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The Gold Bug Variations
A magnificent story that probes the meaning of love, science, music, and art, by the brilliant author of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance .
640 pages, Paperback
First published August 25, 1991
About the author
Richard Powers
47 books5,750 followersRichard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. His book The Overstory won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.
Librarian note: There is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads database.
Librarian note: There is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads database.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 267 reviews
August 12, 2017
In my review of 2666, I wrote about the effectiveness of ambiguity; the power of allowing the reader to infer connections and actively build a personal theory of meaning about a novel. The Gold Bug Variations takes a different approach. Compare it to Gravity’s Rainbow (to which it is on the back cover): Gravity’s Rainbow never spells out its central metaphor; it remains elusive and unbounded, allowed to permeate the novel in unexpected ways. By contrast, Powers never misses an opportunity to break down his metaphors, to dissect, draw together and expound on the connections. They are never allowed room to breathe. The puzzle is almost delivered in its completed form.
And yet the novel succeeds brilliantly, in part because the puzzle in question is so complex and all-encompassing; it has no definite solution. The Gold Bug Variations is driven instead by the author’s irresistible enthusiasm and the richness of its themes, which intersect biology, information science, language and music – subjects with endless permutations, possessing the ability to illuminate all aspects of life, from morality to ontology, to the common search for a life worth living.
This is a novel that was written on the precipice of the information age. Some of the depictions of computer systems, as well as the concerns about the future seem quaint and anachronistic – they have now become part of our quotidian reality; while others of these concerns seem prescient (the difficulty in parsing an overload of information is a troubling reality in the era of fake news).
Powers writes in such an peculiarly ornate and idiosyncratic style, that I almost don’t believe he is American. There’s just something very English about the way he writes. His primary characters are very attractive (particularly the lead character, a librarian), and contribute to much of the appeal of the book. At times the relationships and actions of the characters test credulity, but they are always approached with a genuine earnestness and respect that lends authenticity to the emotions and interactions. The exploration of love and change is powerful and poignant.
This is a difficult novel, one that expects the applicant to arrive qualified with a working knowledge of a wide range of subjects. A moderate understanding of evolution and cell biology is mandatory. Some background in music and computer science is highly recommended. There were many references I managed to pick up that I think would be lost on many people, and I’m sure there were many more that were lost on me. The Gold Bug Variations can be information-dense and heavy handed at times, but it is a wonderful book. This is science-fiction not in the narrow sense but in its truest sense, examining the commonalities of humanity, our searching nature, and our place and purpose in the natural world.
And yet the novel succeeds brilliantly, in part because the puzzle in question is so complex and all-encompassing; it has no definite solution. The Gold Bug Variations is driven instead by the author’s irresistible enthusiasm and the richness of its themes, which intersect biology, information science, language and music – subjects with endless permutations, possessing the ability to illuminate all aspects of life, from morality to ontology, to the common search for a life worth living.
This is a novel that was written on the precipice of the information age. Some of the depictions of computer systems, as well as the concerns about the future seem quaint and anachronistic – they have now become part of our quotidian reality; while others of these concerns seem prescient (the difficulty in parsing an overload of information is a troubling reality in the era of fake news).
Powers writes in such an peculiarly ornate and idiosyncratic style, that I almost don’t believe he is American. There’s just something very English about the way he writes. His primary characters are very attractive (particularly the lead character, a librarian), and contribute to much of the appeal of the book. At times the relationships and actions of the characters test credulity, but they are always approached with a genuine earnestness and respect that lends authenticity to the emotions and interactions. The exploration of love and change is powerful and poignant.
This is a difficult novel, one that expects the applicant to arrive qualified with a working knowledge of a wide range of subjects. A moderate understanding of evolution and cell biology is mandatory. Some background in music and computer science is highly recommended. There were many references I managed to pick up that I think would be lost on many people, and I’m sure there were many more that were lost on me. The Gold Bug Variations can be information-dense and heavy handed at times, but it is a wonderful book. This is science-fiction not in the narrow sense but in its truest sense, examining the commonalities of humanity, our searching nature, and our place and purpose in the natural world.
November 17, 2017
A Source of Meditative Awe
As soon as I finished reading this novel, I wanted to respond the only way I could that would do justice to my feelings for the book: and that was to admit that I was in a state of wonder and to say that, in Richard Powers’ own words, the novel was "a source of meditative awe".
Although, at 639 pages, the novel was long, it was enough, neither too little nor too much. Still I didn’t want it to end, not so much when it did, but at all.
Recognition of the Variations
To the extent that the novel may be considered a work of post-modernism, it’s more profound than anything else I’ve read since, perhaps, "The Recognitions". It shares the knowledge of Thomas Pynchon’s "Gravity’s Rainbow", if not necessarily its playfulness. But then most of what passes for playful in other works of post-modernism is merely puerile, which is the last accusation that could be made about "The Gold Bug Variations". This novel is deadly serious, infinitely curious, intimate and romantic. So much so that you will learn more about women and men within its pages than you would from anything written by Joseph McElroy.
Titular Playfulness
Powers does play in this novel, but he plays with the building blocks of life. They are both the form and the subject matter of the novel. He spins his narrative around the double helix of DNA. There are two main stories: one set in 1957/58 and the other in 1983. Ironically, though perhaps not, each time is just a few years after the recording of one of Glenn Gould’s recordings of Bach’s "The Goldberg Variations" (1955 and 1981), which are alluded to in the title of the novel and consistently throughout the text itself. The two stories don’t so much alternate as intertwine. Powers and his characters play music for us, instead of post-modern silly buggers.
The title also alludes to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, "The Gold-Bug", which concerns the decipherment of a coded message about the location of the deceased Captain Kidd’s pirate treasure. As Poe’s narrator says:
The Seam Between Formula and Mystery
In the 1958 story, a number of scientists (including Drs. Stuart Ressler and Jeanette Koss) are trying to decode the message contained in the spiral DNA staircase. In the 1983 story, a young research librarian named Jan O’Deigh starts investigating Dr Ressler’s background at the request of her future boyfriend, art historian Frank Todd (who has just started working at a commercial data processing centre where Dr Ressler now works, and is eager to find out why Dr Ressler might have abandoned research that could have won him a Nobel Prize).
Soon after the novel starts (in 1983), both Jan and Frank learn that Dr Ressler has died of cancer. Thus, there are limited opportunities to learn the truth from Ressler himself. Jan’s field notebook contains the detail of the 1983 narrative. She's the source of most of the scientific information about DNA and the research project (as she tries to educate herself - and us). The coded message is the central metaphor of the novel. Yet the background isn’t just your customary post-modern name-dropping or info-dumping. We accumulate data, knowledge and understanding at the same pace as Jan does in her effort to investigate Ressler’s background.
The 1958 story is narrated in the third person, though we learn plenty about what Ressler is involved in, both professionally and personally. Indeed, it's revealed early in the novel that Ressler and Jeanette had a love affair. At the beginning of their relationship, Jeanette gave Ressler a vinyl copy of Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of "The Goldberg Variations". Ressler plays it constantly, until eventually it becomes a metaphor for both their relationship and the message contained in DNA.
A Pinnacle of Potency
The Goldberg Variations consist of 30 variations bookended by an aria at the beginning and end. Equally, Powers’ novel consists of thirty chapters bookended by two literary "arias" (literarias). Each chapter averages about 21 pages long, and is divided into four to six sub-chapters (like strands of DNA that propel the novel towards its conclusion).
In the liner notes to his recording, Glenn Gould wrote of Bach’s music:
It’s no overstatement to make the same comments about Powers’ novel. It has a double helical unity derived from intuitive perception that is born of both superlative craft and close scrutiny, mellowed by a non-pyrotechnic mastery of language that is subtly achieved. On the other hand, the vision and design are quite conscious and deliberate, nevertheless achieving a pinnacle of potency.
Playing with Messages
One of the scientists mentioned in the novel says of the double helix:
Powers refers to their research into the riddle as "the old detective story, the sober mystification of the bug." (p 238)
The novel proceeds on the basis that there is both a secret message contained in the code and a message with respect to the creation of life sent out by the code, the latter its primary task.
Jan responds:
The Complexities of Intimacy
Jan soon realises that it’s not just pleasure at the heart of the code, but, like aspects of painting (and music), desire:
She dresses herself up, makes herself a "visual lure" (p 223):
Desire seems to be part of the survival mechanism built into the "sinuous ribbons" of the helix. DNA is self-motivated to perpetuate itself by procreation (i.e., multiplication). Citing Herman Melville, Powers has Jan say, "Survival might force one into bedfellowship with a Queequeg or two":
Play Me My Variations
Ressler initially tries to ignore his own attraction to and longing for Jeanette:
Desire doesn’t just perpetuate the species, but it also seems to frustrate and confuse the normal operation of the individual biological system. Broadcast desire creates a "walking trance, the sleeping spell of mind." (p 237) The system can read it as an error, "a complex carbohydrate tease, cybernetic systems feeding back into each other, an infinite Do-loop, a sentence grammatical but out of syntactical control, whom looping around to subject subject who." (p 238)
Ressler resolves to dedicate his research to Jeanette: "He will bring her an incalculable prize...Now he will prove to her that he, of everyone she has ever met, most merits the selection of love...He has sought the code in order to seduce her." (pp 258, 281)
Some Other Hypothetical Life
Just as the codes of DNA determine life, they are variable, and never result in the same outcome twice. There are approximations, errors and flaws in the code that account for both variation (variety) and evolution. Every code or "language makes it impossible to receive the exact message sent." All language is mere metaphor. It’s not (and can’t be) an exact replica of life.
The Code as a Figure, a Metaphor
Ressler hypothesises that "The code is...a figure. A metaphor. The code exists only as the coded organism. There is no lexicon or look-up book. Not in the molecules, nor the cell, nor anywhere else but in that place - unnameable except by comparison - that houses all translation, all motivation, all that self-propagating structure that only by rough analogy and always in archaic diction (but not yet in his own words) can only inescapably be called desire." (p 271)
The construct of metaphor is central to the novel:
This is how Jan explains the metaphorical relationship between "The Goldberg Variations" and DNA code:
The Unmappable Location of Love
Jan pursues the connection further into the very nature of language, its imprecision and its inability to capture reality:
Still, "for a brief moment, he [Ressler] achieved a synthesis between a scientist’s certainty in underlying particulars and the cleric’s awe at the unmappable whole." (p 399)
The Thing Plays Itself
Like the code, the Variations play themselves, which also describes the mutual desire between Ressler and Jeanette:
Shortly afterwards, Jan describes her notebook entries in a way that could be equally applied to the novel itself:
While this description is literally true, it doesn’t quite do justice to the novel’s status as a profoundly satisfying metaphysical and romantic masterpiece.
I highly recommend this novel to serious readers who are comfortable with the subject matter of both philosophy and science (not that you require any prior knowledge of either - you can leave that to Jan!).
VARIATIONS ON LOVE:
The Double Helix of Desire
[Ode to Stuart Ressler]
Did you think you could find
The secret code of life
With another man’s wife,
Two lovers’ legs entwined?
Play Me My Variations
[In the Words of Richard Powers]
Two copies twist about each
Other with helical precision,
At ever-increasing steps, coding
For their own continuation.
Challenge the Patient
[After Richard Powers]
Apply your Latinate reason
To any vollumannous tome
Spruiked by a pomo coterie:
Dotards love their own dotery.
Weed it and reap out of season,
In case it transmits their syndrome.
CLA REM ONT
[Lyric by Robyn Hitchcock]
"And you wanna know what is
And also what is not
Don't you, girl?
It's an independent life
And you want to see your eyes
Reflected in the world."
SOUNDTRACK:
[Quodlibet]
As soon as I finished reading this novel, I wanted to respond the only way I could that would do justice to my feelings for the book: and that was to admit that I was in a state of wonder and to say that, in Richard Powers’ own words, the novel was "a source of meditative awe".
Although, at 639 pages, the novel was long, it was enough, neither too little nor too much. Still I didn’t want it to end, not so much when it did, but at all.
Recognition of the Variations
To the extent that the novel may be considered a work of post-modernism, it’s more profound than anything else I’ve read since, perhaps, "The Recognitions". It shares the knowledge of Thomas Pynchon’s "Gravity’s Rainbow", if not necessarily its playfulness. But then most of what passes for playful in other works of post-modernism is merely puerile, which is the last accusation that could be made about "The Gold Bug Variations". This novel is deadly serious, infinitely curious, intimate and romantic. So much so that you will learn more about women and men within its pages than you would from anything written by Joseph McElroy.
Titular Playfulness
Powers does play in this novel, but he plays with the building blocks of life. They are both the form and the subject matter of the novel. He spins his narrative around the double helix of DNA. There are two main stories: one set in 1957/58 and the other in 1983. Ironically, though perhaps not, each time is just a few years after the recording of one of Glenn Gould’s recordings of Bach’s "The Goldberg Variations" (1955 and 1981), which are alluded to in the title of the novel and consistently throughout the text itself. The two stories don’t so much alternate as intertwine. Powers and his characters play music for us, instead of post-modern silly buggers.
The title also alludes to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, "The Gold-Bug", which concerns the decipherment of a coded message about the location of the deceased Captain Kidd’s pirate treasure. As Poe’s narrator says:
"Circumstances and a certain bias of mind have led me to take interest in such riddles, and it may well be doubted whether human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve."
