State of Wonder: Oh, to be in the Amazon...

I finished Ann Patchett's State of Wonder at the beginning of October and while I was a little disappointed by the inconclusive ending, I thoroughly enjoyed the journey and would absolutely recommend this novel. I've never read anything by her before though I know people loved Bel Canto so it's yet another book I may have to add to my 2012 reading list. (The year hasn't started yet and already my book list is way, way too long...)

In order to talk about the ending, I'll have to thoroughly talk about the plot so don't read any further if you don't want to know what happens. In fact, if you're planning on reading the book, you should probably stop now - the discovery of what's happened and why is an important element of the book's emotional journey and I think it would lessen the book's "wonder" to know what will happen.

So, with that out of the way...State of Wonder is the story of Marina Singh, a failed OBGYN with daddy issues who now works as a laboratory researcher for a large pharmaceutical firm. She has a good working relationship with her lab partner, family man Anders Eckman, and is having an affair with the head of the company, Mr. Fox (who she always calls Mr. Fox up until the last third of the book, even though she hopes he's already kinda-sorta proposed). Like some other protagonists we've discussed in recent posts, Marina is pretty darn passive about her life at the outset of the novel. She’s a researcher at Vogel because of an accident in medical school (where she felt like she didn’t live up to her teacher’s expectations), her father abandoned her as a child and left her with nightmares, and of course she refers to her secret lover "mister." Marina is a waiter, someone waiting for something to happen in her life, and until then she's just going to plod along.

So we learn all this about Marina as Anders get sent to the Amazon to check up on an expensive but mysterious project that Vogel is funding. It turns out that Marina's former teacher, Dr. Annick Swenson, believes she has found a way to stop menopause, naturally extending a woman's fertility, but she's kind of a strongwilled rebel who demands total secrecy and no limitations on her research. When a letter arrives saying that Anders has unexpectedly died, Marina gets sent to Brazil – ostensibly to pick up where he left off but really to find out what happened to him for his wife and kids. In some ways, this is where the novel starts, but she doesn't find Dr. Swenson in Manaus until page 97 (on my Nook, anyway) - it was quite a delay but it was interesting and I felt like I was on the journey with Marina.

At this point, Annick takes Marina into the jungle to the research station, set among the Lakashi tribe, who it turns out is eating forest bark. She gradually becomes a part of the research group and eventually becomes Dr. Swenson's heir apparent. She's admitted to the circle of trust only to discover that altogether different things are going on - for Dr. Swenson, very little besides science matters and anything that gets in the way of that is worth covering up. As a result, Marina is faced with some difficult moral choices.


But there is where my disappointment set in. There are some really interesting questions posed - and a lot of time spent building up to them - but aside from deliberately rescuing Anders (and the trade-off that takes, plus the odd decision later that night), I didn't think it was clear what Marina would choose to do. It seems like she'd changed...but how? Would Marina return to Brazil to continue Dr. Swenson's work or rat her out? What would she do about Mr. Fox...and did she even love him anyway? I don't think there was even enough to make an educated guess, making it such a strange, unresolved book that needed much more at the end.

Many, many people have compared State of Wonder to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which obviously makes sense, but in the book, when Marina is at the glorious opera house in Manaus, she compares herself to Orpheus and Anders to Eurydice. And it's probably a more apt description - while Marina is going on her own internal journey to face her demons, she is primarily going to rescue Anders from death (by ostensibly finding out what happened to him) and only encounters her own demons along the way.

Personally, I thought the Amazon sounded amazing, deadly creatures and all, and have now resolved to move it higher on my travel wish list. Apparently Ann Patchett didn't feel the same - in an Amazon.com interview between her and Elizabeth Gilbert, she says that she kinda hated the Amazon when she went there to do research. "I absolutely loved the Amazon for four days. It was gorgeous and unfamiliar and deeply fascinating. Unfortunately, I stayed there for ten days. There are a lot of insects in the Amazon, a lot of mud, surprisingly few vegetables, too many snakes... I can see how great it would be for a very short visit, and how great it would be if you lived there and had figured out what was and wasn’t going to kill you, but the interim length of time isn’t great." I don't know why this cracks me up but it does - I guess I'm tickled she wrote an entire novel about the Amazon while hating the Amazon.

An Aside: Stealing Athena in photos

In photos and going chronologically, Karen Essex's Stealing Athena is a novel about the Parthenon and two women who had a major impact on its state of being.

[My photo of the Parthenon in 2004]

Perikles began building on the Athenian Acropolis in 447 BC.

[Roman copy of Pericles bust, from The Elgin Marbles by B.F. Cook]

He put the sculptor Pheidias in charge of artistic decisions and according to the book, Pheidias decided to use Perikles' mistress and Stealing Athena's protagonist Aspasia as his model for his glorious statue of Athena, known as Athena Parthenos. (Pheidias was also accused of hiding portraits of himself and Perikles in the massive statue.) Although the original statue no longer survives, today you can see Alan LeQuire's replica (based on historical writings and artifacts) in Nashville's full-scale Parthenon. (Why Nashville has a full-scale replica of the Parthenon I do not know.)

[The photo of Athena comes from the city of Nashville's website.]

