Rating: 
Summary: A masterpiece of a contemporary novel.
Review: "Plowing the Dark" is a beacon - a magnum opus with a deep thought-provoking meassage. The prose is beyond poetry. It is pure music, music of the spheres, rising lowering. Some passages are like standing on a mountain-top inhaling a beauty never before envisioned. Rhythms and cadences speak to the soul, create a symphony. Power's irresistible voice dance across the page pulling the reader back for another swirl. The structure of this novel is brilliant in the use of parallelism, a parallel progression changing pitch levels, from major to minor, ascending, descending, combining consonants and dissonnants in various degrees with the smoothest of voice leading, closing in a cadence of relief. Powers present colors and scenes in sparkling images, takes the reader for a spin around the universe, causing temporary vertigo. He jolts you into Fantacy Land and you hang on for your life, riding the rollercoaster, clinging to the merry-go-round. His humor pops up when least expected and makes you laugh out loud, releaving your tension.
Rating:
Summary: A cracking good tale in crackling prose
Review: "This room is never anything o'clock." That's the first line of this marvelous tale about two rooms a world apart--a virtual reality lab in Seattle and the room in Beirut where a man is held in solitary confinement by fundamentalist terrorists. What ties those two rooms together is the power of imagination both to destroy and to save. Powers manages to create a forward-rushing tale using such poetic language that one has to force oneself to slow down and savor his slightly quirky but always evocative prose. Two passages picked literally at random (I closed my eyes and pointed my finger) from page 11: "They drove out to his lair in the silence of small talk." "She did well around black. She understood it: one of the big two, not a true color, yet fraternizing with the deepest maroons, hoping to smuggle itself back over hue's closely guarded border." Powers is one of that group of young American writers who are so imaginative, so stylish, so knowing that their prose snaps like a flag in a gale. Yet he's not a smart aleck like some of the others. You care about his characters. You care "how it turns out." His previous novel, "Gain", seemed a bit flaccid to me. In "Plowing the Dark" he's back in top form.
Rating:
Summary: the most thought-provoking novel I've read in years
Review: A friend gave me this book to read because I once worked in Beirut. I had never read any of Richard Powers's work before, and didn't know what to expect. I ended up reading the book in almost one full sitting and have not been able to stop thinking about it since. Powers is amazing. I've never read anything that so successfully combines lyricism with significicant intellectual content. I loved this book!
Rating:
Summary: The most gifted contemporary fiction writer
Review: After completing Plowing the Dark, I marvel at Richard Powers' range of knowledge & use of language. As he does so successfully in his previous six novels, Powers challenges the reader with dense, powerful prose that requires some serious effort. However, as in Plowing the Dark, the effort is richly rewarded by a writer who uses dazzling language to draw the reader into two seemingly unrelated stories. I will not soon forget the richly drawn experiences of the major characters & the power of the human imagination.
Rating:
Summary: a stunner
Review: An extraordinary novel full of the clash of light and dark. Two people in two separate and very different rooms: one is a solitary hostage in Lebanon, who fills his room with memories and the wanderings of his mind: the other is in Seattle designing a virtual reality room, filled with colour, making 'real' the creations of her imagination. Though their experiences couldn't be more different they share a great deal, not least their discovery of the way war and the needs of the militant can intrude on so-called ordinary life. I found myself thinking about this book long after I put it down - wonderful stuff.