The Seam Between Formula and Mystery
In the 1958 story, a number of scientists (including Drs. Stuart Ressler and Jeanette Koss) are trying to decode the message contained in the spiral DNA staircase. In the 1983 story, a young research librarian named Jan O’Deigh starts investigating Dr Ressler’s background at the request of her future boyfriend, art historian Frank Todd (who has just started working at a commercial data processing centre where Dr Ressler now works, and is eager to find out why Dr Ressler might have abandoned research that could have won him a Nobel Prize).
Soon after the novel starts (in 1983), both Jan and Frank learn that Dr Ressler has died of cancer. Thus, there are limited opportunities to learn the truth from Ressler himself. Jan’s field notebook contains the detail of the 1983 narrative. She's the source of most of the scientific information about DNA and the research project (as she tries to educate herself - and us). The coded message is the central metaphor of the novel. Yet the background isn’t just your customary post-modern name-dropping or info-dumping. We accumulate data, knowledge and understanding at the same pace as Jan does in her effort to investigate Ressler’s background.
The 1958 story is narrated in the third person, though we learn plenty about what Ressler is involved in, both professionally and personally. Indeed, it's revealed early in the novel that Ressler and Jeanette had a love affair. At the beginning of their relationship, Jeanette gave Ressler a vinyl copy of Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of "The Goldberg Variations". Ressler plays it constantly, until eventually it becomes a metaphor for both their relationship and the message contained in DNA.
A Pinnacle of Potency
The Goldberg Variations consist of 30 variations bookended by an aria at the beginning and end. Equally, Powers’ novel consists of thirty chapters bookended by two literary "arias" (literarias). Each chapter averages about 21 pages long, and is divided into four to six sub-chapters (like strands of DNA that propel the novel towards its conclusion).
In the liner notes to his recording, Glenn Gould wrote of Bach’s music:
"It is, in short, music which observes neither end nor beginning, music with neither real climax nor real resolution, music which, like Baudelaire's lovers, 'rests lightly on the wings of the unchecked wind.' It has, then, unity through intuitive perception, unity born of craft and scrutiny, mellowed by mastery achieved, and revealed to us here, as so rarely in art, in the vision of subconscious design exulting upon a pinnacle of potency."
It’s no overstatement to make the same comments about Powers’ novel. It has a double helical unity derived from intuitive perception that is born of both superlative craft and close scrutiny, mellowed by a non-pyrotechnic mastery of language that is subtly achieved. On the other hand, the vision and design are quite conscious and deliberate, nevertheless achieving a pinnacle of potency.
Playing with Messages
One of the scientists mentioned in the novel says of the double helix:
"I am the riddle of life. Know me and you will know yourself."
Powers refers to their research into the riddle as "the old detective story, the sober mystification of the bug." (p 238)
The novel proceeds on the basis that there is both a secret message contained in the code and a message with respect to the creation of life sent out by the code, the latter its primary task.
Jan responds:
"I spend the afternoon playing with messages, and on no proof but my pleasure, feel as if I’m closing in on my discovery, me." (p 220)
The Complexities of Intimacy
Jan soon realises that it’s not just pleasure at the heart of the code, but, like aspects of painting (and music), desire:
"Shape and form began to seem dialects of desire."
She dresses herself up, makes herself a "visual lure" (p 223):
"I didn’t try to explain that I was after one thing: what it felt like to be alive." (p 315)
Desire seems to be part of the survival mechanism built into the "sinuous ribbons" of the helix. DNA is self-motivated to perpetuate itself by procreation (i.e., multiplication). Citing Herman Melville, Powers has Jan say, "Survival might force one into bedfellowship with a Queequeg or two":
"Truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold." (p 229)
"At length, he [Todd] relaxed into my arms and kissed me where the collarbone turns to sternum." (p 232)
Play Me My Variations
Ressler initially tries to ignore his own attraction to and longing for Jeanette:
"Dr. Koss walks across the lab to the dissection table, her legs inscribing a counterrhythm, the high arc of her collarbone floating in contrary motion. He is hypnotised by her approach, his pinch of chromatic pain enhanced to ecstasy at just being able to see her, look at her, taste without touching. How can he remain impassive, give this woman no clue that she throws out his method, corrupts his buffer rates, soaks his equilibrium with a wash of chemical maydays." (p 236)
Desire doesn’t just perpetuate the species, but it also seems to frustrate and confuse the normal operation of the individual biological system. Broadcast desire creates a "walking trance, the sleeping spell of mind." (p 237) The system can read it as an error, "a complex carbohydrate tease, cybernetic systems feeding back into each other, an infinite Do-loop, a sentence grammatical but out of syntactical control, whom looping around to subject subject who." (p 238)
Ressler resolves to dedicate his research to Jeanette: "He will bring her an incalculable prize...Now he will prove to her that he, of everyone she has ever met, most merits the selection of love...He has sought the code in order to seduce her." (pp 258, 281)
Some Other Hypothetical Life
Just as the codes of DNA determine life, they are variable, and never result in the same outcome twice. There are approximations, errors and flaws in the code that account for both variation (variety) and evolution. Every code or "language makes it impossible to receive the exact message sent." All language is mere metaphor. It’s not (and can’t be) an exact replica of life.
The Code as a Figure, a Metaphor
Ressler hypothesises that "The code is...a figure. A metaphor. The code exists only as the coded organism. There is no lexicon or look-up book. Not in the molecules, nor the cell, nor anywhere else but in that place - unnameable except by comparison - that houses all translation, all motivation, all that self-propagating structure that only by rough analogy and always in archaic diction (but not yet in his own words) can only inescapably be called desire." (p 271)
The construct of metaphor is central to the novel:
"The poignancy of a pattern lifted beyond identity, beyond the thing it was mimicking, past metaphor, into the first mystery: the bliss beyond the fiddle, but not, for a night, beyond fiddling." (p 574)
This is how Jan explains the metaphorical relationship between "The Goldberg Variations" and DNA code:
"Dr Ressler - already fighting gnostic tendencies - must have loved discovering in Bach two paired strands, four phrase-building blocks, a sixty-four-codon catalogue. Bach had a habit of imbedding mystic numbers in his compositions; these ones happen to correspond to the number-game nature embeds in its own. But this coincidence was the least of the qualities that made this music Ressler’s best metaphor for the living gene." (p 579)
The Unmappable Location of Love
Jan pursues the connection further into the very nature of language, its imprecision and its inability to capture reality:
"I would tell him [Todd] how the helix is not a description at all, but just the infolded germ of a scaffolding organism whose function is to promote and preserve the art treasure that erects it. How the four-base language is both more and less than plan. How it comprises secret writing in the fullest sense, possessing all the infinite, extendable, constructing possibilities lying hidden in the parts of speech. How there is always a go-between, a sign between signature and nature...Even Todd would see how breathtaking it must have been to be the first to connect metaphor to chemistry, to find the genes, those letter-crosses nesting like flocks in family trees...How language makes it impossible to receive the exact message sent...I would make metaphors for you until I became almost clear. Words are fairy tale, not a court transcript...The closest he [Ressler] would ever get is simile, literature in translation, the thing by another name, and never what the tag stood for. The dream that base-pair sequences might talk about themselves in high-level grammar vanished in the synthesised organism. Science remains at best a marvellous mine, not a replacement for the shattered Tower [of Babel]." (p 517)
Still, "for a brief moment, he [Ressler] achieved a synthesis between a scientist’s certainty in underlying particulars and the cleric’s awe at the unmappable whole." (p 399)
The Thing Plays Itself
Like the code, the Variations play themselves, which also describes the mutual desire between Ressler and Jeanette:
"All the two of them need to do is hit the right notes at the right time, and the thing plays itself." (p 501)
Shortly afterwards, Jan describes her notebook entries in a way that could be equally applied to the novel itself:
"A little lay chemistry, evolution in outline, amateur linguistics padded out with kiss-and-tell." (p 556)
While this description is literally true, it doesn’t quite do justice to the novel’s status as a profoundly satisfying metaphysical and romantic masterpiece.
I highly recommend this novel to serious readers who are comfortable with the subject matter of both philosophy and science (not that you require any prior knowledge of either - you can leave that to Jan!).
VARIATIONS ON LOVE:
The Double Helix of Desire
[Ode to Stuart Ressler]
Did you think you could find
The secret code of life
With another man’s wife,
Two lovers’ legs entwined?
Play Me My Variations
[In the Words of Richard Powers]
Two copies twist about each
Other with helical precision,
At ever-increasing steps, coding
For their own continuation.
Challenge the Patient
[After Richard Powers]
Apply your Latinate reason
To any vollumannous tome
Spruiked by a pomo coterie:
Dotards love their own dotery.
Weed it and reap out of season,
In case it transmits their syndrome.
CLA REM ONT
[Lyric by Robyn Hitchcock]
"And you wanna know what is
And also what is not
Don't you, girl?
It's an independent life
And you want to see your eyes
Reflected in the world."
SOUNDTRACK:
[Quodlibet]
January 7, 2019
How many ways are there of being alive?
This was my second time though The Gold Bug Variations. For brevity’s sake (I could write a lot, so be thankful), I’ve left my original review below as most of it still holds. Here are just a few further thoughts.
There are faults in this book. It is over-written (Powers has turned every possible dial up to 11), it could be 200 pages shorter, it contains technical, scientific passages that will baffle all but the expert. But I still give it 5 stars for one simple reason: reading the book makes me rejoice in being alive, makes me more aware of living. If that’s not worth 5 stars, I don’t know what is.
The basis of the story is genetics. Appropriately, it is a double-helix love story as two tales twist around one another. At the same time, it incorporates Bach’s Goldberg Variations which also form a kind of helix in their intricate structure (think “Crick-Watson, met de Bles, Bach” instead of “Godel, Escher, Bach”).
The seeds of most, if not all, of Powers’ future books are evident as you read. At one point I reached the conclusion that all Powers’ subsequent novels are simply explorations of one of the ideas he initially investigates here. Some of his dominant themes play out:
Fields of study, like spectral bands, differ only in wavelength. No discrete moment when red ends and orange begins.
The crucial thing is not...what a thing is but how it connects to others...Each thing is only what it is through everything else.
There is repeated exploration of time as both cyclical (dates repeating) and linear (always moving forward). This is something that Ali Smith has said she is exploring in her current seasonal quartet.
There are references back to Powers’ first two novels as he talks about the impact of science on war and vice versa and as he makes explicit reference to the time capsule buried at the start of Prisoner’s Dilemma.
And, in the midst of all the technical detail, a simple quote that says Science…is about reverence not mastery.
I guess it is partly all the talk about genetics, but the wonder of life shines through every page of this book (even the ones I can’t understand). The by turns happy and sad love stories that show that humanity is more than a collection of genes/chromosones/enzymes etc. reflect what Powers has said about his latest book The Overstory where he has reminded us (in interviews etc. not in the book, except by our own interpretation of it) that the real most amazing products of 4 billion years of evolution that need our help are us.
Purely by coincidence, I started this book on the same day that I started a book called “Seeking Aliveness” which is a day-by-day through the year series of short Christian meditations. The first week (which is as far as I have got so far) focuses on what it means to be alive, to be part of the wonders of the world whether natural or man made. These two books played against one another as I read them in a way that would, I think, have made Bach very happy.
---------------
ORIGINAL REVIEW
---------------
In Myers-Briggs terminology, I am a strong N-type. We Ns like ideas and we love patterns, especially hidden patterns that we can uncover. Facts matter but are somewhat secondary. This book is great for such a person!
The plot of this book is almost a by-product of its structure and subject matter. It uses the science of genetics to explore the significance and meaning of life. If it were not about four people, two couples, and an intertwined love story, then something would have gone wrong!
This is a book to make you pause and contemplate some of the mysteries of life. It’s not an easy book to read, partly because it contains some long passages that are scientific or that require a working knowledge of music theory. But it is an immensely rewarding book to read, especially, I think, if you allow your mind to pick up some of the thoughts thrown out and to dwell on them for a while.
There’s a double love story that wraps around itself which is like the double helix in the scientific bits. But there are many passages that ask you to stop and think about how and why you are here. They ask “how” because they consider the randomness and complexity of life from a scientific viewpoint. And how can we reach a point of development that allows us to ask questions of ourselves in that way? And then the “why” question crops up in the pursuit of knowledge, the love stories, the creativity of painting and music.
Any book that makes you more aware of being alive and more aware of what it means to be alive, what it means to be YOU, has to be worth the effort it takes to read it. Well, that’s my view, anyway. And it does take both time and effort to read this. At 639 pages of often dense and technical language (but often, simultaneously, playful language), you cannot expect to skip through it.
I appreciate some will find this book too clever for its own good. I can understand that view. The New York Times said "Just seeing so much cleverness packed into 639 pages is a remarkable experience. The novel reads as if it has been written from a room-size collection of index cards, so dense is each paragraph. Almost every sentence is a heroic tour de force built around a fascinating gimmick of language, usually a pun or a metaphor derived from the figurative possibilities of scientific technical language, liberated from the usual literary attention to connotation or elegance."
That quote will have put many people off. My wife has a degree in English Literature but would run a mile from a book described that way. But I don't share that view. I loved what it made me think about. I wish I was clever enough to understand the multitude of puns and metaphors that I feel slipped by as I read!
This was my second time though The Gold Bug Variations. For brevity’s sake (I could write a lot, so be thankful), I’ve left my original review below as most of it still holds. Here are just a few further thoughts.
