State of Wonder

Because a plot summary is expected, I'll provide one, but plot is not the main driving factor of State of Wonder. Dr. Annick Swenson, medical doctor and ethnobotanist, is conducting drug development research in the Amazon. Mr. Fox, CEO of Vogel, the drug company sponsoring Dr. Swenson's lab is

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becoming increasingly concerned by Dr. Swenson's lack of communication about her research. Dr. Anders Eckman, another Vogel researcher, is sent by Mr. Fox to check on Dr. Swenson's progress. When Mr. Fox gets a letter from Dr. Swenson informing him of Dr. Eckman's death he decides to send yet another researcher to assess the situation. Dr. Marina Singh, who has significant and complicated ties to all involved parties, sets off to Brazil with a two-fold assignment: learn the details of Dr. Eckman's death and report on Dr. Swanson's research progress. The setting is as important at the characters. Brazil: oppressive humidity, innumerable bugs, deadly snakes, mysterious natives, exotic diseases, unique flora, relentless sun, opaque rivers, and claustrophobic jungles. The ultimate success of the Americans depends on their ability to adapt to and navigate in such wildly unfamiliar territory.

As with many of Ann Patchett's previous books, I had a visceral reaction to State of Wonder. The beauty is in her writing style and the mood it creates. I was drawn in and read more slowly than usual because I didn't want the book to end. I worried about Marina and her health. I rooted for her to find information to take home to comfort Dr. Eckman's widow. I rejoiced in her ability to achieve success despite her setbacks. I felt Marina's core-deep loneliness fed by the losses of her father, her role model, her career, and her marriage. And ultimately, I found peace and satisfaction knowing that while Marina was sent to the Amazon to find Eckman and Swenson, the most important person she found was herself.

The scientists in State of Wonder are challenged to think about their stance on everything from the ethics of profit-driven drug development to the wisdom of interfering with the day-to-day lives of indigenous peoples to the comparative value of life and freedom. Patchett highlights these potentially polarizing dilemmas with care and grace, not proselytizing.

For me, State of Wonder has it all: it made me think, it made me feel, and it was engrossing.

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Knowing that women in the Amazon’s Lakashi tribe maintain fertility into old age, Minnesota-based Vogel Pharmaceuticals has funded the research of famed (and formidable) female physician Annick Swenson there for years, in hope of developing a drug that makes extended fertility available to women

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everywhere. So when Swenson cuts her communications with Vogel, corporate researcher Anders Eckman is dispatched to the Amazon to talk with her and determine the project’s status. And when Eckman is then reported dead under ambiguous circumstances, Marina Singh, his friend and laboratory colleague at Vogel, agrees to travel to Brazil to find out about the drug, Eckman, and Swenson.

Forty-two-year-old Marina has felt unmoored her whole life -- personally, as a bi-racial child of divorce with parents on two continents and with dark skin that feels out of place in Minnesota; and professionally, after an incident during OB-GYN training prompted her to switch from clinical medicine to laboratory pharmacology. The novel’s narration mimics Marina’s state of being -- taking time in Minnesota to decide and prepare for travel; experiencing the confused mental state that is a side effect of her antimalarial drug, Lariam; then lolling in Manaus, Brazil, waiting over weeks (and for me, weeks of intermittent reading) to be taken to Swenson’s research site deep in the jungle. And then Marina finally does board a boat and heads along the river into the Amazon.

...every insect in the Amazon lifted its head from the leaf it was masticating and turned a slender antenna in her direction.

With that, Marina’s interest comes alive and so did mine, for the whole second half of the novel -- the wonders and dangers of deep nature and indigenous peoples; the ethics of medical research and sociological interventions; the immediate threats to life and the possibility of recovery from past traumas. For me, Bel Canto remains Patchett’s best novel. But State of Wonder compares favorably to her others -- accessible, interesting and informative; a bit incredible and tidy. And it’s prompted me to (finally) get to Joseph Conrad’s Congo in Heart of Darkness.

