![]() ![]() ![]() Disarmingly incapable of affectation, she never confuses style with a special effect. Yet the wondrous quality in Patchett’s novels comes from her writing, quiet, warm, and sure. ![]() State of Wonder is Patchett’s sixth in a steady stream of excellent novels full of signs and wonders: a magician’s assistant whose dead friends speak to her in her dreams ( The Magician’s Assistant, 1997) a hostage situation during which an American opera singer, a Japanese businessman and South American terrorists become friends and fall in love ( Bel Canto, 2001). When Anders Eckman, the researcher sent by the pharmaceutical company to report on her progress, dies of a strange malarial fever, our unlikely heroine Marina Singh is called upon to collect information on his death and finish his work. Annick Swenson, the novel’s mad scientist, who has gone rogue from the pharmaceutical company funding her research on a reproductive drug. Presiding over the Lakashi and a corps of international medical researchers is the formidable Dr. Here, the fictional Lakashi tribe possesses an unusual elixir of life – their women can bear children into old age. An adventure story of almost ungainly imagination, State of Wonder is set on a remote island of the Amazon. ![]() State of Wonder is Patchett’s most recent novel, and it establishes her as one of our most gifted writers of novels with real beginnings, middles and ends, novels of engrossing narrative velocity that come to surprising and almost primally satisfying resolution. ![]()
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