There are faults in this book. It is over-written (Powers has turned every possible dial up to 11), it could be 200 pages shorter, it contains technical, scientific passages that will baffle all but the expert. But I still give it 5 stars for one simple reason: reading the book makes me rejoice in being alive, makes me more aware of living. If that’s not worth 5 stars, I don’t know what is.
The basis of the story is genetics. Appropriately, it is a double-helix love story as two tales twist around one another. At the same time, it incorporates Bach’s Goldberg Variations which also form a kind of helix in their intricate structure (think “Crick-Watson, met de Bles, Bach” instead of “Godel, Escher, Bach”).
The seeds of most, if not all, of Powers’ future books are evident as you read. At one point I reached the conclusion that all Powers’ subsequent novels are simply explorations of one of the ideas he initially investigates here. Some of his dominant themes play out:
Fields of study, like spectral bands, differ only in wavelength. No discrete moment when red ends and orange begins.
The crucial thing is not...what a thing is but how it connects to others...Each thing is only what it is through everything else.
There is repeated exploration of time as both cyclical (dates repeating) and linear (always moving forward). This is something that Ali Smith has said she is exploring in her current seasonal quartet.
There are references back to Powers’ first two novels as he talks about the impact of science on war and vice versa and as he makes explicit reference to the time capsule buried at the start of Prisoner’s Dilemma.
And, in the midst of all the technical detail, a simple quote that says Science…is about reverence not mastery.
I guess it is partly all the talk about genetics, but the wonder of life shines through every page of this book (even the ones I can’t understand). The by turns happy and sad love stories that show that humanity is more than a collection of genes/chromosones/enzymes etc. reflect what Powers has said about his latest book The Overstory where he has reminded us (in interviews etc. not in the book, except by our own interpretation of it) that the real most amazing products of 4 billion years of evolution that need our help are us.
Purely by coincidence, I started this book on the same day that I started a book called “Seeking Aliveness” which is a day-by-day through the year series of short Christian meditations. The first week (which is as far as I have got so far) focuses on what it means to be alive, to be part of the wonders of the world whether natural or man made. These two books played against one another as I read them in a way that would, I think, have made Bach very happy.
---------------
ORIGINAL REVIEW
---------------
In Myers-Briggs terminology, I am a strong N-type. We Ns like ideas and we love patterns, especially hidden patterns that we can uncover. Facts matter but are somewhat secondary. This book is great for such a person!
The plot of this book is almost a by-product of its structure and subject matter. It uses the science of genetics to explore the significance and meaning of life. If it were not about four people, two couples, and an intertwined love story, then something would have gone wrong!
This is a book to make you pause and contemplate some of the mysteries of life. It’s not an easy book to read, partly because it contains some long passages that are scientific or that require a working knowledge of music theory. But it is an immensely rewarding book to read, especially, I think, if you allow your mind to pick up some of the thoughts thrown out and to dwell on them for a while.
There’s a double love story that wraps around itself which is like the double helix in the scientific bits. But there are many passages that ask you to stop and think about how and why you are here. They ask “how” because they consider the randomness and complexity of life from a scientific viewpoint. And how can we reach a point of development that allows us to ask questions of ourselves in that way? And then the “why” question crops up in the pursuit of knowledge, the love stories, the creativity of painting and music.
Any book that makes you more aware of being alive and more aware of what it means to be alive, what it means to be YOU, has to be worth the effort it takes to read it. Well, that’s my view, anyway. And it does take both time and effort to read this. At 639 pages of often dense and technical language (but often, simultaneously, playful language), you cannot expect to skip through it.
I appreciate some will find this book too clever for its own good. I can understand that view. The New York Times said "Just seeing so much cleverness packed into 639 pages is a remarkable experience. The novel reads as if it has been written from a room-size collection of index cards, so dense is each paragraph. Almost every sentence is a heroic tour de force built around a fascinating gimmick of language, usually a pun or a metaphor derived from the figurative possibilities of scientific technical language, liberated from the usual literary attention to connotation or elegance."
That quote will have put many people off. My wife has a degree in English Literature but would run a mile from a book described that way. But I don't share that view. I loved what it made me think about. I wish I was clever enough to understand the multitude of puns and metaphors that I feel slipped by as I read!
September 20, 2020
This was my penultimate Powers novel (I haven't yet managed to get hold of a copy of Prisoner's Dilemma, its immediate predecessor). It is a book which I had been looking forward to because of its musical content and some interesting reviews, but for me it did not quite meet my high expectations, perhaps because Powers just had too many ideas to shoehorn in, and the result is over-long and quite hard work to read. I am not sure I fully understood the scientific content either.
There are three main characters - the main narrator is Jan O'Deigh, a librarian whose job involves answering questions from the public (so perhaps a human forerunner of Google, Alexa et al). Two of her questioners are Stuart Ressler, who spots an error in her daily today in history piece (so she is a proto-Wikipedia too). Franklin Todd, Ressler's colleague in his night-shift job in a financial company's computer centre also approaches her wanting to know what Ressler's past involved.
Ressler turns out to have been a brilliant but somewhat erratic researcher in genetics back in the mid 1950s, when the first attempts were being made to understand DNA encoding. A young female colleague introduces him to Bach's Goldberg variations, which is the other main linking theme. In the modern part of the story, Jan starts visiting the two men in the data centre, starting an affair with Todd and getting increasingly drawn to Ressler and his genetic puzzles.
As always Powers devotes a lot of space to exploring his technical, scientific and musical subject matter, not necessarily with academic rigour, but detailed enough to get an understanding of why he is so interested in them. For me though, the human aspects of the story were a little weak, so I don't think this one will ever be my favourite Powers novel.
There are three main characters - the main narrator is Jan O'Deigh, a librarian whose job involves answering questions from the public (so perhaps a human forerunner of Google, Alexa et al). Two of her questioners are Stuart Ressler, who spots an error in her daily today in history piece (so she is a proto-Wikipedia too). Franklin Todd, Ressler's colleague in his night-shift job in a financial company's computer centre also approaches her wanting to know what Ressler's past involved.
Ressler turns out to have been a brilliant but somewhat erratic researcher in genetics back in the mid 1950s, when the first attempts were being made to understand DNA encoding. A young female colleague introduces him to Bach's Goldberg variations, which is the other main linking theme. In the modern part of the story, Jan starts visiting the two men in the data centre, starting an affair with Todd and getting increasingly drawn to Ressler and his genetic puzzles.
As always Powers devotes a lot of space to exploring his technical, scientific and musical subject matter, not necessarily with academic rigour, but detailed enough to get an understanding of why he is so interested in them. For me though, the human aspects of the story were a little weak, so I don't think this one will ever be my favourite Powers novel.
November 1, 2007
Dear Richard Powers,
I'm sorry I gave up on your book about a third of the way into it. I don't normally do that. Even if I'm trapped in an airport newsstand without a book, and end up buying "The Hunt for Red October", or some Neil Gaiman jerk-off dorkfest, I'll usually see it through to the end out of what I can only guess to be some misplaced romantic loyalty to the printed word, or possibly a mild to medium case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. "The Gold Bug Variations" however, proved painful and laborious enough to squelch both neuroses.
Next time, remember that you don't have to hold my hand and feed me chocolate truffles while you tediously walk me through every metaphor, every allusion, every historical or pop culture reference, or any otherwise subtle device that makes good fiction challenging. I'm a reasonably smart guy. I like figuring it out on my own. Thanks jerk.
Hugs and Kisses,
Ben White
I'm sorry I gave up on your book about a third of the way into it. I don't normally do that. Even if I'm trapped in an airport newsstand without a book, and end up buying "The Hunt for Red October", or some Neil Gaiman jerk-off dorkfest, I'll usually see it through to the end out of what I can only guess to be some misplaced romantic loyalty to the printed word, or possibly a mild to medium case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. "The Gold Bug Variations" however, proved painful and laborious enough to squelch both neuroses.
Next time, remember that you don't have to hold my hand and feed me chocolate truffles while you tediously walk me through every metaphor, every allusion, every historical or pop culture reference, or any otherwise subtle device that makes good fiction challenging. I'm a reasonably smart guy. I like figuring it out on my own. Thanks jerk.
Hugs and Kisses,
Ben White
January 14, 2023
un viaggio nella musica, nella genetica, nell'infinitamente piccolo e nell'infinitamente grande.. un viaggio in noi stessi.
a volte il metodo per risolvere un enigma è più importante dell'enigma stesso
nel DNA ADENINA-TIMINA nell'RNA ADENINA-URACILE
nel DNA CITOSINA-GUANINA nell'RNA CITOSINA-GUANINA
a volte il metodo per risolvere un enigma è più importante dell'enigma stesso
nel DNA ADENINA-TIMINA nell'RNA ADENINA-URACILE
nel DNA CITOSINA-GUANINA nell'RNA CITOSINA-GUANINA
June 9, 2016
Music of the Genetic Code
Each time I have finished reading a book by the author (The Echo Maker, The Time of Our Singing, and Orfeo ), true Powers fans have chimed in with, "Ah, but you must try The Gold Bug Variations!" For them, apparently, it stands as a gold standard of the author's work. It is certainly the richest, most knowledge-packed, monster-marvel of a book by Powers (or just about anyone else) that you could hope to read. Totally amazing, but also immensely challenging; I can't help thinking that many of these friends are patting themselves on the back for having got through it at all; I certainly feel that way myself.
It was especially interesting to compare it with Orfeo, published almost a quarter-century later. So similar are the themes that it is impossible not to see Orfeo as a later revisiting of the earlier novel, trimming it down, changing its proportions, and bringing the science up to date. Both feature a protagonist who is both a scientist and a musician. In Orfeo, this is Peter Els, a chemist-turned-composer who does simple gene splicing in a kitchen laboratory. In The Gold Bug Variations, it is Stuart Ressler, who had a brief brush with fame in the 1950s, on the cutting edge of cracking the genetic code. Now, almost a recluse, he works night shifts in a computer processing warehouse in Brooklyn, incessantly playing Bach's Goldberg Variations on a scratchy gramophone. Powers would make even more of the musical element in Orfeo, giving that novel an extended lyrical feel that it not to be found here. But whether he is writing about Bach here or music of our own time in the later book, his treatment of music is utterly superb; he has made me hear new things in a work that I have been trying to play for the past twenty years!
The Goldbergs underpin the Gold Bugs in every possible way. The novel has thirty chapters and an opening and closing aria, paralleling Bach's aria and thirty variations, although only a handful of Powers' chapters are clearly tied to the musical form of the individual variation. But the concentration on form is central. Ressler is concerned with how the arrangement of the bases Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, and Thymine on the double-helix strands of DNA may map out the structure of a cell, an organism, an individual, and ultimately every aspect of life in which that individual takes part. DNA is the key to our individuality; it is also what we pass on to our children, ensuring our continuation beyond death. Like Orfeo, this earlier novel is a book about death and the conquest of death through genetic inheritance; indeed, it opens with the news that Ressler has died. What, if anything, has he passed on to succeeding generations? Why did he abandon science when he was apparently on the threshold of its holy of holies?
Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Gold Bug" does more than provide a nicely-punning title for Powers' novel; it is also the first introduction of cryptography into fiction. To call the work of Stuart Ressler and his real-life contemporaries in molecular biology "code breaking" is more than a metaphor: it in fact has much in common with both mathematics and linguistics. Codes and information retrieval play a large part in the novel, from renaissance iconography to computer programming. Ressler's fascination with the Goldberg Variations is only partly sensual; he is in awe at the rigor with which Bach built a towering structure on a simple thirty-two-measure bass, interspersing a series of strict canons with virtuoso displays and genre pieces of many different kinds. The same combination of rigor and jeu d'esprit is found in the writing, which sometimes has the expository clarity of a book of non-fiction (nay, a whole library of them!), sometimes twines itself into an intricate knot of the most brilliant puns and allusions, sometimes hooks you with simple narrative that is unexpectedly direct and moving.
For yes, it does have a story, although there are times when you begin to wonder. The principal character is not actually Ressler, but the narrator, a reference librarian of around thirty named Jan O'Deigh. She gets to know Ressler when his coworker on the computer night shift, a young art historian named Franklin Todd (Frank or Frankers), asks her to research his reticent colleague. It will surprise no one that Jan and Frank fall in love (though it takes a long time to get them there). No surprise either that Stuart Ressler's annus mirabilis of science should also have included a love affair of his own. Like base-pairs on a double helix, the two love stories spiral around one another at a twenty-five year remove. Whether heart-warming or heart-breaking, they open all kinds of other questions about the connections between human beings—and these cannot all be solved by reference to the genetic code. For this is also a book about splitting and recombining, the kind that people do, not just cells.
It is not a simple book—did I make that clear? Even the double helix is an inadequate analogy for its narrative technique. It opens, as I say, with Franklin sending Jan news of Ressler's death. But by this time, Jan and Frank have split up and are no longer in touch. Jan quits the library and sets herself to spend a year researching Stuart Ressler's life, his former scientific field, and his ever-present music. At the same time, she is trying to work out where Frank can be, piecing together clues from the occasional missives he sends from foreign countries. So any one chapter may contain a section set in the lonely present, another a year or so earlier, when Jan used to visit the two men amid the whirring machinery in their night workshop, and another a quarter-century before that, capturing the ferment of discovery in the labs of the University of Illinois. Oh, and those arabesques of intellectual legerdemain that I mentioned earlier, pages of exposition on just about every subject under the sun, a veritable Bartlett's of assorted quotations that Jan would post on the board in her job as librarian, a grab-bag of interesting factoids that she would research in her answers on the Question Board, and the frequent "This Day in History" feature, serving to place the story not only in its time but in the context of the entire millennium. Sometimes I think Powers tried to put everything he knew into a single novel, as though afraid he would not get to write another. Well, he did write others, many of them, just as intelligent but generally better focused than this one.