(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)

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Love, I suppose, is a state of wonder. Sometimes numbing, sometimes bedazzling, sometimes painful, sometimes blissful, sometimes singular, sometimes plural, sometimes filial, sometimes paternal, and sometimes conjugal—love is a perennial challenge for a novelist. Ann Patchett obviously loves a

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challenge. And since a writer’s ambition ought to know no bounds, she picks up the challenge of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Dante’s Inferno, and Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. To these she adds some dilemmas of medical ethics, participant observer anthropologists, and ethnobotanists. And I’m only just scratching the surface of this rich text. Indeed there is so much here to think about and discuss and reconsider that I doubt any consensus of opinion will form on this novel for some time. That’s as it should be. But love, I think, is a central core around which the other themes swirl.

Marina Singh is a physician turned pharmacological scientist. She suffers from unresolved father love, which transfers to a kind of worship of a former professor with a powerful personality, Annick Swenson, whom Marina later must seek out deep in the Amazonian rain forest. Her task is to check on the progress of Dr Swenson’s research into an infertility drug, as well as to verify the demise of her former colleague Anders Eckman, who preceded her in a similar quest. There is something unsettling about Marina’s awe of Annick Swenson. But she is not alone. Other scientists are equally in thrall, as is an entire tribe, the Lakashi. Such adoration, however, seems to be transitive since Annick herself previously experienced it for her own former professor, and late paramour, Dr Rapp, the discoverer of the Lakashi tribe and, more importantly, the variety of pharmacological treasures which they steward. It is unsettling because such love may imply a corresponding dislike of the self. And to some extent it feels either implausible or unsavoury this late in the day.

An equally niche form of love might be found in the paternalism that underwrites the non-interventionist ethic of the participant observer anthropologist and the ethnobotanist. Dr Swenson insists on leaving the Lakashi in their natural state, despite having lived with them, on and off, for fifty years. (Her scientists have never bothered to learn the language of the Lakashi.) Yet at the same time she is secretly involved in research on a malarial vaccine which she knows would potentially lead to a population explosion in poorly developed countries were it might significantly reduce the child mortality rate. It’s a difficult dilemma, and Patchett is wise to give us no easy answer.

These are merely two of the aspects of love canvassed here. There is so much more in State of Wonder, that all I can do is urge as many of my friends as possible to read it, if only so that I’ll have someone to talk to about it. It is not a great novel, I think. Its virtue resides in its, and its author’s, ambition. Which I admit to being a bit in awe of. Long may she continue picking up the challenge. Highly recommended.

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The novel essentially begins in a research lab of Vogel, a pharmaceutical company, in Minnesota. A scientist, Dr. Anders Eckman, has been sent to the Amazon to find another scientist, Dr. Annika Swenson, who is considered a loose cannon since she has stopped communicating with the firm that employs

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her and pays for her research. She is supposedly working on a drug which will ensure fertility in women long after their body has started to age, to any age, as a matter of fact, by studying the women of the Lakashi tribe because those women are endlessly fertile and bear children for decades. Upon hearing of the death of Dr. Eckman, The Ceo, Mr. Fox, sends another research scientist to find out the details of his death. As Dr. Marina Singh travels to Manaus, Brazil, and the Amazon, the story evolves.
There were times when I had to suspend disbelief because the plot did not seem credible. The wife of Dr. Eckman, Karen, does not believe her husband is really dead. Marina sets out to find out where he has been buried, to recover his personal effects and to find out how far the research of Dr. Swenson has progressed. It did not ring true that a random scientist would be sent into the Amazon without the proper training and preparation to do a job that professional detectives would be better suited. She is woefully unprepared for the task she has accepted. She seems very naïve and unsophisticated for a highly educated doctor and scientist and I felt that she acclimated to very unusual, frightening situations too easily and without normal trepidation. However, the writing style was so engaging and the characters so well developed that I became invested in their plight and found it hard to put it down.
As an aside, another aspect of the story which gave me pause was the description of Minnesota. It was described a bit too idyllically when the main character "waxes poetic" for her home. Having lived there, I know that it is not a Garden of Eden. It is described by natives as having four seasons, winter, winter, winter and road repair and the state bird is the mosquito! It is a great place to live, but climate is not one of its strong points and in my memory, I don’t think of it as verdant and pastoral, rather I think of the people as being very special.
Now, back to the book, the author creates interest from the beginning and keeps you wanting to keep turning pages to discover how the story will resolve itself. I must admit I had many suspicions about the way the book would turn out but the actual ending was a total surprise. It is a mystery filled with excitement, adventure, danger, fantasy and several ethical dilemmas. The hypocrisy that sometimes exists in the world of science is exposed. The research aspect raises many questions that would create lively discussions.
Although well written, it was not my cup of "science fiction" since I prefer my dose of it to be in the realm of the possible. The many twists and turns of the plot strayed completely from that road, (i.e. a lone woman venturing out into the Amazon to rescue a co-worker from a cannibal tribe in a location she just happens to find), however, the book does raise an important question: Does the means ever justify the ends?

