|
Indlæser... The Overstory: A Novel (original 2018; udgave 2019)af Richard Powers (Forfatter)
Detaljer om værketThe Overstory af Richard Powers (2018)
  
» 18 mere Books Read in 2020 (137) Books Read in 2018 (205) Booker Prize (245) Five star books (341) Litsy Awards 2018 (60) Trees (1) The Hive Recommends (11) Climate Change (4) Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog. A little long, repetitive and tedious at times (  ) ibkennedy | Feb 23, 2021 |  In the first half of [b:The Overstory|40180098|The Overstory|Richard Powers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1562786502l/40180098._SY75_.jpg|57662223] the author uses trees as a connecting motif through the lives of nine disconnected characters. I've enjoyed the "different characters / shared object" framing device since first experiencing it in [b:The Library Card|87218|The Library Card|Jerry Spinelli|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328865933l/87218._SX50_.jpg|1222529] and the first half of the book uses it extremely well. The second half of the book shifts into a shared narrative and the book's well crafted characters suffer under the weight of having to carry that narrative. Still - well written and worth the read. ( ) eshaundo | Feb 10, 2021 | I really wanted to like this book but after 30% i cannot figure out what rhus is about but random stories with trees. (  ) kakadoo202 | Feb 9, 2021 | I got quite bored of this by the end, but it had its good bits. (  ) CharlotteBurt | Feb 1, 2021 | A powerful book on many levels: -many distinct characters that one cares about -strong consciousness of how we fail to perceive LIFE all around us and -an attempt to understand just why/how that failure happens -several provocations for soul-searching about one's own myopia -a recognition that our (humans') fate is sealed * it doesn't end well for people * but consider whether that is really something to be frightened about The book slides from radical activisim to an almost Buddhist acceptance regarding ecological disaster and tries to cover a variety of possible responses to it---none of which seem to work. It is neither dark nor hysterically lugubrious but rather it seems to point to a stoic realism. I hope to find time to read it again (  ) brianstagner | Jan 27, 2021 |
 “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. "  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.
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 to life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, 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. In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. 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. The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity's self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us? -- from dust jacket. No library descriptions found. |
 Google Books — Indlæser...Populære omslagVurderingGennemsnit: (4.07)
Er det dig?Bliv LibraryThing-forfatter. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
3
1
1