Yet this is utterly extraordinary. Despite its weighty qualifications as a door-stop, it opens windows onto wider landscapes and more entrancing airs than one could ever have thought possible.
Each time I have finished reading a book by the author (The Echo Maker, The Time of Our Singing, and Orfeo ), true Powers fans have chimed in with, "Ah, but you must try The Gold Bug Variations!" For them, apparently, it stands as a gold standard of the author's work. It is certainly the richest, most knowledge-packed, monster-marvel of a book by Powers (or just about anyone else) that you could hope to read. Totally amazing, but also immensely challenging; I can't help thinking that many of these friends are patting themselves on the back for having got through it at all; I certainly feel that way myself.
It was especially interesting to compare it with Orfeo, published almost a quarter-century later. So similar are the themes that it is impossible not to see Orfeo as a later revisiting of the earlier novel, trimming it down, changing its proportions, and bringing the science up to date. Both feature a protagonist who is both a scientist and a musician. In Orfeo, this is Peter Els, a chemist-turned-composer who does simple gene splicing in a kitchen laboratory. In The Gold Bug Variations, it is Stuart Ressler, who had a brief brush with fame in the 1950s, on the cutting edge of cracking the genetic code. Now, almost a recluse, he works night shifts in a computer processing warehouse in Brooklyn, incessantly playing Bach's Goldberg Variations on a scratchy gramophone. Powers would make even more of the musical element in Orfeo, giving that novel an extended lyrical feel that it not to be found here. But whether he is writing about Bach here or music of our own time in the later book, his treatment of music is utterly superb; he has made me hear new things in a work that I have been trying to play for the past twenty years!
The Goldbergs underpin the Gold Bugs in every possible way. The novel has thirty chapters and an opening and closing aria, paralleling Bach's aria and thirty variations, although only a handful of Powers' chapters are clearly tied to the musical form of the individual variation. But the concentration on form is central. Ressler is concerned with how the arrangement of the bases Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, and Thymine on the double-helix strands of DNA may map out the structure of a cell, an organism, an individual, and ultimately every aspect of life in which that individual takes part. DNA is the key to our individuality; it is also what we pass on to our children, ensuring our continuation beyond death. Like Orfeo, this earlier novel is a book about death and the conquest of death through genetic inheritance; indeed, it opens with the news that Ressler has died. What, if anything, has he passed on to succeeding generations? Why did he abandon science when he was apparently on the threshold of its holy of holies?
Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Gold Bug" does more than provide a nicely-punning title for Powers' novel; it is also the first introduction of cryptography into fiction. To call the work of Stuart Ressler and his real-life contemporaries in molecular biology "code breaking" is more than a metaphor: it in fact has much in common with both mathematics and linguistics. Codes and information retrieval play a large part in the novel, from renaissance iconography to computer programming. Ressler's fascination with the Goldberg Variations is only partly sensual; he is in awe at the rigor with which Bach built a towering structure on a simple thirty-two-measure bass, interspersing a series of strict canons with virtuoso displays and genre pieces of many different kinds. The same combination of rigor and jeu d'esprit is found in the writing, which sometimes has the expository clarity of a book of non-fiction (nay, a whole library of them!), sometimes twines itself into an intricate knot of the most brilliant puns and allusions, sometimes hooks you with simple narrative that is unexpectedly direct and moving.
For yes, it does have a story, although there are times when you begin to wonder. The principal character is not actually Ressler, but the narrator, a reference librarian of around thirty named Jan O'Deigh. She gets to know Ressler when his coworker on the computer night shift, a young art historian named Franklin Todd (Frank or Frankers), asks her to research his reticent colleague. It will surprise no one that Jan and Frank fall in love (though it takes a long time to get them there). No surprise either that Stuart Ressler's annus mirabilis of science should also have included a love affair of his own. Like base-pairs on a double helix, the two love stories spiral around one another at a twenty-five year remove. Whether heart-warming or heart-breaking, they open all kinds of other questions about the connections between human beings—and these cannot all be solved by reference to the genetic code. For this is also a book about splitting and recombining, the kind that people do, not just cells.
It is not a simple book—did I make that clear? Even the double helix is an inadequate analogy for its narrative technique. It opens, as I say, with Franklin sending Jan news of Ressler's death. But by this time, Jan and Frank have split up and are no longer in touch. Jan quits the library and sets herself to spend a year researching Stuart Ressler's life, his former scientific field, and his ever-present music. At the same time, she is trying to work out where Frank can be, piecing together clues from the occasional missives he sends from foreign countries. So any one chapter may contain a section set in the lonely present, another a year or so earlier, when Jan used to visit the two men amid the whirring machinery in their night workshop, and another a quarter-century before that, capturing the ferment of discovery in the labs of the University of Illinois. Oh, and those arabesques of intellectual legerdemain that I mentioned earlier, pages of exposition on just about every subject under the sun, a veritable Bartlett's of assorted quotations that Jan would post on the board in her job as librarian, a grab-bag of interesting factoids that she would research in her answers on the Question Board, and the frequent "This Day in History" feature, serving to place the story not only in its time but in the context of the entire millennium. Sometimes I think Powers tried to put everything he knew into a single novel, as though afraid he would not get to write another. Well, he did write others, many of them, just as intelligent but generally better focused than this one.
Yet this is utterly extraordinary. Despite its weighty qualifications as a door-stop, it opens windows onto wider landscapes and more entrancing airs than one could ever have thought possible.
July 27, 2009
It's been about five years since I read this book. It was so good, so smart and so well constructed that I haven't read another Richard Powers book since. I feel like his books need to be saved for just the right time, I don't know when that time is, but I'd always like to have another of his books to read for the first time waiting for me, sort of like Raymond Chandler or the last DFW stories I haven't read yet.
April 21, 2022
Tedious due to FAR too much science, its epic length adds to the dilemma..I did my best but could only handle the first 150 pages. As with all authors, his narrative style has evolved over the years and I personally find books written in the 2000's to be far more engaging.
Conceptually its an interesting story and for those familiar with his encyclopedic mind, he went a bit overboard with this one..
"...and that's all I'm going to say about that.." ~ Forrest Gump
Conceptually its an interesting story and for those familiar with his encyclopedic mind, he went a bit overboard with this one..
"...and that's all I'm going to say about that.." ~ Forrest Gump
December 24, 2012
The Gold Bug Variations wrecked the world of one jon faith a long time ago. My ecstatic reply generated ripples of both interest and disquiet . I loved the three characters, loved the Midwestern backdrop, the nerdy affinity that adults could maintain with straight faces. No, there wasn't much beer drinking, but the rich foam of ideas was a fair compensation. What followed was pure reverence. Then I had a girlfriend who found the novel to be shit. It should be noted that she was an actual scientist. I argued but in name only. I was defeated. My spirits sank. I now fear any return to this one.
March 2, 2018
function bookReview( motifCount, wordPlayStyle1, wordPlayStyle2, KeyMessage ){
arg1 = motifCount;
arg2 = wordPlayStyle1;
arg3 = wordPlayStyle2;
arg3 = KeyMessage;
var KeyMessage = writeReview( motifCount + wordPlayStyle1 + wordPlayStyle2 + KeyMessage);
return( KeyMessage( writeReview ) );
}
var GoldbergReview = bookReview( 3, 'pun', 'metaphor', ‘The overriding importance of the infinite arising from the simple' );
print( GoldbergReview );
Published in 1991 and scooping up several much deserved awards, Richard Powers’ third novel is a rich musical cypher of a novel.
function DecipherCypher(
Narratively it’s about a scientist’s study of the chemical structure of DNA and two relationships divided by 30 years. In the 1950’s, Stuart Ressler, the young biological scientist, is embedded in the study of deciphering the genetic code. In the 80’s Ressler becomes the focus of a studious librarian and programmer when they discover him, working the graveyard shift in a computer processing lab.
Structurally, thematically, syntactically and linguistically (read four note theme) it’s about how the DNA code relates to the musical composition of Bach's Goldberg Variations(plus systems that can generate infinite possibility) and in turn how it reveals truths about genetics and romance.
The four note theme within Bach’s composition, is itself, embedded within the overarching structure of the book: the triangulation of the three characters. This structure is inherent in the novel's three major motifs. Two relate to code(the bug in Gold Bug itself a pun): genetic code and computer code, with the third motif being musical composition(read code) – Bach's Variations.
Stylistically the use of meta, puns and metaphor (‘what’s a meta for?’) is pervasive. There are pages of mind-bendingly-spectacular metaphor which will crack open any reader's skull and electrify their grey matter with luminescent technicolour vividness.
);
This novel has an abundance of brains but also, inherently, depth-'n-breadth of heart-'n-soul. Magnificent.
PrintResult( Incredible book );
Note to self: is this book's publication—as the writer's third book—itself a coded reference to the three motif? *feints*
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Johann Sebastian Bach – Bach: The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (1955 mono) - Gould Remastered
https://open.spotify.com/user/killerp...
Today, 27th January 2018 — Scientists Image DNA, Being Read In Unprecedented Detail
http://bit.ly/2rJgXG4
arg1 = motifCount;
arg2 = wordPlayStyle1;
arg3 = wordPlayStyle2;
arg3 = KeyMessage;
var KeyMessage = writeReview( motifCount + wordPlayStyle1 + wordPlayStyle2 + KeyMessage);
return( KeyMessage( writeReview ) );
}
var GoldbergReview = bookReview( 3, 'pun', 'metaphor', ‘The overriding importance of the infinite arising from the simple' );
print( GoldbergReview );
Published in 1991 and scooping up several much deserved awards, Richard Powers’ third novel is a rich musical cypher of a novel.
function DecipherCypher(
Narratively it’s about a scientist’s study of the chemical structure of DNA and two relationships divided by 30 years. In the 1950’s, Stuart Ressler, the young biological scientist, is embedded in the study of deciphering the genetic code. In the 80’s Ressler becomes the focus of a studious librarian and programmer when they discover him, working the graveyard shift in a computer processing lab.
Structurally, thematically, syntactically and linguistically (read four note theme) it’s about how the DNA code relates to the musical composition of Bach's Goldberg Variations(plus systems that can generate infinite possibility) and in turn how it reveals truths about genetics and romance.
The four note theme within Bach’s composition, is itself, embedded within the overarching structure of the book: the triangulation of the three characters. This structure is inherent in the novel's three major motifs. Two relate to code(the bug in Gold Bug itself a pun): genetic code and computer code, with the third motif being musical composition(read code) – Bach's Variations.
Stylistically the use of meta, puns and metaphor (‘what’s a meta for?’) is pervasive. There are pages of mind-bendingly-spectacular metaphor which will crack open any reader's skull and electrify their grey matter with luminescent technicolour vividness.
);
This novel has an abundance of brains but also, inherently, depth-'n-breadth of heart-'n-soul. Magnificent.
PrintResult( Incredible book );
Note to self: is this book's publication—as the writer's third book—itself a coded reference to the three motif? *feints*
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Johann Sebastian Bach – Bach: The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (1955 mono) - Gould Remastered
https://open.spotify.com/user/killerp...
Today, 27th January 2018 — Scientists Image DNA, Being Read In Unprecedented Detail
http://bit.ly/2rJgXG4
September 15, 2016
I have been reading this book forever, and now I am finally done. And in that sentence lies the explanation for the missing fifth star.
This book is filled with things to gush about. I love the lovers' private idiolects. I love the library reference desk, where everything and anything is fair game. Question board, card file, today in history. Most of all, I love the way that this book made me wonder at DNA, something I assumed I understood, but of course do not. I mean, you know how it works, but you don't actually know how it works. And the mystery of it, how simple combines and recombines and ends up complicated; I think you don't really think about that, or at least I don't. It's a marvel, and yet it's not. It's a stunning accident. In this sense I would recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone and everyone. We could use more books that are serious in this way.
And yet.
And yet I found myself able to put it down for long stretches, viewing the picking back up of it with something almost approaching a sigh. I did not devour it with the singlemindedness that other titles that come with this much sheer length have brought, nor with the hunger that other Powers titles have inspired. It bags, my friends, there in the middle. Variation is also, you know, repetition. And unless you are inspired to go deep structure (I am assuming that there is one, but then again, I didn't go beyond noting that there are thirty number, goldbergian chapters, so maybe there isn't. One this is for sure -- I will never dig through the book to map it out for myself.), well, in places it really just feels long.
I think pace is perhaps the biggest issue. The thing (and it is a hefty, hefty tome) goes from not much happening for perhaps forever to a car wreck of events all piled up there at the end, and I think Powers lost me just a little bit with the whole Uncle Jimmy thing of it. Suddenly, I was reading a book with a plot, and all I could think was, really Richard? You want to do this to me here and now, over 600 pages in? What's up with that?