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State of Wonder is another of my final reads from 2011 that I absolutely loved. I think I devoured it in a day or maybe two which is really fast for me considering that I had other books last year that I was reading for weeks.

Marina Singh, a pharmaceutical research scientist, is sent to the Amazon

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to determine if any progress is being made by her former mentor Dr. Annick Swenson. Another purpose for her trip is to determine how exactly her colleague, Anders Eckman, died when he was sent on the same journey to find Dr. Swenson. Dr. Singh finds the research scientists working with Dr. Swenson to be very secretive about their exact findings and must spend more time in the jungle than she had hoped earning their trust.

The language used in State of Wonder is fantastic. The descriptive passages really drew me into the story while the story is kept moving with uncertain action. The characters are interesting with their depth and hidden secrets. The circumstances of life in the jungle force past relationships to surface and forgotten skills to be put once again to the test. The contrast between the comforts of Singh's life in Minnesota and the harsh beauty she finds in Brazil highlight the complacency most of us have in our own lives. Rarely do we travel so far outside of our comfort zone and challenge ourselves in a new environment. Patchett holds a mirror up to each reader as if to say see what you could become if you expanded your reality and moved beyond the routine.

Without giving anything away, I will say there was one aspect of the ending I was not thrilled with but I loved the twist to the story that I honestly didn't see coming. Even with the one tiny aspect that I didn't think fit well, I highly recommend State of Wonder . It was a great book that thoroughly captured my attention.

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State of Wonder, the magical new novel by Ann Patchett, begins with news of a death. Anders Eckman, a big blond Minnesotan, has died in the Amazon. He was sent there by the pharmaceutical company for which he worked to track down a research team led by a single-minded and eccentric doctor who is

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doing ground-breaking research but sending no results to her big pharma backer. The news comes in a businesslike, emotionless letter--written on old-fashioned Aerogram stationary--from the researcher Anders was sent to locate. The recipient of the news is Marina Singh, Anders's office mate and friend.

Marina, fortyish and quiet, is asked by Mr. Fox, her boss, to help break the news to Anders's wife. Then she's asked to travel to the Amazon herself, to finish the work Anders began. She wants to do neither, but does both, because she's that kind of person, helpful and kind, and because she's been having a discreet affair with Mr. Fox, a gentle, if quietly demanding, widower twenty years older than Marina.

She gets her inoculations and begins a course of the anti-malarial drug that she knows from experience will give her screaming nightmares, and sets off for Manaus, Brazil, where Dr. Annick Swensen keeps an apartment. She will be in the city for weeks, spending time with, trying to gain the trust of, the Bovenders, the young Australian couple who act as caretakers--and gatekeepers--for the elusive Dr. Swensen.

Eventually Marina and Dr. Swensen meet in the city, and Marina follows the doctor to the secret research compound she maintains in a remote jungle outpost. Slowly, Marina begins to learn things about the research, and about the reasons for the secrecy. Dr. Swensen has been continuing the research of her mentor, begun many years earlier, on a tribe called the Lakashi, whose women bear children until their sixties and seventies. Swensen is secretive because she's protecting the Lakashi from the hordes of researchers and reporters she knows would flood their quiet existence if word ever got out. Marina is drawn into life in the compound, helping in the research and to hide the location, even participating in the grand experiment.