Rating: 
Summary: Plowing the Dark
Review: An hour after I have finished reading Plowing the Dark, my feelings are still mixed. On one hand, Powers' prose was simply wonderful with detailed, intricate sentences spilling from every page. The two alternate sections were cut to and from in such a way that I never felt like I was reading the 'wrong' part of the storyline, and I was always anxious to return to the other thread. On the other hand, the storyline pretty much didn't exist, it was more of a two year chunk of life, which is fine normally, but when the ending - as such there was - seemed as tacked on as it did, I was a little disappointed. But first the two plots. One deals with a virtual reality room being created, the 'Cavern', and we watch as the main character, Adie, learns about it and comes to terms with it. The premise for it is very interesting, but it never really went anywhere: They simply sat around making the Cavern better for two years. While the interaction between people was certainly interesting, and the little comments on society that Powers allowed himself were insightful, I was left wondering what the point of it all was. The second seems completely unrelated, and for the most part it is. A teacher, Tai, has moved to the Middle East to teach willing students conversational English, and soon after he arrives, he is kidnapped and held as a political hostage. Each of these scenes - and there were many - involving his capture and incarceration were written from a 'you look over there, you do this' type perspective, which really worked. Because it is natural for a reader to expect that he will be freed by the end of the book, his section certainly had a clear beginning, middle and end that I could hold on to while the other thread of the story meandered. But then, at the end, the two storylines come together in a way that to me, seems completely impossible and contrived. The end existed merely to bring an end to the book and to connect two completely disparate lives. Which is a shame, because by the end of the book I was fully immersed into both Adie and Tai's lives, what they had been and what they wanted to become. In a way, I felt cheated by the tenuous link forged between them, but to be honest I had no idea how the author could possibly put the two ideas together. They are not even remotely similar: an artist working on the age's greatest technological achievement and a captured Muslim-American. I certainly couldn't link the two together, and clearly neither could the author. But the writing was good, very good in some parts, and the philosophy behind the Cavern was interesting. I'd recommend it for a reader who wants to enjoy what is happening, but not to expect anything meaningful in terms of story.
Rating: 
Summary: Clever idea that falls far short.
Review: An outline of this book would be riveting. It's basic framework is smart and has a great deal of potential, but then the writing undoes it all. Powers spends too much time proving how very clever and erudite he is, dropping names and obscure references at every opportunity, and winds up neglecting the compelling part of the story. It was painful in places, particularly wading through the heavy-handed techno-geek dialogue that tropes being hip, but winds up sounding affected and self-indulgent. The secondary plot, as others have mentioned, is far more compelling than the primary plot. Scores of pages are spent fetishizing technology and 'The Cavern'. It's really cool, Richard. We get it. If Powers spent more time on his character development and less time trying to impress us with his unabridged thesaurus, this would be a far more enjoyable read.
Rating:
Summary: Clever idea that falls far short.
Review: An outline of this book would be riveting. It's basic framework is smart and has a great deal of potential, but then the writing undoes it all. Powers spends too much time proving how very clever and erudite he is, dropping names and obscure references at every opportunity, and winds up neglecting the compelling part of the story. It was painful in places, particularly wading through the heavy-handed techno-geek dialogue that tropes being hip, but winds up sounding affected and self-indulgent. The secondary plot, as others have mentioned, is far more compelling than the primary plot. Scores of pages are spent fetishizing technology and 'The Cavern'. It's really cool, Richard. We get it. If Powers spent more time on his character development and less time trying to impress us with his unabridged thesaurus, this would be a far more enjoyable read.
Rating:
Summary: Hostage: the Game?
Review: Considering its subject matter, there is something grimly appropriate in the book's tortured and tangled figures of speech, and its often maddening techno-jargon. But these things do get in the way. And I fear the jargon, however "fresh" at present, will be dated in five years and incomprehensible in ten. Which is unfortunate: the book has much to say which should continue to be heard clearly, not just ten but a hundred years from now. Powers is a strong and courageous writer who reaches into realms most writers don't even suspect are there. The hostage episodes (written in the second person) are almost obscenely harrowing, as they should be. And the book as a whole does a powerful if sometimes bewildering job of raising essential questions: about beauty and terror and the perverse links between them, about the simulated and non-simulated "realities" we make for ourselves. Plowing The Dark is very much worth reading. (Somehow I have skipped the author's novels between Three Farmers and this one; after a bit of R & R now, I intend to go back eagerly to check them out.)
Rating: 
Summary: An Extraordinary Novel
Review: Considering its subject matter, there is something grimly appropriate in the book's tortured and tangled figures of speech, and its often maddening techno-jargon. But these things do get in the way. And I fear the jargon, however "fresh" at present, will be dated in five years and incomprehensible in ten. Which is unfortunate: the book has much to say which should continue to be heard clearly, not just ten but a hundred years from now. Powers is a strong and courageous writer who reaches into realms most writers don't even suspect are there. The hostage episodes (written in the second person) are almost obscenely harrowing, as they should be. And the book as a whole does a powerful if sometimes bewildering job of raising essential questions: about beauty and terror and the perverse links between them, about the simulated and non-simulated "realities" we make for ourselves. Plowing The Dark is very much worth reading. (Somehow I have skipped the author's novels between Three Farmers and this one; after a bit of R & R now, I intend to go back eagerly to check them out.)
|