I also found, and perhaps this more of a personal reaction, that I was unable to care about the whole issue of being issueless. Childless by choice, I simply do not get why it needs to be a tragedy that you don't spawn or, flip side of the tragedy coin, a giant decision inspired by a quasi existential horror of the world and its terrors. Can't you just not want kids, ffs?* Push that up against all the DNA talk, and the whole has even just the faintest whiff of purpose, when the message really should be, sure, we're a DNA box, a container for it to reproduce itself, but for precisely that reason we get to pick our own meanings of life. I could accept a book that offers up another viewpoint, but I think that viewpoint would need to be argued for, not assumed. This book thinks it's already there, somehow. Build that empathy, Richard, construct that bridge to experience. It's not like you didn't have the time.
So, reluctantly, and somewhat unexpectedly, I find myself thinking that this book was quite good, but actually not his best. I think, somehow, for that, I always find myself back at the Prisoner's Dilemma (talk about your private idiolects! a masterpiece of the fucked up family made verbal.), a book which did poke at me until I finished it, and then continued to poke at me once I was done. I do look forward to continuing the process of reading and ranking the Powers efforts, however. I've yet to regret reading one.
*Indeed, I am tempted to deconstruct the damn question, in the style of so many academic pseudo-activists before me (think, heterosexuality: what causes it and what does it mean?), asking people to justify why they DO want kids instead of having to endlessly supply people with reasons why have declined to pump any out. I don't require an explanation.
This book is filled with things to gush about. I love the lovers' private idiolects. I love the library reference desk, where everything and anything is fair game. Question board, card file, today in history. Most of all, I love the way that this book made me wonder at DNA, something I assumed I understood, but of course do not. I mean, you know how it works, but you don't actually know how it works. And the mystery of it, how simple combines and recombines and ends up complicated; I think you don't really think about that, or at least I don't. It's a marvel, and yet it's not. It's a stunning accident. In this sense I would recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone and everyone. We could use more books that are serious in this way.
And yet.
And yet I found myself able to put it down for long stretches, viewing the picking back up of it with something almost approaching a sigh. I did not devour it with the singlemindedness that other titles that come with this much sheer length have brought, nor with the hunger that other Powers titles have inspired. It bags, my friends, there in the middle. Variation is also, you know, repetition. And unless you are inspired to go deep structure (I am assuming that there is one, but then again, I didn't go beyond noting that there are thirty number, goldbergian chapters, so maybe there isn't. One this is for sure -- I will never dig through the book to map it out for myself.), well, in places it really just feels long.
I think pace is perhaps the biggest issue. The thing (and it is a hefty, hefty tome) goes from not much happening for perhaps forever to a car wreck of events all piled up there at the end, and I think Powers lost me just a little bit with the whole Uncle Jimmy thing of it. Suddenly, I was reading a book with a plot, and all I could think was, really Richard? You want to do this to me here and now, over 600 pages in? What's up with that?
I also found, and perhaps this more of a personal reaction, that I was unable to care about the whole issue of being issueless. Childless by choice, I simply do not get why it needs to be a tragedy that you don't spawn or, flip side of the tragedy coin, a giant decision inspired by a quasi existential horror of the world and its terrors. Can't you just not want kids, ffs?* Push that up against all the DNA talk, and the whole has even just the faintest whiff of purpose, when the message really should be, sure, we're a DNA box, a container for it to reproduce itself, but for precisely that reason we get to pick our own meanings of life. I could accept a book that offers up another viewpoint, but I think that viewpoint would need to be argued for, not assumed. This book thinks it's already there, somehow. Build that empathy, Richard, construct that bridge to experience. It's not like you didn't have the time.
So, reluctantly, and somewhat unexpectedly, I find myself thinking that this book was quite good, but actually not his best. I think, somehow, for that, I always find myself back at the Prisoner's Dilemma (talk about your private idiolects! a masterpiece of the fucked up family made verbal.), a book which did poke at me until I finished it, and then continued to poke at me once I was done. I do look forward to continuing the process of reading and ranking the Powers efforts, however. I've yet to regret reading one.
*Indeed, I am tempted to deconstruct the damn question, in the style of so many academic pseudo-activists before me (think, heterosexuality: what causes it and what does it mean?), asking people to justify why they DO want kids instead of having to endlessly supply people with reasons why have declined to pump any out. I don't require an explanation.
February 14, 2023
Mi capitava spesso, tempo fa, di prendere il tram per andare in centro. Il tragitto era lungo e il tram proseguiva lento, fra traffico e momento potenziale del tram ai minimi. Ed allora abbandonandomi al cullare traballante del mezzo, mi mettevo a guardare fuori attraverso lo spesso vetro di separazione. Il mondo mi passava davanti in tutta la sua splendida varietà: il cielo alle volte di un azzurro irreale, quasi come se col pastello lo avessi appena scarabocchiato, poi ci potevano essere le nuvole, alle volte sporadiche, altre volte grigie, quasi nere e l'atmosfera era così carica di quell'oscurità che tanto c'affligge ed allo stesso tempo ci colpisce in fondo al cuore. Gli alberi andavano e venivano, purtroppo le città sono un agglomerato di cemento e sporcizia, tutto merito del buon genere umano, ecco... il genere umano, di cui faccio parte, è capace di opere sublimi ed indimenticabili: come per esempio questo libro che ho appena letto, oppure le grandi scoperte in campo scientifico, ma poi ricadiamo sempre nell'infimo marciume, utilizzando queste scoperte per scopi non così solidali...
Perchè succede ciò? Ce lo chiediamo spesso e molte volte cerchiamo di decodificarne il segreto più recondito, ma davvero esiste un codice per tutto o anzi per qualsiasi situazione?
Il desiderio, il vero protagonista di questo immenso romanzo, sia per mole che per contenuti, che cos'è veramente? Cerchiamo ogni giorno, ogni attimo della nostra vita di raggiungerlo, chi non anela al desiderio? Penso che il desiderio sia la fonte della vita: il desiderio di conoscenza, il desiderio di essere amati, il desiderio di essere ascoltati, il desiderio di esistere in quanto esseri viventi, frementi di gioia e di stupore per tutto ciò che la vita e la Natura ci propone e sottopone... è il desiderio, quello ancestrale, che muove mari e monti in questo libro, che mi ha letteralmente spossato, sia per l'intensità che per le riflessioni sociologiche che emana da tutte ed 800 pagine.
Memorabile!
Perchè succede ciò? Ce lo chiediamo spesso e molte volte cerchiamo di decodificarne il segreto più recondito, ma davvero esiste un codice per tutto o anzi per qualsiasi situazione?
Il desiderio, il vero protagonista di questo immenso romanzo, sia per mole che per contenuti, che cos'è veramente? Cerchiamo ogni giorno, ogni attimo della nostra vita di raggiungerlo, chi non anela al desiderio? Penso che il desiderio sia la fonte della vita: il desiderio di conoscenza, il desiderio di essere amati, il desiderio di essere ascoltati, il desiderio di esistere in quanto esseri viventi, frementi di gioia e di stupore per tutto ciò che la vita e la Natura ci propone e sottopone... è il desiderio, quello ancestrale, che muove mari e monti in questo libro, che mi ha letteralmente spossato, sia per l'intensità che per le riflessioni sociologiche che emana da tutte ed 800 pagine.
Memorabile!
January 1, 2023
Many consider this to be Powers' magnum opus, so I am surprised to find that this one just did not interest me. I found the three main characters dry, and Powers repeated his metaphors over and over again until finally I had to say out loud, "I get it, dude." Another problem for me was that I was not interested in revisiting molecular biology to this degree. This is my third Powers novel, the previous two being his most recent works. I enjoyed those quite a bit so I will be coming back to Powers. This is not his magnum opus, in my opinion. I think Powers was still trying to find his stride at this point in his career.
July 11, 2024
The Gold Bug Variations may not be the perfect novel, it definitely is a fascinating one which will resonate in my mind for quite some time. Its intricate double mystery plot, fittingly structured like a double helix, drew me in from the first pages and kept me enthralled to the very end, despite the frequent technical digressions about the history of life sciences. While the writing is rather dense and demanding at times, there are also plenty of moving, sometimes outright lyrical scenes. Above all, I found the novel stimulated my curiosity and reflection about various topics and their interconnections. It is one of those books which keep you wondering after you turn the last page.
The storyline focuses on two intertwined searches. It jumps back and forth between the late 1950s, when brilliant young scientist Stuart Ressler and his team try to break the mysteries of DNA coding, and the 1980s, when Jan O’ Deigh, a librarian is recruited by Franklin Todd, a computer programmer cum art history student, to help him find out why his colleague Stuart abandoned his once promising career as a biologist 25 years earlier to pursue a dead-end night shift job in IT. In a novel which is partly about counterpoint there are also some interesting side stories and secondary characters of course. The members of Stuart’s scientific lab are a rather intriguing bunch of people and the seemingly endless stream of baffling questions the visitors at Jan O’Deigh’s library expect her to answer provides regular comic relief. I personally also enjoyed the secondary plot about Franklin’s PhD research on Herri met de Bles, an obscure sixteenth century Flemish painter; if only because it allowed Powers to share his sense of perplexity and sometimes surprising insights into the wonders of my native Dutch language (It never occurred to me to pause and reflect on the original meaning of words such as “eenvoudig”, “uiteraard”, “woordenschat”, etc.).
This relatively contained set of characters and settings allows Powers to cover a lot of ground and to explore a broad range of themes. “The Gold Bug Variations” is about the history of life sciences and the dynamics of scientific discovery, the music of Bach and its relation to the divine, coding, decoding and translation, desire, lust, human agency and love, among many other things.
According to some readers on this forum, one needs at least some prior knowledge about genetics and cell biology to fully grasp what is going on. That may indeed be the case but my almost total lack of knowledge in this area did not prevent me from truly enjoying the reading experience. Although I probably have missed quite a few subtle points about the way Ressler’s research relates to the science of the time, the broader philosophical reflections his investigations gave rise to kept me engaged all the way to the end. Through its intricate storytelling, “The Gold Bug Variations” made me wonder about the fundamental driver of evolution (and beyond that, of life itself), about the nature of human curiosity and the purpose of research, about human existence and whether there is something unique about it in a universe which encompasses it entirely (but not quite).
As advertised on the cover, “The Gold Bug Variations” is indeed a philosophical novel, brimming with big ideas. It also has an undeniable aesthetic quality, however. The suspenseful narration held my interest throughout. Certain parts of the book are also moving on a more sensuous, aesthetic level. I very much enjoyed the descriptions of how Ressler discovers the music of Bach and digs deeper and deeper into the Goldberg variations. I was also touched by the romantic and deeply erotic love between him and his fellow researcher, Jeannette Koss. That said, formally speaking, some plot twists may come across as over-engineered and the dialogue may seem too overwrought to be truly believable (the ratio of puns per line must be close to that of an average Aaron Sorkin script, but hey, I don't mind).
Despite these obvious flaws, “The Gold Bug Variations” definitely “did it” for me: the book was enjoyable in and of itself, deepened my already tremendous affection for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and got me to think anew about some of life’s big mysteries. If that does not deserve four stars, I don’t know what does.
The storyline focuses on two intertwined searches. It jumps back and forth between the late 1950s, when brilliant young scientist Stuart Ressler and his team try to break the mysteries of DNA coding, and the 1980s, when Jan O’ Deigh, a librarian is recruited by Franklin Todd, a computer programmer cum art history student, to help him find out why his colleague Stuart abandoned his once promising career as a biologist 25 years earlier to pursue a dead-end night shift job in IT. In a novel which is partly about counterpoint there are also some interesting side stories and secondary characters of course. The members of Stuart’s scientific lab are a rather intriguing bunch of people and the seemingly endless stream of baffling questions the visitors at Jan O’Deigh’s library expect her to answer provides regular comic relief. I personally also enjoyed the secondary plot about Franklin’s PhD research on Herri met de Bles, an obscure sixteenth century Flemish painter; if only because it allowed Powers to share his sense of perplexity and sometimes surprising insights into the wonders of my native Dutch language (It never occurred to me to pause and reflect on the original meaning of words such as “eenvoudig”, “uiteraard”, “woordenschat”, etc.).
This relatively contained set of characters and settings allows Powers to cover a lot of ground and to explore a broad range of themes. “The Gold Bug Variations” is about the history of life sciences and the dynamics of scientific discovery, the music of Bach and its relation to the divine, coding, decoding and translation, desire, lust, human agency and love, among many other things.
According to some readers on this forum, one needs at least some prior knowledge about genetics and cell biology to fully grasp what is going on. That may indeed be the case but my almost total lack of knowledge in this area did not prevent me from truly enjoying the reading experience. Although I probably have missed quite a few subtle points about the way Ressler’s research relates to the science of the time, the broader philosophical reflections his investigations gave rise to kept me engaged all the way to the end. Through its intricate storytelling, “The Gold Bug Variations” made me wonder about the fundamental driver of evolution (and beyond that, of life itself), about the nature of human curiosity and the purpose of research, about human existence and whether there is something unique about it in a universe which encompasses it entirely (but not quite).
As advertised on the cover, “The Gold Bug Variations” is indeed a philosophical novel, brimming with big ideas. It also has an undeniable aesthetic quality, however. The suspenseful narration held my interest throughout. Certain parts of the book are also moving on a more sensuous, aesthetic level. I very much enjoyed the descriptions of how Ressler discovers the music of Bach and digs deeper and deeper into the Goldberg variations. I was also touched by the romantic and deeply erotic love between him and his fellow researcher, Jeannette Koss. That said, formally speaking, some plot twists may come across as over-engineered and the dialogue may seem too overwrought to be truly believable (the ratio of puns per line must be close to that of an average Aaron Sorkin script, but hey, I don't mind).