Ann Patchett has a delicate touch with her characters, an ability to insinuate the reader one layer at time into the intricate depths of their psyches. Several characters by the end of the novel will come to behave in ways that, if one had only read the first few chapters, would appear out of keeping with their introductions. So subtle is Patchett's unfolding of the characters, however, that there is no dissonance at all for the reader who has followed along the whole way.

Patchett's descriptions of the physical environment, from the bitter cold of a Minnesota winter to the smoggy heat of a Latin American city to the deep jewel colors and surreal flora and fauna of the deep Amazon jungle, are just as glorious as her characters. Each detail is rendered with such exquisitely rich precision as to make one long to experience it for oneself.

State of Wonder is a novel which lives up to its name. It is beautiful and funny and sad, with an ending that could not be more perfect. It's a novel that can be savored just as well in delicious solitude or in the company of a book group.

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This book made the top ten fiction list for 2011 in numerous book review publications, and it was well-deserved. The book takes place in Minnesota and the Amazon rain forest. Dr. Marina Singh is sent by her employer, Vogel Pharmaceuticals, to discover the circumstances of her co-worker's death. Dr.

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Anders Eckmann had been sent earlier to check on Vogel's researcher Dr. Annake Swenson, who was out-of-touch and behind schedule. What follows are twists and turns of plot that are as numerous as the the turns of the Amazon itself. Well, maybe not quite that numerous but almost! It's a delightful book that many have compared with Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I would say it's a much happier book than that one, however. It does give the reader a definite feel for how life goes in the rain forest. Patchett is to be commended for a literary accomplishment.

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This is only the second book I’ve read by Patchett (the first being [Bel Canto], which I adored). While I wasn’t quite as taken with this book, it’s clear that Patchett’s a superb storyteller. Here, the first half of the book could have been shortened, the second half is stunning, and end

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is too abrupt and leaves just a few too many loose ends.

Somewhere in Brazil, Dr. Annick Swenson, an irascible, elusive, and brilliant physician, is hidden away in the bush working on a fertility drug which will allow woman to continue to bear children through old age. (Why the world would need this isn’t addressed except as a puzzle to be solved, for the profits to be made, and for the occasional woman who has waited too long to have children). The company footing the bill has sent researcher Anders to track down the doctor and pin down just how the work is going, but after 3 months they receive a curt note from Swenson that Anders has died and been buried in the jungle. Anders’s office-mate, a 40-something scientist with her own past run-ins with Swenson and a current affair with her widowed boss, is asked by said boss to follow Anders’s trail and finish his assignment. Swenson doesn’t want to be found, so this proves difficult, but eventually contact is made. That’s the first half of the book, and it does drag on a bit.

But the second half, in which Marina travels inland with Swenson to the native village she’s living with and testing, is fantastic. Herein lies a plot thick with one of my main interests: how the meeting of mutually inexplicable cultures leads to misunderstandings, disasters, and, sometimes, revelations.

Unfortunately, there are a couple of problems with the end of the story. The events themselves might make more sense if the author had taken the time to explore them as much as she did the main story, but the reader is left to reread the final few pages over and over trying to make sense, and it left a bad taste, given how the characters acted throughout the rest of the book. There is also a tiny bit of action which the careful reader will observe and understand, but its ramifications are not addressed at all, and I couldn’t tell if Patchett was leaving this as a bit of an Easter egg for the reader or just wrapped up the book too quickly to deal with it. (Sorry to be so vague, but it’s an event which would give away much too much to relate.) The reader will beg for a sequel(or even an epilogue), but I rather doubt one is planned.

Well worth the read. Patchett’s dialogue and invention of scenario are simply too wonderful to miss.

