Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"The mind can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven", 17 Dec 2006
In The Echo Maker the riddle of human identity and the unmistakable power of the human mind is explored through Capgras' syndrome, a rare disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that a close family member or spouse has been replaced by an identical looking impostor.
Thirty-something Nabraska native Karin Schluter is devastated to discover that her twenty-seven year old brother Mark no longer recognizes her as his sister after he crashes truck on an isolated road, "like he fell of a wooden horse." Critically injuried, Mark lies in hospital, lapsing in and out of consciousness, whilst Karin having left her job in Sioux City to care for him, hovers over his bedside, frantically hoping he'll recover.
This is a time of great sadness and uncertainty for Karin, plunged into untried topography in a situation she is incapable confronting. Intent to survive on her savings and her mother's life insurance policy, Karin holds vigil as Mark gradually begins to respond to treatment, but as the days go by, it quickly becomes evident that something is terribly wrong.
Mark sees Karin as an imposter, perhaps even someone who has been hired and whose intentions are to underhandedly masquerade as his sister. When she is told by the doctors that Mark was manifesting a condition called Capgras syndrome, it is almost impossible to fathom and comes as a terrible shock to both Karin and Daniel, her environmentalist ex-boyfriend who works at crane sanctuary near the Platte River.
Days later, Mark is still denying her. He assembles everything else: whom he was where he works, what had happened to him. But he continues to insist that Karin is an actress who looks very much like his sister. The part of his brain that recognizes faces is intact, so his memory, but the part that processes emotional association has somehow disconnected from them.
Karin doesn't believe Mark has any syndrome - his mind is just sorting out the chaos of injury; until she discovers an opportunity to perhaps set things right and perhaps bring her brother out of his bemused state. In desperation, she contacts Gerald Weber, a world famous author and a specialist in brain injuries who lives in New York.
Gerald's professional career has been winding down and he's about to embark on a book tour. However, upon hearing of Karin's predicament, he travels to Kearney to meet Mark and tape his sessions. As the mystery of Mark's illness unfolds and the clues to the accident pile up, Gerald and Karin, and even Mark find that tenderness is found in the midst of grief and that hope resurfaces unexpectedly.
Gerald's intuition as a neurologist makes him feel unsettled and his precipitous arrival in Nebraska gives him a hamstrung sense that has plagued him throughout his residency. Karin knows she is trading on disaster, using her damaged brother to make things right with her own past, and she sees Gerald as unquestionably her only hope. While Mark, who once saw his sister as the voice of reason, now continues to resent her very presence.
Weber seems to think that Mark has stopped recognizing his sister because some part of him has stopped recognizing himself. Karin is sure that something is about to happen, a good thing she hadn't engineered, which is somehow the result of Mark's catastrophe. When she investigates the accident, the police tell her Mark wasn't alone on that night. There were three sets of tire tracks on the stretch of North Line where he lost control.
Someone else had lost control, right in front of Mark, and the calamity was called in from a pay phone at the Mobile Station just of the Kearney interstate exit by a male of indeterminate age who refused to give a name. As the description of that night unfolds in front of her "like a weirdly cut handheld -camera reality show," Karin wonders who left the note by his bedside signed, "I am No One."
Part of the journey for Mark and Karin is the recognition that only time and love can heal some of the wounds of their past. Both have escaped from a dysfunctional family life, with a severely religious mother who preached fire and brimstone and a father who was reclusive and ineffectual. Karin was left to raise her brother as though he was her "psychology experiment," a simple boy who just wanted to be "a real good chicken calmer" when he grew up.
Author Richard Powers writes an intriguing story of the ramifications of this rare syndrome on those who represent commonplace and how the psyche can be broken apart often at a moments notice. In his touching tale, his characters are fully fleshed out, totally three dimensional in all of their fears and worries and hopes and dreams.
These are ordinary people forced to confront the almost insurmountable, their lives defined by their cautious striving to reconnect with each other in the face of a very personal tragedy. Mike Leonard December 06.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Extremely unimpressed, 7 Jun 2008
I found this book very very slow in pace and hugely frustrating. I've never read a book until now that I've actually wanted to rip in half!! The story was intriguing for the first 200 pages but the remaining 300+ pages left me extremely bored. The language was peppered with clinical jargon that was infuratingly complex and at times gratutitous. The characters were not that likeable and the ending was disappointing, at best, and I cannot understand why it is has had such big acclaim!
On the whole I found it boring, self-indulgant and it left me completely cold. My copy is heading for amazon.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A fascinating and intelligent story, tackling many big themes, 18 Feb 2008
"The Echo Maker" is the ninth and latest novel by American author Richard Powers. One winter's night in Nebraska, Karin Schluter receives a call: her brother Mark has been involved in a near-fatal road accident and is in hospital, critically injured and possibly brain-damaged. When finally he awakes from his coma, he seems to have made a full recovery except for one detail: he believes that Karin is not his real sister but in fact a near-identical impostor. Mark is suffering from an extremely rare recognition disorder known as Capgras Syndrome. Devastated by her brother's insistent denial of her, Karin calls on renowned neurologist Gerald Weber in a desperate plea for help. Meanwhile, Mark struggles to understand why and how his world appears suddenly changed. With the sole clue available to him - an anonymous note left by his hospital bedside - he slowly begins to discover what actually happened on the night of his accident.
This is a novel full of grand themes, namely the relationship of mind, soul, brain and body, and the very nature of memory, reality and identity. What is the essence that makes us who we are? Does it matter how other people perceive us, and how are we ourselves shaped by their actions? This is by no means a dry read, however, since Powers fills his narrative with a cast of interesting and brilliantly realised characters, from the at-times neurotic Karin to the rational but increasingly depressive Weber, from Mark's beer-guzzling buddies to the mysterious care worker Barbara. All of these characters, too, have their problems, which are only exacerbated as they respond to the pressures of assisting Mark's recovery.
At the same time there are some elements of a detective story, or a psychological thriller, and indeed Powers does remarkably well to maintain the suspense over the course of 550 pages. For the most part his prose flows very well, and is not impeded either by the gravity of the issues at hand or by an excess of neurobiological information or language. Unfortunately, it is let down in the closing twenty to thirty pages of the book, where the narrative degenerates to the point where it is almost unintelligible, and the dialogue becomes a mess of cryptic half-sentences. Indeed the resolution as a whole feels somewhat rushed and chaotic, and ultimately unsatisfying for a novel of this length.
This aside, however, "The Echo Maker" is a fascinating - and in many places unsettling - journey through the manifold quirks of the human mind. On the whole it remains a stimulating and engaging read, and one that I can recommend.
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