Despite these obvious flaws, “The Gold Bug Variations” definitely “did it” for me: the book was enjoyable in and of itself, deepened my already tremendous affection for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and got me to think anew about some of life’s big mysteries. If that does not deserve four stars, I don’t know what does.
January 26, 2023
Il valore e la bellezza di questo libro ossessivo sono fuori dubbio ma il mio pensiero più frequente da metà al tanto sospirato gesto di girare l’ultima pagina è stato solo uno: anche meno, Richard Powers, anche meno.
August 10, 2020
Il libro è del 1991 e narra vicende tra la metà degli anni 50 ed i primi anni 80. Un biologo studia il DNA edi i meccanismi di riproduzione e mutazione. Poi scompare per riapparire 25 anni dopo in uno di quei centri elaborazione dati dove computer grandi come un container fanno girare nastri e producono tabulati per svolgere funzioni che uno smartfon oggi fa in pochi secondi. Viene adottato da due giovanotti di belle speranze (lui e lei ) di cui diviene mentore. Il boom della ricerca genetica degli anni 50, la scoperta della logica combinatoria che regola i meccanismi di riproduzione, che è anche la struttura della variazioni Goldberg di Bach che è anche il linguaggio della programmazione dei primi computer. Di tutto e di più per 800 pagine . Personaggi che quando parlano tra di loro citano RIlke in tedesco, parlano di Schoenberg e di pittura fiamminga.
Come sempre Powers riversa sulla vicenda la propria bulimia culturale fino ad asfissiare, fagocitare i personaggi che sarebbero di per se ben studiati ed ai quali ci si affezionerebbe volentieri se non parlassero per pagine e pagine come brillanti ed istrionici conferenzieri, sovente con chiose ad effetto che non si sa se consegnare a lapidi marmoree o a bigliettini dei baci perugina. Che poi, trattandosi anche di storie di corna, scendere dal pulpito sarebbe anche narrativamente pertinente. Peccato perché lo spunto è splendido, ci sono premonizioni brillanti degne di un DeLillo, di cui però Powers non ha la lucida concisione. Si arriva in fondo discretamente esausti, causa la straripante sovrabbondanza di citazioni, sempre dottissime e ricercate. Troppo primo della classe per essere un grande scrittore.
Come sempre Powers riversa sulla vicenda la propria bulimia culturale fino ad asfissiare, fagocitare i personaggi che sarebbero di per se ben studiati ed ai quali ci si affezionerebbe volentieri se non parlassero per pagine e pagine come brillanti ed istrionici conferenzieri, sovente con chiose ad effetto che non si sa se consegnare a lapidi marmoree o a bigliettini dei baci perugina. Che poi, trattandosi anche di storie di corna, scendere dal pulpito sarebbe anche narrativamente pertinente. Peccato perché lo spunto è splendido, ci sono premonizioni brillanti degne di un DeLillo, di cui però Powers non ha la lucida concisione. Si arriva in fondo discretamente esausti, causa la straripante sovrabbondanza di citazioni, sempre dottissime e ricercate. Troppo primo della classe per essere un grande scrittore.
October 4, 2020
This book is a colossal failure, where colossal describes the magnitude not of the failure but the book. It just goes on and on. My audiobook went 32.5 hours (apparently the print version is 640 pages). At some point I lost track of time and just waited bloody-mindedly for it to end, like Covid-19.
Powers' writing resides in the grey zone between science fiction and the "literary" kind. It feels like science fiction, because it is poorly written but full of interesting scientific ideas. But Powers gets nominated for (and wins) conventional literary awards (National Book Award for The Echo Maker, Pulitzer for The Overstory), not Hugos and Nebulas, and gets the James Wood treatment in the New Yorker. And in fact this isn't quite speculative enough to be sci-fi; it's literary fiction which uses scientific motifs as art, going into lots of detail but only to imbue the plot with symbolism. In theory I should have loved it. I didn't.
The thin plot is about two parallel love affairs, one set in 1957 in UIUC (Powers' alma mater), at the heart of the genetic revolution, between gifted biologist Stuart Ressler and the wife of a colleague. The other, set in New York in the '80s, is between a reference librarian named Jan and a colleague of Stuart's, now working the night shift as a yeoman computer programmer for a financial company. (As an aside, Jan's job at the NYPL is apparently to provide serious answers to absolutely any question asked by the public, including nonsense like "can we afford to stand idly by?" and "what's the difference between the United States and a carton of yogurt?" Did this really exist, before the internet?)
Thus the plot involves a sort of double helix of relationships; with two couples (base pairs, like A-T and C-G, yes?) separated over time. Another common theme is information (Jan is a librarian, Stuart goes from genetics to computer programming), and music - Bach's Goldbach Variations, all written over a four note theme, is a recurrent motif. And cryptography. The title is a pun on Goldbach and Poe's The Gold-Bug (Powers has an unfortunate weakness for puns - often entire paragraphs exist just to set one up), where a broken code leads to buried pirate treasure. After the bioinformatic turn, the 1950s scientists see their problems as codebreaking, and set each other puzzles for fun. Another note: both couples are childless or sterile, so they themselves cannot reproduce.
Wikipedia tells me that between ages eleven to fifteen Powers "became an avid reader, enjoying classics such as the Iliad and the Odyssey". I'm sorry, I mean no disrespect to the formative position of these works in Western literature - Schliemann's digging and that Keats poem and all that - but anybody who cites them as their favourite childhood reading (in which language?!) is clearly insane. Powers switched his major from physics to English but after graduating worked as a computer programmer before becoming a writer, like J.M. Coetzee. He does not otherwise much resemble Coetzee. At first I was reminded slightly of Vikram Seth: both write very serious characters, people who are always either pondering the mysteries of the universe or relaxing by listening to opera. Seth also writes bloated monsters (A Suitable Boy is 1,349 pages, a book for the imprisoned or terminally ill.) But Seth also has a fine ear for language and a subtle, understated style. He would never write a sentence like
For the writing is what made me hate this book, its inexhaustible, unending mediocrity. I liked the intellectual grab bag, every paragraph stuffed with scientific jargon and literary or musical references, complex patterns or wordplay. But I couldn't handle having to listen to drivel like this.
Powers' writing resides in the grey zone between science fiction and the "literary" kind. It feels like science fiction, because it is poorly written but full of interesting scientific ideas. But Powers gets nominated for (and wins) conventional literary awards (National Book Award for The Echo Maker, Pulitzer for The Overstory), not Hugos and Nebulas, and gets the James Wood treatment in the New Yorker. And in fact this isn't quite speculative enough to be sci-fi; it's literary fiction which uses scientific motifs as art, going into lots of detail but only to imbue the plot with symbolism. In theory I should have loved it. I didn't.
The thin plot is about two parallel love affairs, one set in 1957 in UIUC (Powers' alma mater), at the heart of the genetic revolution, between gifted biologist Stuart Ressler and the wife of a colleague. The other, set in New York in the '80s, is between a reference librarian named Jan and a colleague of Stuart's, now working the night shift as a yeoman computer programmer for a financial company. (As an aside, Jan's job at the NYPL is apparently to provide serious answers to absolutely any question asked by the public, including nonsense like "can we afford to stand idly by?" and "what's the difference between the United States and a carton of yogurt?" Did this really exist, before the internet?)
Thus the plot involves a sort of double helix of relationships; with two couples (base pairs, like A-T and C-G, yes?) separated over time. Another common theme is information (Jan is a librarian, Stuart goes from genetics to computer programming), and music - Bach's Goldbach Variations, all written over a four note theme, is a recurrent motif. And cryptography. The title is a pun on Goldbach and Poe's The Gold-Bug (Powers has an unfortunate weakness for puns - often entire paragraphs exist just to set one up), where a broken code leads to buried pirate treasure. After the bioinformatic turn, the 1950s scientists see their problems as codebreaking, and set each other puzzles for fun. Another note: both couples are childless or sterile, so they themselves cannot reproduce.
Wikipedia tells me that between ages eleven to fifteen Powers "became an avid reader, enjoying classics such as the Iliad and the Odyssey". I'm sorry, I mean no disrespect to the formative position of these works in Western literature - Schliemann's digging and that Keats poem and all that - but anybody who cites them as their favourite childhood reading (in which language?!) is clearly insane. Powers switched his major from physics to English but after graduating worked as a computer programmer before becoming a writer, like J.M. Coetzee. He does not otherwise much resemble Coetzee. At first I was reminded slightly of Vikram Seth: both write very serious characters, people who are always either pondering the mysteries of the universe or relaxing by listening to opera. Seth also writes bloated monsters (A Suitable Boy is 1,349 pages, a book for the imprisoned or terminally ill.) But Seth also has a fine ear for language and a subtle, understated style. He would never write a sentence like
"False cognates. Faux amis, as the Germans would say, if they were French."Or say of the brilliant but shy Ressler
"For a professional decipherer, he's shy on a few key secret-communication commodities."Yes, we get it, you don't have to spell everything out!
For the writing is what made me hate this book, its inexhaustible, unending mediocrity. I liked the intellectual grab bag, every paragraph stuffed with scientific jargon and literary or musical references, complex patterns or wordplay. But I couldn't handle having to listen to drivel like this.
"I saw this place and the oddest thing. I was home...I had no idea you'd be here. I thought it would be all code-breaking. Never predicted, until this morning, that it would be this." This! What, exactly? Name it. "That I would fall in love." Jeanette arches against his hand, almost mews. It mauls him to think what the years might have been like, what chances they might have lived.("The pre-eminent literary chronicler of the technological age," says the New York Times. "Smartest person since Hegel, basically.") It goes on:
"So much wasted time. I might have been watching you learn things, learning them with you. But look! We're here. We've found each other now. That's the main thing. Even if I..." Her voice drops, inaudible. "If I've married prematurely." She stares straight ahead, oversteering. Ressler feels her neck tense and removes his hand. Suddenly she shouts so violently from the lungs it makes him jump. "Stupid. Fool! Damn it to hell." She clutches him with a free claw, turns her face on him, eyes red, puffy, pleading. "Why?"
Read
August 23, 2024I have long said that an entire undergraduate degree program could be delivered using this novel and its range of reference as the sole text. I still believe that fully after what must be at least the 12th time through it. Even the things that have changed in the nearly 35 years since it appeared could still be tracked for wider cultural significance—for example, the “inviolable” World Trade towers, etc. A masterpiece of integration between the arts and the sciences.
October 7, 2015
“Ads are our supreme art, polar exploration, and depth psychology rolled into one.”
And it seems Richard Powers is this sort of litterateur – his language is stilted and necrotic and his narration is a hotchpotch of the far-fetched words.
“…the world was awash in messages, every living thing a unique signal.”
There are no personages but soulless blueprints of those…
There is no history but a file of dead historical data…
There is no thinking but a suite of irrelevant quotes…
“Pitch-writing obeys amorphous, ambiguous linguistics – a dialect just beyond paraphrase. Fast and loud is more exciting than slow and quiet. The rest is silence.”
Richard Powers isn’t a writer – he is a librarian endlessly shuffling a deck of card indexes.
And it seems Richard Powers is this sort of litterateur – his language is stilted and necrotic and his narration is a hotchpotch of the far-fetched words.
“…the world was awash in messages, every living thing a unique signal.”
There are no personages but soulless blueprints of those…
There is no history but a file of dead historical data…
There is no thinking but a suite of irrelevant quotes…
“Pitch-writing obeys amorphous, ambiguous linguistics – a dialect just beyond paraphrase. Fast and loud is more exciting than slow and quiet. The rest is silence.”
Richard Powers isn’t a writer – he is a librarian endlessly shuffling a deck of card indexes.
October 26, 2011
I had not heard of Richard Power before I picked up a copy of The Goldbug Variations, so I didn't have much of a preconceived idea of what to expect. First thing I did was open up the book randomly to a few pages and read some sentences to get the authors general style. First I noticed the density of the style. I'm ok with that. I tend to like dense and even write that way some times. But then I noticed that as far as I could tell the sentences didn't really mean anything. Well they would probably mean something in context.
Right off the bat I must praise Richard Powers. He is brilliant. His mind grasps language structure, word choice, and metaphor in unique and deep ways. Several sentences evoked awe at his ability to craft them. I cannot but hope that someday I can posses some small measure of his skill.
Though he possesses an astounding ability at word craft, Richard Powers has written a bad book. Except for the crafting of individual sentences and word usage, he has failed in every facet of novel writing. To be honest even the writing mechanics themselves are flawed in several points.
Richard Powers seems to be confused that the point of writing is to communicate [I am aware of and embrace several other purposes for writing. But at its core writing is about communicating]. Reading this book one gets the impression that he thinks writing is to obfuscate and show off his brain. The style is dense with pretension and his attempts to foster wonder and beauty are stilted and mechanistic. From the very beginning he loves to tell us how someone's cells yearn for something or describe blushing as a long complex string of physiological details. It's as if he is a man who has lost all concept of how beauty actually feels. With his effuse mechanistic descriptions he has sapped all the beauty from the universe and then tries to put it back. He fails. This is a book utterly devoid of beauty or wonder, for Powers has reduced all transcendences to attempted mechanistic explanations.