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Dr. Marina Singh, research scientist for a pharmaceutical company in Minnesota, is sent to Brazil to investigate the disappearance of her colleague in the Amazon and to assess the progress in the development of a ground breaking new drug.
Set deep in the Amazon jungle, this is quite likely the

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authour's most 'visual' novel to date with echoes of Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

The narrative flows effortlessly with Patchett's lyrical prose, is populated by some very vibrant characters and is set against a lush, exotic and slightly repulsive setting.
While the author is clearly making a statement about corporate drug companies and the transforming power of the rain forest, I still found MEGO (my eyes glazing over) for lack of new or innovative ideas. Indeed, I did not find this novel as intellectually stimulating or provocative as her other earlier books.
Or perhaps I've been reading too much sci-fi/fantasy, which are always full of new concepts and ways of seeing.

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In State of Wonder by Ann Patchett (this is the first of her novels I’ve read) Maria Singh works for a pharmaceutical company in Minnesota and the last place she wants to go is Brazil, in particular the tributary of the Amazon where her good friend and colleague Anders Eckman has just met his

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death. But Maria is under a double obligation – to Anders’ wife and three sons, to whom she has to relay the scant news of what happened to him, and to her boss who is responsible for sending Anders to the research outpost in the jungle to investigate why work there has stalled.

It’s already an intriguing premise, and by the time Marina is on her way a few
more layers of interest have been added. Her boss Jim Fox is also her
clandestine lover, and the woman she is to locate and interrogate is her former teacher and mentor Dr. Swenson, a woman both admired and feared by all her students and under whose tutelage Marina made a horrific medical blunder from
which her professional self-esteem has never recovered.

I loved this book so much it’s hard to dissect it and work out what makes it so good, except that I instantly felt ‘in the skin’ of the main character, who presents a calm and purposeful exterior to colleagues but reveals to the reader the sources of her frequent nightmares. These nightmares are heightened by taking an
anti-malarial drug that forces her to choose between the physical protection it
offers and her sanity. I particularly liked the episode on her flight to Manaus
where memories jostle with waking nightmares and the mundane irritations of air travel, revealing the mish-mash of fear and confusion in which she is trapped.

In Manaus she immediately falls victim to a fever which nearly kills her, but with her lover urging her on (from the safety of his office in Minnesota) she continues her journey to her personal heart of darkness. The fact that her luggage
is repeatedly lost or stolen means that she has to face her demons without even a toothbrush to connect her to civilisation.

The descriptions of the jungle and its discomforts are as vivid as anything in Poisonwood Bible, but seen entirely through the eyes of a woman who is terrified of being where she is and increasingly angry with those who have put her there.

Marina’s journey does eventually take her beyond fear and beyond anger to self-discovery and self-belief. But it’s her initial vulnerability and the author’s ability to put us insideMarina’s head that got this reader hooked.

For all I know the science in the book may be as far-fetched as one reviewer argues, but for me there wasn’t the slightest shadow of disbelief, and I was only sorry that a great read came to an end in a tidy 300 or so pages, when for me the story had a real epic quality.

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This story is a little far-fetched and goofy, but I liked thinking about how on earth researchers figure out what they do, and imagining the rain forest, and whether Meryl Streep could play the Dr well, and all that. Suspend your disbelief and enjoy it.

Ann Patchett marries commercial and literary fiction in my dream novel

A researcher enters the Amazon in search of a missing explorer and on the hunt for a miracle drug. As a life-long fan of science and adventure thrillers, I’ve read that novel any number of times. And I liked it each and every

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time. It’s a story that never grows old, as far as I’m concerned. However, even in my most far-fetched literary mash-up daydreams, I never thought I’d see novelist Ann Patchett entering that verdant territory!

What Patchett has created is essentially my dream novel, marrying the best of my beloved thrillers with a gorgeous and substantive literary work. In some ways, the novel feels like half of one thing and half the other due to the way the story is structured. It’s told through the eyes of Marina Singh, a pharmaceutical researcher headquartered in Minnesota. When it is learned that her lab partner, Anders Eckman, unexpectedly died on a trip to the Brazilian jungle, both his widow and her boss (and lover) entreat Marina to follow his path into the jungle. The widow wants answers, and the boss wants the job Anders started to be finished. And that job is to find out what is going on out in the field with researcher Annick Swenson, the renowned but difficult doctor who was once Marina’s mentor.

