book review state of wonder ann patchett

State of Wonder echoes the asymmetries of that book in the emotional complexity that frames Marina's journey. In her first novel, 1992's The Patron Saint of Liars, Rose is more than 20 years younger than her second husband, but the cause of their marriage's long dark night is really their shared fidelity to a code of silence.

Patchett's novels typically derive their narrative energy from unlikely romantic entanglements that slowly unravel under the pressures of life. Fierce and driven, she refuses to communicate with her employer about the years she has spent putatively investigating why the Lakashi women are able to bear children into their 70s. Swenson is an ethnobiologist turned gynaecologist turned immunologist who is committed to keeping the Lakashi's secrets. Marina's personal motivation for travelling to Brazil is to find out what happened to her colleague, Anders Eckman, who evidently died making the same trip before her but her professional duty is to report back on research being carried out by Annick Swenson, who happens to be Singh's former professor. Ann Patchett's sixth novel, State of Wonder, merges the two kingdoms in the story of a pharmacologist, Marina Singh, who travels into the Amazonian jungle to spend time with the mysterious Lakashi tribe. At the other extreme, there's the seething world below eye level, the microscopic life of cells and bacteria. At one pole, there's the globe as playground, the hunt through the shrinking wildernesses for whatever magic may somehow lie hidden beyond the totalising reach of GPS. I n the disenchanted millennial world, the American search for wonder centres on the very large and the unimaginably small.

Book review state of wonder ann patchett