Powers' density is weight without substance. The inane verbosity doesn't add beauty just more obscurity. Its like he is a stroke victim who thinks he has a very important message to get across. He tries multiple ways to express it. Pilling word upon word, unintelligible sound on sound, but after all the gasping and huffing, all the loud clamoring and he still has not said anything.
This leads to another alarming, if minor point. About five percent of the sentences in this book mean nothing. There is no way around this fact. You read the sentence, look for clues in the context, try alternate definitions and after all that work the sentence is gibberish. This annoyed me. Powers seems to think that because he is 'literary' he can write gibberish and we should conclude its brilliance. Well sorry, but to me gibberish is gibberish no matter how well it reads.
Most, but by no means all, of the obscurity occurs during the long pompous narrative sermons that fill the book. The book would be about three hundred pages shorter if he had cut out all the sections that prattle on and on in inane verbosity about evolution and music. Even during these tirades, he slips track into entire meaningless paragraphs. How aggravating I found these sections cannot be underestimated.
What plot exists is driven by a cast of incomprehensible characters. No actual people live, think, act, or talk like these people. And most nauseating, they all talk the exact same way. Every character speaks with Richard Powers' dense pompous verbiage. Conversations are filled with bizarre metaphors and over intelligent quips. On top of this, they act in completely unexpected ways incongruent with previous actions or statements about their character. People fall in and out of love without any rhyme or reason. An intrinsic character quality is suddenly mentioned after two hundred pages of interaction with that character. Interestingly that trait was absent or even contradicted for the previous actions and descriptions of the character.
Except for bits awe felt here or there for a particularly well-crafted sentence, this book is a thoroughly un-enjoyable read. You will be pulled through page after page not knowing what is being said and expecting that nothing has really been said. This book will not draw you into a higher appreciation of anything. If this book accomplishes anything, it will more likely confuse or depress. It will not change you. In many ways this book is similar to the piece of music off of which the title is based. They are both masterful in creation but devoid of any real heart or emotion. No one will be driven to new heights of passion through this or the Goldburg variations.
Right off the bat I must praise Richard Powers. He is brilliant. His mind grasps language structure, word choice, and metaphor in unique and deep ways. Several sentences evoked awe at his ability to craft them. I cannot but hope that someday I can posses some small measure of his skill.
Though he possesses an astounding ability at word craft, Richard Powers has written a bad book. Except for the crafting of individual sentences and word usage, he has failed in every facet of novel writing. To be honest even the writing mechanics themselves are flawed in several points.
Richard Powers seems to be confused that the point of writing is to communicate [I am aware of and embrace several other purposes for writing. But at its core writing is about communicating]. Reading this book one gets the impression that he thinks writing is to obfuscate and show off his brain. The style is dense with pretension and his attempts to foster wonder and beauty are stilted and mechanistic. From the very beginning he loves to tell us how someone's cells yearn for something or describe blushing as a long complex string of physiological details. It's as if he is a man who has lost all concept of how beauty actually feels. With his effuse mechanistic descriptions he has sapped all the beauty from the universe and then tries to put it back. He fails. This is a book utterly devoid of beauty or wonder, for Powers has reduced all transcendences to attempted mechanistic explanations.
Powers' density is weight without substance. The inane verbosity doesn't add beauty just more obscurity. Its like he is a stroke victim who thinks he has a very important message to get across. He tries multiple ways to express it. Pilling word upon word, unintelligible sound on sound, but after all the gasping and huffing, all the loud clamoring and he still has not said anything.
This leads to another alarming, if minor point. About five percent of the sentences in this book mean nothing. There is no way around this fact. You read the sentence, look for clues in the context, try alternate definitions and after all that work the sentence is gibberish. This annoyed me. Powers seems to think that because he is 'literary' he can write gibberish and we should conclude its brilliance. Well sorry, but to me gibberish is gibberish no matter how well it reads.
Most, but by no means all, of the obscurity occurs during the long pompous narrative sermons that fill the book. The book would be about three hundred pages shorter if he had cut out all the sections that prattle on and on in inane verbosity about evolution and music. Even during these tirades, he slips track into entire meaningless paragraphs. How aggravating I found these sections cannot be underestimated.
What plot exists is driven by a cast of incomprehensible characters. No actual people live, think, act, or talk like these people. And most nauseating, they all talk the exact same way. Every character speaks with Richard Powers' dense pompous verbiage. Conversations are filled with bizarre metaphors and over intelligent quips. On top of this, they act in completely unexpected ways incongruent with previous actions or statements about their character. People fall in and out of love without any rhyme or reason. An intrinsic character quality is suddenly mentioned after two hundred pages of interaction with that character. Interestingly that trait was absent or even contradicted for the previous actions and descriptions of the character.
Except for bits awe felt here or there for a particularly well-crafted sentence, this book is a thoroughly un-enjoyable read. You will be pulled through page after page not knowing what is being said and expecting that nothing has really been said. This book will not draw you into a higher appreciation of anything. If this book accomplishes anything, it will more likely confuse or depress. It will not change you. In many ways this book is similar to the piece of music off of which the title is based. They are both masterful in creation but devoid of any real heart or emotion. No one will be driven to new heights of passion through this or the Goldburg variations.
June 7, 2022
I have read and enjoyed other books by Richard Powers, most recently Bewilderment which I read late last year. So it was with some confidence that I would like it that I picked this early book of his to read. What the experience taught me is that one can't always depend on recreating one's enjoyment of a writer's later works with his earlier efforts. This book was published in 1991 and I hated it.
The first thing to be said about the book is that it is long, close to 700 pages, and, in my opinion, if an unsparing editor had cut it to half that length, it might have been a better book. Powers seemed determined to never use only one word if ten could be employed to convey the same meaning. Moreover, he seemed equally determined to use some of the most obscure words in the language. (I'm sorry I didn't write any of them down to give you an example of what I mean; I was just too exasperated.)
I take a back seat to no one in my appreciation of our language. I'm even currently slogging my way through a nonfiction book about its history and rise to dominance on the world stage today (The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language by Rosemary C. Salomone), but surely the first test of being a good writer is to use cogent and accessible language and not exasperate your reader by making her have to pick up a dictionary every five minutes. Powers failed that test for me with this particular book.
But about the plot...
There are two tracks to the plot. The first occurs in 1957/58 and the second takes place in 1983. The two stories are intertwined. In the earlier track, scientists, including Dr. Stuart Ressler, are attempting to decode the message of the DNA spiral. In the 1983 story, we learn that Dr. Ressler is working at a commercial data processing center and art historian Frank Todd has just started working there and is curious as to why Ressler abandoned research that might have won him the Nobel Prize. Todd gets a young research librarian named Jan O'Deigh to investigate Ressler's background. Soon after the effort begins, Ressler dies of cancer, so there is never an opportunity to ask him about his reasons.
In the 1958 narrative, we learn that Ressler had an affair with another scientist with whom he worked, Dr. Jeanette Koss. Dr. Koss had given Ressler a vinyl record featuring Glenn Gould playing Bach's "Goldberg Variations." Ressler plays the record constantly and it becomes a kind of metaphor for their search for the message in DNA.
The 1983 narrative is essentially Jan O'Deigh's field notebook. From it we learn information about DNA and Ressler's and Koss's research. She is attempting to educate herself on the subject and, as we read, she educates us as well.
The construct of metaphor is essential to the novel's plot. In fact, it seems that the author may have meant it as an analogy between "The Goldberg Variations" and the DNA code, and I think the truth is that I may just not be smart enough to understand all that. To do so might require a firmer grounding in philosophy and science than I have. It is a complex and difficult plot that demands a lot of the reader and there were many references that are probably lost on the unprepared reader. I am quite sure there were many that were lost on me.
I've often felt that the time that one reads a particular book has much to do with one's enjoyment or lack of enjoyment of it, so perhaps I just picked this one up at the wrong time of my life. In looking at reader reviews of the book on Goodreads, I was struck by the fact that most of them were glowing. Those readers really, really liked this book! So, once again I am the rebel, the outlier. I can live with that.
The first thing to be said about the book is that it is long, close to 700 pages, and, in my opinion, if an unsparing editor had cut it to half that length, it might have been a better book. Powers seemed determined to never use only one word if ten could be employed to convey the same meaning. Moreover, he seemed equally determined to use some of the most obscure words in the language. (I'm sorry I didn't write any of them down to give you an example of what I mean; I was just too exasperated.)
I take a back seat to no one in my appreciation of our language. I'm even currently slogging my way through a nonfiction book about its history and rise to dominance on the world stage today (The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language by Rosemary C. Salomone), but surely the first test of being a good writer is to use cogent and accessible language and not exasperate your reader by making her have to pick up a dictionary every five minutes. Powers failed that test for me with this particular book.
But about the plot...
There are two tracks to the plot. The first occurs in 1957/58 and the second takes place in 1983. The two stories are intertwined. In the earlier track, scientists, including Dr. Stuart Ressler, are attempting to decode the message of the DNA spiral. In the 1983 story, we learn that Dr. Ressler is working at a commercial data processing center and art historian Frank Todd has just started working there and is curious as to why Ressler abandoned research that might have won him the Nobel Prize. Todd gets a young research librarian named Jan O'Deigh to investigate Ressler's background. Soon after the effort begins, Ressler dies of cancer, so there is never an opportunity to ask him about his reasons.
In the 1958 narrative, we learn that Ressler had an affair with another scientist with whom he worked, Dr. Jeanette Koss. Dr. Koss had given Ressler a vinyl record featuring Glenn Gould playing Bach's "Goldberg Variations." Ressler plays the record constantly and it becomes a kind of metaphor for their search for the message in DNA.
The 1983 narrative is essentially Jan O'Deigh's field notebook. From it we learn information about DNA and Ressler's and Koss's research. She is attempting to educate herself on the subject and, as we read, she educates us as well.
The construct of metaphor is essential to the novel's plot. In fact, it seems that the author may have meant it as an analogy between "The Goldberg Variations" and the DNA code, and I think the truth is that I may just not be smart enough to understand all that. To do so might require a firmer grounding in philosophy and science than I have. It is a complex and difficult plot that demands a lot of the reader and there were many references that are probably lost on the unprepared reader. I am quite sure there were many that were lost on me.
I've often felt that the time that one reads a particular book has much to do with one's enjoyment or lack of enjoyment of it, so perhaps I just picked this one up at the wrong time of my life. In looking at reader reviews of the book on Goodreads, I was struck by the fact that most of them were glowing. Those readers really, really liked this book! So, once again I am the rebel, the outlier. I can live with that.
December 2, 2014
A mid-50's scientist was on the verge of real discovery in the realms of DNA research, and nothing happened. Decades later a librarian wants to know why. Where'd he go? What happened?
If you liked Gravity's Rainbow you might want to give The Gold Bug Variations a look. It has perhaps not quite a Pynchonian level of technical discussion and detail, but a lot nonetheless; Power's voice is hard work, but after awhile I found it growing on me. Rich characterization, imagery, and arcane references abound. (Many appear to be included to aid with chronology. The book is non-linear. Not to a fault, but almost.)
7-29-05. Just finished, and the question that keeps turning over in my mind is: so, why CAN'T this be my favorite book of all time? I think it might be. It's got music (and lots of it), it's got science (just a little more than I could get my head around—not a bad thing), it's got aching romance (I've discovered I have a bit of a taste for romance here as I plow into my 40s), it's got suspense and puzzles and art and trivia, to say nothing of just being wonderfully erudite and well-written and DIFFICULT. [The really good books that I've gotten lost in have been books that rewarded study. Like the good old Queen's Gambit back in November, I might have found myself doing an instant reread, were it not for this puppy's 600+ page count.]
14OCT12. over 1/3 the way through the long-overdue reread. Interesting how I found the science too much seven years ago...before I taught high school bio for three years! Viewed with these better trained eyes the science discussions are on the level of the stuff I taught in my honors classes.
09DEC12. Have a look at my Gold Bug Variations page. You might find it handy as a scene spotter or a reading companion, but I created it to break down the chronology of the novel's three narrative time frames.
If you liked Gravity's Rainbow you might want to give The Gold Bug Variations a look. It has perhaps not quite a Pynchonian level of technical discussion and detail, but a lot nonetheless; Power's voice is hard work, but after awhile I found it growing on me. Rich characterization, imagery, and arcane references abound. (Many appear to be included to aid with chronology. The book is non-linear. Not to a fault, but almost.)
7-29-05. Just finished, and the question that keeps turning over in my mind is: so, why CAN'T this be my favorite book of all time? I think it might be. It's got music (and lots of it), it's got science (just a little more than I could get my head around—not a bad thing), it's got aching romance (I've discovered I have a bit of a taste for romance here as I plow into my 40s), it's got suspense and puzzles and art and trivia, to say nothing of just being wonderfully erudite and well-written and DIFFICULT. [The really good books that I've gotten lost in have been books that rewarded study. Like the good old Queen's Gambit back in November, I might have found myself doing an instant reread, were it not for this puppy's 600+ page count.]
14OCT12. over 1/3 the way through the long-overdue reread. Interesting how I found the science too much seven years ago...before I taught high school bio for three years! Viewed with these better trained eyes the science discussions are on the level of the stuff I taught in my honors classes.
09DEC12. Have a look at my Gold Bug Variations page. You might find it handy as a scene spotter or a reading companion, but I created it to break down the chronology of the novel's three narrative time frames.