In the first half of the novel, the action is stalled. There’s a lot of waiting for events to transpire. This allows plenty of time for Patchett to set the premise, exposit the background, and richly develop her characters—for as much as plot drives the novel, the characters’ relationships are always at the heart of the story. Around the time that both Marina and the reader have had about as much waiting as they’re going to take, the second half of the novel springs into action. And I do mean action! It’s exotic jungle adventure at its pulpiest best! As beautifully-written as it is, this part of the story is truly plot-driven. Patchett took me delightfully by surprise more than once, yet even when she caught me off guard, I could look back and see her carefully laid foundation. It’s really masterfully constructed.

A lot happens towards the end of the novel. Some may find the conclusion too neat, but for me it was perfect. Now if only John Irving would write a techno-thriller, my life would be complete!

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(fiction) Ann Patchett is a highly acclaimed author, and this book has received some glowing reviews, so I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. The Amazon setting could only be a plus for me.

A woman's boss, who is also her uncommitted lover, sends her alone to the Amazon to find out how a co-worker

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sent there months earlier died. That co-worker had been sent to check on another co-worker, a researcher who had been in the Amazon for years without reporting back to her boss. All of these people work for a drug company researching a possible new drug. Fertility not just for post menopausal women, but for women into their 70s – just what this world needs.

Too much of the story was implausible to me, starting with a company that would continue to pay all bills for a researcher who refuses to report to the company, not even tell the company where she is. Ending with...well, I can't tell you what, but not very believable. Too many coincidences.

Is this supposed to be a novel about ethics? On page 2, describing a lab, “others had walls of mice or monkeys or dogs” for testing and research. This doesn't bode well. Most of the characters in this group had an astounding lack of ethics, rarely if ever questioned. Perhaps that would have been workable if I had liked any of the characters. There were a couple of people that induced some level of fondness in me, but for the most part, I really didn't care what happened to any of them. For me, that is a sign of failure in a novel. I may dislike, hate, love, or admire the characters, but I have to care about them at some level. With these people, for the most part, my thoughts were, “okay, you are going to do something stupid once again. Who cares?”

The ending...let's just say I hated it.

I did like some of the descriptions of life in the jungle, and the writing itself was as good as it can get while still not drawing me into the story, thus three stars. I know that many others will love this novel but I was disappointed.

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I didn't love it. The book is well researched, at least on the pharmaceutical side, and it appears to be on other levels too.However, there is something missing. There is just too much distance between the reader and the characters, and while some of them are well characterized (the Bovenders, Dr

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Swenson, Marina, even Milton), there are some characters or relationships that are quite important and feel too flat (What does Marina see in Mr Fox? Does she really love him? Is Marina so detached from her living and friends family that she almost doesn't think about them in all the trip? Was she that close to Anders? It doesn't feel like it to me).

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I immediately liked this book when I read the first page. I found it hard to put down. I liked all the characters, the settings and the plot, which may be implausible but it's easy to go along with the premise. But as others mention, there is a sudden startling twist at the end, and it seems too

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sudden, and a little manipulated, as if the author suddenly changed her mind about the story, and then wrote a quick finale that doesn't exactly fit previous circumstances. I found myself saying, but why this, and why that, wouldn't it have made more sense to...and suddenly I didn't like it as much.

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Another book club read, this one started off absolutely cracking. For the first half of the book I was positively giddy with excitement each time I came back to it, entranced by the mixture of very good writing, adventure, mystery, emotion, hints of connections to Greek myth, Conrad's Heart of

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Darkness, any number of Werner Herzog's filmic explorations of obsession based in the Amazon jungle and doubtless other literary allusions that passed me by. I couldn't wait to turn the next page!

Then, at pretty much bang on the halfway mark, just as the main character Miranda et al set off down the Rio Negro, it started to lose me.

