/tegner/...medforfatternogle udgaverbekræftet
Chauvin, SergeTraductionmedforfatternogle udgaverbekræftet
Gaffney, EvanOmslagsdesignermedforfatternogle udgaverbekræftet
Guevara, Teresa Lanero Ladrón deTraductormedforfatternogle udgaverbekræftet
Karhulahti, SariOversættermedforfatternogle udgaverbekræftet
Kempf-Allié, GabrieleÜbersetzermedforfatternogle udgaverbekræftet
Lanero, TeresaOversættermedforfatternogle udgaverbekræftet
Noorman, JelleOversættermedforfatternogle udgaverbekræftet
Quinn, MarysarahDesignermedforfatternogle udgaverbekræftet
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The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nodto me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.
-RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Earth may be alive: not as the ancients saw her--a sentient Goddess with a purpose and foresight--but alive like a tree. A tree that quietly exists, never moving except to sway in the wind, yet endlessly conversing with the sunlight and soil. Using sunlight and water and nutrient minerals to grow and change. But all done so imperceptibly, that to me an old oak tree on the green is the same as it was when I was a child.
--James Lovelock
Earth may be alive: not as the ancients saw her - a sentient Goddess wit a purpose and foresight - but alive like a tree. A tree that quietly exists, never moving except to sway in teh wind, yet endlessly conversing with the sunlight and the soil. Using sunlight and water and nutrient minerals to grow and change. But all done so imperceptibly, that to me the old oak tree on the green is the same as it was when I was a child.
-JAMES LOVELOCK
Tree . . . he watching you. You look at tree, he listen to you. He got no finger, he can't speak. But that leaf . . . he pumping, growing, growing in the night. While you sleeping you dream something. Tree and grass same thing.
--Bill Neidjie
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Fiction. Literature. HTML:

A monumental novel about reimagining our place in the living world, by one of our most "prodigiously talented" novelists (New York Times Book Review).

The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing-and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by trees, are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest. There is a world alongside ours??vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

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