Fast-forward about 2,200 years to first years of the 19th century. There was a man named Lord Elgin. He loved the Parthenon more than he loved his wife, the heiress Mary Nisbet and the other protagonist of Stealing Athena.

The photo of Lord Elgin, attributed to a 1795 drawing by G.P. Harding, also comes from Cook's book. The drawing of Mary Nesbit, Countess of Elgin, is found on the cover of Susan Nagel's awesome biography, Mistress of the Elgin Marbles.]

But by that time, the Acropolis had been used and abused. After the fall of the Greek gods, the Parthenon had been turned into a church; when the Turks arrived, they turned into a mosque. Later, they used it to store gunpowder and half the building exploded during a Venetian siege in 1687. So Elgin made it his life's mission to cart what he could back to England, thus beginning one of the art world's biggest controversies. Since he didn't have much money of his own, he used his wife's fortune. Ironically, saving the Acropolis marbles from further ruin helped destroy his own marriage. In the wake of a scandalous divorce, he was forced to sell his beloved marbles to the British Museum in 1816.

According to the British Museum, about half of the marble sculptures from the Parthenon survive. They have a good chunk of what's left, including about 60 percent of the remaining frieze and "much" of what remains of the East Pediment.

[My 2004 photos of the Duveen Gallery (top) and East Pediment (bottom)]

Now we're going beyond Stealing Athena, but the rest of the remaining frieze is in Athens. When I was there, in 2004, it was housed in the old, small Acropolis museum that was on top of the hill. (As I recall, the overflow was kept in storage.) The British Museum refuses to give them back to Athens and for a long time, one of the arguments was that Greece didn't have a proper facility in which to house them. Although the spectacular new Acropolis Museum opened in 2009 (alas, I haven't yet been), the B.M. still isn't budging - and I imagine they never will.

This subject of location is highly controversial and while I've tried to keep my own opinions out of this post, the one thing that sticks out in my mind from my trips to Athens and London is the difference in the marbles' condition from one location to the next. Say what you will but Elgin's actions led to a better preservation in the long-run - and it's obvious in pictures:

[My 2004 photos of a frieze section in Athens (top) and a metope in London (bottom)]

Anyway...that would be the end (and I am reminded once again of why I hate trying to input photos into Blogger...)

#17: Pompeii, Robert Harris

Although I had other books stashed in my luggage, I ended up trading Good in Bed for Pompeii at some hostel since I spent most of my time in Europe/Asia tripping around ancient ruins. Even though Pompeii is set in Italy (hence the title) and I was not, it seemed to fit the mood - though I spent the entire book wondering if I had read it before.

It turns out that I had - clearly it was not memorable enough to be remembered in its entireity (though I am absolutely certain that I read it while I was in Athens in 2004) but was still enjoyable the second time around. Pompeii is the story of aquarius Marcus Attilus, who has been sent to the town of Misenum, in southern Italy, after the former aquarius disappears. When he gets there, the mighty Aqua Augusta starts mysteriously dropping in volume. Attilus sets out to fix the aquaduct before southern Italy goes dry, but little does he know that the oncoming eruption of Mt. Vesuvius is to blame.

It's a quick read and good for nipping into here and there on a trip like mine. It also made me realize that I still need to haul my ass to Pompeii - enough so that I almost considered trying to squeeze it into my itinerary. But since that never happened, I'll have to hit it up another time - probably forgetting, once again, that I read this book so it can have yet another go-around.

An Aside: The Lacuna in photos

And now for a pictoral trip through Barbara Kingsolver's new novel, The Lacuna. One of the reasons I'd picked the book up is because I'd had such a great time in Mexico City - it's really an amazing town and undeserving of its negative reputation!

We saw this cleansing ceremony taking place on a Sunday morning behind the Cathedral. At the beginning of the book, Harrison's mother drags him along with her as she visits a shaman in the jungle and Kingsolver's description reminded me of the one we'd seen:

The next photo shows the entry to the Casa Azul (no photos allowed inside the house). This was the house that Frida Kahlo grew up in and one of the houses that she and Diego lived in. We never made it to the house in San Angel or Anahuacalli, the weird Aztec temple-house that Harrison mentions in The Lacuna. We were in Mexico City just after Dia de los Muertos and there was a large table set up outside with mementos to Frida and Diego, like this one:

We also went to Leon Trotsky's house, which is only a few blocks from the Casa Azul. The house has such a cloud of sadness hanging over it...I really do think Trotsky has the most tragic story of the 20th century. The first photo is of Trotsky's study where he was murdered by ice pick in 1940. The second photo is of Trotsky's office, where someone like Harrison Shepherd would have worked:

We tried to go see the Rivera murals at the Palacio Nacional but for whatever reason, it was closed that day. So instead, we later went to the Palacio de Bellas Artes and saw some of the other Rivera murals, including Man at the Crossroads, mentioned in The Lacuna. This is the mural that Rivera recreated in 1934 after the Rockefellers tore down the commissioned original in New York City because they didn't like its themes. In the first photo, you can see Lenin between the wings on the right. In the second photo, the man with the white hair is Trotsky.

And then last but not least, a photo of Teotihuacan. In the background you can see the Temple of the Sun. In the book, Frida takes Harrison here to visit her archaeologist friend. During his picnic lunch on the riverbank with Frida, Harrison finds an Aztec figurine of a man.