It's difficult to pin down exactly what went wrong. Perhaps it was because Miranda, around whom the action revolves, was never really strongly drawn--I didn't have a sense of knowing what she was about, what opinions she held, what she aspired to in life, what she believed in. Aside from a few insights into traumatic events in her past, my image of her was hazy. That hadn't bothered me up to that point, maybe because I had assumed more would be revealed as the story progressed; that I would gradually get to know her. Instead, my image of her somehow became less focussed from the point at which she entered the jungle and I was left at the end with nothing much more than an indistinct blur of a character upon which to hang the drama.

Based on the first half, I will certainly seek out more by Ann Pratchett. What a pity this one didn't quite last the distance.

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Ann Patchett, readers in tow, ventures into the Amazon jungle in her latest offering, `State of Wonder.'

Briefly, it's the story of Dr. Marina Singh, who is dispatched into the jungle to find out what happened to Anders Eckman, her former officemate. He died while checking on the status of a drug

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research station for their pharmaceutical giant employer, and his grieving widow begs Marina to find out the details of his death. Venturing into the Amazon is literally venturing into her own past as Marina must seek out her former teacher, Annick Swenson, who heads the research team and was in part responsible for an unfortunate incident in Marina's past.

Patchett's novels are multilayered, and `State of Wonder' is no exception. It is, if anything, too loaded with nuance and portent. As Marina descends into her own heart of darkness, facing her own past and the costly error of her residency, she must also grapple with the complex ethical issues of drug research, love, and responsibility.

`State of Wonder' is a thought-provoking absorbing novel, but its complex theme resulted, for this reader at least, in a diminution of emotional intensity. Nevertheless, Patchett continues to amaze and delight.

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A book to rival "Bel Canto." "State of Wonder" takes you on a journey through the Amazon where the definitions of everything we think we know are blurred, and the things about which you think you are certain can be upended in a moment. Patchett creates a world where women can have babies well into

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their 80s and 90s, where a tribe of cannibals are the only ones with the strength to do the right thing, and where even the dead return to life.

Reading this book made me think a lot about the idea of devotion. What things in our own lives are worthy of complete devotion? For what things might we truly sacrifice ourselves and the things that we hold most dear? Very few people live their *everyday* lives in devotion to the things for which they would give their *entire* lives. I know it isn't practical, but I did wonder what the world would be like if everybody lived and worked with the single-minded certainty and devotion we see in "State of Wonder's" Dr. Swenson.

On a more literary note, there is an obvious comparison to be made between "State of Wonder" and Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," but while it seems clear that "Heart of Darkness" may have been a strong influence on Patchett, the books are, at their core, about very different themes, and I think the two would be very complimentary if read side by side.

Another story with obvious influences in "State of Wonder"--and which is mentioned more than once in the book itself--is the Greek myth of Orpheus bringing Eurydice back from the realm of the dead. While Patchett's story has what seems like a happier ending, there is much less certainty for Marina than there is for Orpheus, and Marina's sacrifices are at least as great as those made by Orpheus.

This was a magical book which had me hooked from the first. I look forward to reading it again in the future.

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This book had an interesting an exotic premise: A pharma doctor goes to the Amazon and mysteriously dies while studying the work on a new fertility drug so his partner follows his footsteps to finish the job and hopefully, discover the truth behind his death. Patchett includes well-drawn characters

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along with an engrossing description of South American life in this language-rich novel.

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Summary: Scientists discover a drug in the Amazon, which appears to extend female fertility into old age. The research is lead by the mysterious and eccentric Dr. Swenson. When an employee of the drug company dies on a trip to the jungle research center in Brazil, the pharmacologist Marina is sent

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down there to to find out what happened - and to find out how Dr. Swensons research is going.

It was a slow start, but once Dr. Swenson appears and we are in the jungle the book is hard to put down (or rather stop listening too). All in all an exiting and brainy adventure with some surprising twists and turns that kept me fascinated - actually I was reluctant to leave Marina and wanted to know more about her fate - Both Marina and Dr. Swenson was complexed, nuanced and well-drawned characters.

Good narration by Hope Davis.