December 27, 2015
Awash with science and music, love and longing, the GBV is a breathtaking work of fiction. I was immensely surprised to see how few people have read this fascinating book.
Mr. Powers is clearly incredibly smart, and his prose is very clever if sometimes dry. He did bore me a bit with too much detail on Bach's Goldberg Variations, but overall I enjoyed this book. Recommended for those who enjoy a bit of a love story with your postmodernism .
Mr. Powers is clearly incredibly smart, and his prose is very clever if sometimes dry. He did bore me a bit with too much detail on Bach's Goldberg Variations, but overall I enjoyed this book. Recommended for those who enjoy a bit of a love story with your postmodernism .
September 16, 2022
"Ho avvertito l'ingenuo sospetto del dottorando che sotto la congenita complessità delle faccende umane scorra una formula così semplice ed elegante che la redenzione dipendeva dal suo svelamento."
Un romanzo fiume che comincia e finisce con il numero quattro: quattro sono i componenti principali del DNA, quattro sono le strutture di base delle "Variazioni Goldberg", quattro i protagonisti che si inseguono e le cui vite si avvolgono e incrociano. I mattoni del romanzo sembrano quindi interessanti, soprattutto alla luce della mescolanza di elementi letterari e scientifici senza soluzione di continuità.
Eppure le 800 pagine del libro sono proprio tante, troppe, infinite. Un po' lo si vede allo sperimentalismo di Richard Powers, la cui scrittura fluttua a livelli molto alti ma si caratterizza anche per una complessità sintattica non da poco. I contenuti di tale sintassi, poi, non sono mai lineari ma prendono digressioni e varianti che portano fuori strada, per poi rientrare in un punto in cui sembra non sia cambiato nulla ma è cambiato molto. Infine, anche la stessa struttura dei capitoli non segue alcun ordine: si suddividono in sottocapitoli che non si ripetono nei loro contenuti, né nella presenza dei personaggi né per il tema (ti aspetteresti che il primo sottocapitolo di ogni capitolo sia parallelo a quello del capitolo precedente, ma non è così). Insomma, è stato molto difficile arrivare in fondo e onestamente ho saltato tutte le parti rigorosamente scientifiche perché incomprensibili. Sembra che Powers dia per scontate molte conoscenze (o magari il suo intento è quello di disorientare il lettore). Fatto sta che non possono non annoverare questo come una delle peggiori letture dell'anno.
Un romanzo fiume che comincia e finisce con il numero quattro: quattro sono i componenti principali del DNA, quattro sono le strutture di base delle "Variazioni Goldberg", quattro i protagonisti che si inseguono e le cui vite si avvolgono e incrociano. I mattoni del romanzo sembrano quindi interessanti, soprattutto alla luce della mescolanza di elementi letterari e scientifici senza soluzione di continuità.
Eppure le 800 pagine del libro sono proprio tante, troppe, infinite. Un po' lo si vede allo sperimentalismo di Richard Powers, la cui scrittura fluttua a livelli molto alti ma si caratterizza anche per una complessità sintattica non da poco. I contenuti di tale sintassi, poi, non sono mai lineari ma prendono digressioni e varianti che portano fuori strada, per poi rientrare in un punto in cui sembra non sia cambiato nulla ma è cambiato molto. Infine, anche la stessa struttura dei capitoli non segue alcun ordine: si suddividono in sottocapitoli che non si ripetono nei loro contenuti, né nella presenza dei personaggi né per il tema (ti aspetteresti che il primo sottocapitolo di ogni capitolo sia parallelo a quello del capitolo precedente, ma non è così). Insomma, è stato molto difficile arrivare in fondo e onestamente ho saltato tutte le parti rigorosamente scientifiche perché incomprensibili. Sembra che Powers dia per scontate molte conoscenze (o magari il suo intento è quello di disorientare il lettore). Fatto sta che non possono non annoverare questo come una delle peggiori letture dell'anno.
June 16, 2007
More people who love fiction need to discover Richard Powers. His work isn't the most poetic or character-driven, but they offer so much else. Gold Bug and Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance are among my favorite books (but avoid Operation Wandering Soul).
A story of two temporally separated yet linked couples (why do I love that gimmick so?), this novel is essentially about variations on themes, codes: in music, painting, computers, and the discovery of DNA. Cerebral and curious and charming. Yes, the title references Bach's Goldberg Variations as well as Poe's story.
A story of two temporally separated yet linked couples (why do I love that gimmick so?), this novel is essentially about variations on themes, codes: in music, painting, computers, and the discovery of DNA. Cerebral and curious and charming. Yes, the title references Bach's Goldberg Variations as well as Poe's story.
December 17, 2022
It's hard to know what to say about this one. It's monumental in its concept and incredibly impressive, but at the same time I wouldn't recommend it for anyone else to read. I mean, it's so long! And so slow! There are parts where he just stops and goes on and on for pages about science or music or art or something else. It's somehow packed with information but also very little happens. It seems like it could have been half as long, but it's hard to see how. Anyway, I like when people take big swings so I appreciate it. But again, I don't recommend reading it!
September 5, 2007
Overworked and overdone. Each sentence reads as though you were reading across two pages that were stuck together. There's no flow, no sense of context or storytelling at all, only a sense that the writer is trying to show off his ability to use a thesaurus. I can't get into this book. I don't think I'll be finishing it.
August 2, 2020
Genetica molecolare in crittogrammi musicali
Finalmente tradotto in italiano dalla bravissima Licia Vighi, già traduttrice di Sussurro del mondo, vincitore del Pulitzer dell’anno scorso, THE GOLD BUG VARIATIONS approda in Italia con ventinove anni di ritardo! E non è mai troppo tardi per i bei libri!
Scienza, musica, arte, informatica e due storie d’amore sovrapposte. Un romanzo-mondo, espressione felice se abbinata a questo voluminoso libro. Niente è messo lì per caso, perché la Natura non fa niente senza un perché ed anche Powers sembra piegarsi a questo assioma. Ogni pagina ha una sua necessità, anche il titolo originale: The Gold Bug Variations infatti si rifà sia a Lo scarabeo d’oro di Poe e sia a Bach tramite un gioco di suoni, The Goldberg Variations. E ...
“Cosa potrebbe esserci di più semplice? Quattro
note scendono dal Sol lungo i gradi della scala.
Quattro siffatte battute sviluppano
quattro frasi, poi si torna al principio”.
Quattro.
Quattro le stagioni, i quattro punti cardinali, quattro le lettere del tetragramma, quattro le basi che formano gli acidi nucleici del DNA. Quattro le note basilari di un componimento musicale di Bach. “Quattro i corpi paralizzati dal desiderio al centro di un mondo brulicante di specie”.
Ecco spiegato anche il perché del titolo in italiano: ogni terza variazione dell’opera di Bach citata è detta canone e il desiderio, visto non solo come spinta sessuale, ma come motore della conoscenza è alla base di ogni ricerca in ambito scientifico, oltre ad essere l’attrazione che spinge due persone ad amarsi. Certamente la scelta editoriale de La Nave di Teseo, così come per l’altro libro di Powers, The Overstory tradotto con Sussurro del mondo, è stata fatta per rendere più accattivante l’opera, (tenuto conto del fatto che il lettore medio sceglie le sue letture in base ai titoli ed alle copertine).
Il quattro è al centro di uno schema magico cui il dottor Stuart Ressler , il personaggio più affascinante dell’intero romanzo, dedica tutte le sue energie per riuscire a codificare il DNA, la trama segreta della vita. Attraverso intuizioni illuminanti riesce, grazie alla donna di cui si innamora, Jeanette Koss, che lo avvicina alla musica, in particolare alle variazioni di Goldberg di Bach, a individuare in quest’opera la metafora più vicina al problema della codifica del DNA, la combinazione polifonica dei numeri, la musica alla base della vita umana, di questa particolare “scala di Giacobbe”, con una struttura molecolare a spirale con “due ringhiere appaiate che si attorcigliano luna all’altra” destinate a non incontrarsi mai.
Recensione completa per la redazione QLibri
https://www.qlibri.it/narrativa-stran...
Finalmente tradotto in italiano dalla bravissima Licia Vighi, già traduttrice di Sussurro del mondo, vincitore del Pulitzer dell’anno scorso, THE GOLD BUG VARIATIONS approda in Italia con ventinove anni di ritardo! E non è mai troppo tardi per i bei libri!
Scienza, musica, arte, informatica e due storie d’amore sovrapposte. Un romanzo-mondo, espressione felice se abbinata a questo voluminoso libro. Niente è messo lì per caso, perché la Natura non fa niente senza un perché ed anche Powers sembra piegarsi a questo assioma. Ogni pagina ha una sua necessità, anche il titolo originale: The Gold Bug Variations infatti si rifà sia a Lo scarabeo d’oro di Poe e sia a Bach tramite un gioco di suoni, The Goldberg Variations. E ...
“Cosa potrebbe esserci di più semplice? Quattro
note scendono dal Sol lungo i gradi della scala.
Quattro siffatte battute sviluppano
quattro frasi, poi si torna al principio”.
Quattro.
Quattro le stagioni, i quattro punti cardinali, quattro le lettere del tetragramma, quattro le basi che formano gli acidi nucleici del DNA. Quattro le note basilari di un componimento musicale di Bach. “Quattro i corpi paralizzati dal desiderio al centro di un mondo brulicante di specie”.
Ecco spiegato anche il perché del titolo in italiano: ogni terza variazione dell’opera di Bach citata è detta canone e il desiderio, visto non solo come spinta sessuale, ma come motore della conoscenza è alla base di ogni ricerca in ambito scientifico, oltre ad essere l’attrazione che spinge due persone ad amarsi. Certamente la scelta editoriale de La Nave di Teseo, così come per l’altro libro di Powers, The Overstory tradotto con Sussurro del mondo, è stata fatta per rendere più accattivante l’opera, (tenuto conto del fatto che il lettore medio sceglie le sue letture in base ai titoli ed alle copertine).
Il quattro è al centro di uno schema magico cui il dottor Stuart Ressler , il personaggio più affascinante dell’intero romanzo, dedica tutte le sue energie per riuscire a codificare il DNA, la trama segreta della vita. Attraverso intuizioni illuminanti riesce, grazie alla donna di cui si innamora, Jeanette Koss, che lo avvicina alla musica, in particolare alle variazioni di Goldberg di Bach, a individuare in quest’opera la metafora più vicina al problema della codifica del DNA, la combinazione polifonica dei numeri, la musica alla base della vita umana, di questa particolare “scala di Giacobbe”, con una struttura molecolare a spirale con “due ringhiere appaiate che si attorcigliano luna all’altra” destinate a non incontrarsi mai.
Recensione completa per la redazione QLibri
https://www.qlibri.it/narrativa-stran...
November 24, 2020
I dreaded reading this book so much.
Misogyny alarm bells rang as soon as Powers began extolling Watson and Crick.. and aside from the BRIEFEST mention, omitted my beloved heroine Rosalind Franklin. (How can you name a character 'Franklin' and then completely gloss over his namesake's contributions to genetics when THAT IS THE SUBJECT MATTER OF YOUR BOOK?!?) The narrator, wooden librarian Jan O'Deigh, was so utterly lifeless that she was more reminiscent of an encyclopedia than a breathing woman. When Stuart, former microbiologist, and Franklin, ABD art historian, discuss science and teleology, O'Deigh excuses herself to work on a jigsaw puzzle. Infuriating! Powers fares better at writing from a woman's perspective in 'The Overstory', but I won't be swift in forgiving this atrocity.
The conceit was.... 'clever' but did not excuse the abundant pages of stilted dialogue and belabored puns. Let me be clear, I attempted to 'crack the code' because I like riddles and NOT because I respect this book. The chapters were organized to reflect the Goldberg Variations: 32 chapters = an aria, 30 variations, and a de capo finish. I don't know much about music, so much of my structural understanding rested on genetics. Two romantic couples = two base pairs (musical phrases), three narratives = three bases per codon (canon pattern).
A chichi theoretical exercise, this book did not resonate with me at all. I know no one cares, but I had to get it off my chest. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Misogyny alarm bells rang as soon as Powers began extolling Watson and Crick.. and aside from the BRIEFEST mention, omitted my beloved heroine Rosalind Franklin. (How can you name a character 'Franklin' and then completely gloss over his namesake's contributions to genetics when THAT IS THE SUBJECT MATTER OF YOUR BOOK?!?) The narrator, wooden librarian Jan O'Deigh, was so utterly lifeless that she was more reminiscent of an encyclopedia than a breathing woman. When Stuart, former microbiologist, and Franklin, ABD art historian, discuss science and teleology, O'Deigh excuses herself to work on a jigsaw puzzle. Infuriating! Powers fares better at writing from a woman's perspective in 'The Overstory', but I won't be swift in forgiving this atrocity.
The conceit was.... 'clever' but did not excuse the abundant pages of stilted dialogue and belabored puns. Let me be clear, I attempted to 'crack the code' because I like riddles and NOT because I respect this book. The chapters were organized to reflect the Goldberg Variations: 32 chapters = an aria, 30 variations, and a de capo finish. I don't know much about music, so much of my structural understanding rested on genetics. Two romantic couples = two base pairs (musical phrases), three narratives = three bases per codon (canon pattern).
A chichi theoretical exercise, this book did not resonate with me at all. I know no one cares, but I had to get it off my chest. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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