Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
"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Capgras' syndrome, a rare disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that a close family member or spouse has been replaced by an identical looking impostor.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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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
poor writing detracts from a reasonable storyline, 1 Jun 2007
An interesting storyline is terribly overwritten by Richard Powers. The prose is dense and pretentious, with seemingly innocuous exchanges between characters sitting oddly next to deeply melodramatic soul-searching. The neurology is fairly sound (I was given the book because I'm a neuropsychologist) and I, like one of the other reviewers, stuck with the story in order to see what happened. Powers' desperately erudite style, though, and his efforts to weave philosophy of consciousness into almost every sentence, make for a very unsatisfying read. Although grammatically correct, his glaring use of the possessive pronoun with gerunds "It wouldn't have made any difference, *our* coming forwards", in all characters from the well-spoken neurologist to the beer-drinking, truck-racing lads, makes the speech stilted and unrealistic. Overall, a very disappointing book.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Too long for the brief story, 6 Dec 2007
If you spent a week reading "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" while watching the Hallmark Channel, you might end up writing this novel. Mark Shluter has crashed his truck and his sister, Karin, quits her job and dumps her boyfriend to take care of him. But Mark suffered a brain injury in the accident and insists that his sister is not his sister but someone pretending to be his sister. A famous neurologist, Gerald Weber, arrives to see Mark so he can write about him in his next book. And some cranes fly through town on their way to Alaska.
The main problem with the story is that Powers does nothing with the story. His characters are uninteresting to start with and are completely unbelievable. They don't react to situations, they overreact. Everything that happens is the most important thing that has ever happened and every character reacts that way. And Powers doesn't tell a story, too often he tells us about a story. For example, when Weber goes on a television show, we only find out that he embarrasses himself during the interview but not what he said that was so terrible that it destroyed sales of his book. Weber, a crucial character in the story, is the weakest written character in the book. It is virtually impossible to justify or understand his actions. And if two people have sex in the mud, don't you think they might want to shower or at least change their clothes before going off to lunch and then on to some tourist attraction?
There are some good parts of the book. The mystery of the letter left at the hospital is interesting and is wrapped up quite nicely. In a clever and effective technique, Powers writes alternating sections from the point of view of the various characters. But the book would have been much better if Powers had reduced the length by about 200 pages. I found myself becoming bored with the characters and the story. Serious editing and the elimination of certain story threads could have kept the book short enough to make us not care that the characters are completely unlikeable and unbelievable. But at 450 pages, the holes in the characters shine through.
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