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Such an unusual wonderfully written story, I loved it! There were so many amazing scientific/medical ideas. It kept me gripped all the way through with wonderful descriptions and interesting people. I really recommend it and am looking for more books by Patchett.

I listen to a lot of audiobooks. Most of the time I think that's a good thing; I feel, as long as you are giving the book your full attention and aren't merging on the interstate, you can really appreciate an author's work, especially when it comes to crafting sentences. You can also (whether

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fortunately or not) hear the flaws more acutely, especially when it comes to pacing, dialogue, and the author's over-reliance on pet vocabulary. "State of Wonder" turned out to be slightly disappointing to me, and I can't help wondering if I would have been better off reading the book. Or maybe it was better to hear the clank-clank-clank of elements that just weren't working. (Having a narrator who was mediocre but wasn't bad enough to shut off didn't help matters, I admit.)

I try not to scan any reviews or interviews of books that I have already decided to read, and as I had been looking forward to "State of Wonder" for months, I didn't know anything much about it. I didn't know, for example, that Patchett had auctioned off character names for charity. You could certainly hear the artificial quality, though, of the Bovenders being mentioned by their first and last names every single time they were on the stage. ".....and then the BOvenders said..." or "Barbara BOvender stood at the door..." BOvender, BOvender, BOvender. Everytime the narrator mentioned their names, it was like she was hitting a nail on the head. (The Saturns, too.) Ugh. Other name choices bothered me, as well. It was always "Mr. Fox." Yeah, it was an unequal relationship, but she WAS sleeping with him, for God's sake. Had I unwittingly strayed into a Henry James novel? AND the Lakashi themselves. I didn't know, either, that Patchett had, indeed, named the tribe after her favorite cereal (a bit of cutsie-pieness that I find objectionable) but I think I did pick up on it subconsciously, and I just couldn't take them seriously as a faithfully constructed Amazonian tribe. At least I didn't confuse them with "Snap, Crackle, and Pop", so that's something I guess.

The entire pacing of the first part of the book dragged for me; I seemed to have listened to entire CDs where nothing much happened except Marina trudging slowly through Manaus while she waited for Dr. Swenson, the researcher gone-off-the grid, to show up. Being blocked by the BOvenders at every turn, of course. Things got better when maniacal Dr Swenson finally strolled out of the jungle (I do have to say I thought the set piece at the opera was brilliant) and Marina got to the Amazon. At last.

I had other problems with the book that had nothing to do with the audio book format. Marina did more than a few things that made her seem like a bit of an idiot. The phone going astray, for example.I sympathize with Ann Patchett's dilemma. In the modern world, where family members can pick up the phone or e-mail and moan about car problems to deployed spouses in Afghanistan, it's hard to really isolate your characters sufficiently when the plot requires it. The satellite phone loss should have been handle better--it should have been broken or stolen, not packed away in checked baggage. I never really regained my respect for her, it was such a tyro's mistake. Marina also had another huge lapse of judgement at the end of the book, one that I didn't find completely believable. Some people might. It's a toss-up, for me.

Of course, the entire premise of the book--naive behind-the-desker is sent off by her company to find her lost colleague in the Amazon--is also improbable, as is the biological/ecological basis of the lost world that she encounters. I was willing to overlook these sticking points in the spirit of adventure; other readers may not be so forgiving.

There were sections of the book I really enjoyed. Marina's introduction to the jungle--her stumbling disorientation-was great. The bug-slapping, skin swelling stickiness of it all made me feel as if I were there, in the Amazon, where I never want to go. And I enjoyed the supremely self-confident and arrogant-to-the-point of obliviousness Dr Swenson, even if she was a bit of a cliche. In the end, though, the book turned on a literal bend-in-the river coincidence that I just didn't buy. The entire book came crashing down, which was a pity.

I was sorry I couldn't like this book more. I wanted to. I YEARN for big sweeping novels, with active heroines doing amazing things, and stories that grapple with big ideas. But at the end, Patchett seemed to drop all those grand themes, the ones that she always seemed a bit tentative about all along, in favor of a cheap Hollywood ending. It made me rather sad. Really.

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