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The Echo Maker [Paperback]

Richard Powers
3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
RRP: �8.99
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Book Description

7 Feb 2008

On a winter night on a remote road in Nebraska, Mark Schluter's truck turns over in a near fatal accident. His sister, Karin, returns reluctantly to their home town to look after him. But when he finally awakes from his coma, Mark believes that Karin - who looks, acts and sounds just like his sister - is really an identical imposter.

Shattered by her brother's refusal to recognise her, Karin contacts Dr Gerald Weber, famous for his case studies describing the infinitely bizarre worlds of brain disorder. But what Weber discovers in Mark begins to undermine even his own sense of self.

Meanwhile Mark, armed only with a note left by an anonymous witness, attempts to learn what happened on the night of his accident. The truth of that evening will change the lives of all three beyond recognition.

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.


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Product details

  • Paperback: 576 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage (7 Feb 2008)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0099506025
  • ISBN-13: 978-0099506027
  • Product Dimensions: 13.2 x 19.9 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 250,149 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Review

"Among his most stunning yet: profound and heartbreaking" (Financial Times)

"A psychological thriller, a flawed love story, a study of authenticity in emotions, a commentary on America's relations with itself and the world, humanity and ecollogy... undoubtedly magnificent" (The Times)

"There's no other way to say it: Richard Powers is a genius" (Time Out)

"An exhilarating narrative feat... He is a formiddable talent, and this is a lucid, fiercely entertaining novel" (Sebastian Faulks Washington Post)

"Richard Powers is the most intellectually stimulating novelist at work in the English language today...[He writes] luminous prose. Sentence after sentence has the razor-sharp quality of aphorism about the weird wired world we have made" (Sunday Times)

Book Description

Winner of the US National Book Award, this is a stunning novel by Richard Powers, author of The Time of Our Singing.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars powerful stuff 7 Sep 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I always ending buying copies of this book (mostly second hand I confess) because I give so many copies away, or people borrow a copy and it never comes back and i feel I'm taking something important away from them if I ask for it back.

This book more than most others you can read again and again because it has a poetry and a depth you cannot find in other novels and because you change over time so does this book.

The story? A sister looks after her brother after he has a terrible accident: 'he stops recognising his sister, because some part of him has stopped recognising himself.'
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars excellent, intelligent read 3 Jan 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
A good story with a twist in the tale, along with a good portrayal of the tragedy of brain injury and the effects on the family.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars The echoes of a good narrative? 10 April 2007
By deusbat
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
As a true fan of psychological reading I must have been among the first ones to have ordered the hardcopy from Amazon only to find myself surprisingly disappointed even after having read only the first few chapters. I struggled till the very end not giving up, but there was hardly anything to prove my first impressions wrong. A few thought-provoking but too well known neurological facts scattered across an obscure and dull narrative, some speculations over a handful of other popular ideas e.g. ecological crisis, overpopulation, pressures of modern life etc. (well-done, but not too persuasive), a couple of in-built lectures to throw in the face of the reader more "gripping" facts (is it some mocking of Dan Brown?). No matter how hard I tried I could not feel the author's sincerity or his genuine interest in the ideas he is writing about. It is a decent piece of writing, well thought-through, well structured, and full of "correct" ideas, but just has no sense of direction, no soul. Probably that was the whole idea though - to convey the pointlessness of modern-day life and tell us once again that we are going nowhere? Please, not again. If you want to try, go ahead, but go for a cheap paperback and don't forget to recycle it.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Too long for the brief story 6 Dec 2007
Format:Paperback
If you spent a week reading "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" while watching the Hallmark Channel, you might end up writing this novel. Mark Shluter has crashed his truck and his sister, Karin, quits her job and dumps her boyfriend to take care of him. But Mark suffered a brain injury in the accident and insists that his sister is not his sister but someone pretending to be his sister. A famous neurologist, Gerald Weber, arrives to see Mark so he can write about him in his next book. And some cranes fly through town on their way to Alaska.

The main problem with the story is that Powers does nothing with the story. His characters are uninteresting to start with and are completely unbelievable. They don't react to situations, they overreact. Everything that happens is the most important thing that has ever happened and every character reacts that way. And Powers doesn't tell a story, too often he tells us about a story. For example, when Weber goes on a television show, we only find out that he embarrasses himself during the interview but not what he said that was so terrible that it destroyed sales of his book. Weber, a crucial character in the story, is the weakest written character in the book. It is virtually impossible to justify or understand his actions. And if two people have sex in the mud, don't you think they might want to shower or at least change their clothes before going off to lunch and then on to some tourist attraction?

There are some good parts of the book. The mystery of the letter left at the hospital is interesting and is wrapped up quite nicely. In a clever and effective technique, Powers writes alternating sections from the point of view of the various characters.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
By Susie
Format:Hardcover
An interesting storyline is terribly overwritten by Richard Powers. The prose is dense and pretentious, with seemingly innocuous exchanges between characters sitting oddly next to deeply melodramatic soul-searching. The neurology is fairly sound (I was given the book because I'm a neuropsychologist) and I, like one of the other reviewers, stuck with the story in order to see what happened. Powers' desperately erudite style, though, and his efforts to weave philosophy of consciousness into almost every sentence, make for a very unsatisfying read. Although grammatically correct, his glaring use of the possessive pronoun with gerunds "It wouldn't have made any difference, *our* coming forwards", in all characters from the well-spoken neurologist to the beer-drinking, truck-racing lads, makes the speech stilted and unrealistic. Overall, a very disappointing book.
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12 of 16 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
In The Echo Maker the riddle of human identity and the unmistakable power of the human mind is explored through Capgras' syndrome, a rare disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that a close family member or spouse has been replaced by an identical looking impostor.

Thirty-something Nabraska native Karin Schluter is devastated to discover that her twenty-seven year old brother Mark no longer recognizes her as his sister after he crashes truck on an isolated road, "like he fell of a wooden horse." Critically injuried, Mark lies in hospital, lapsing in and out of consciousness, whilst Karin having left her job in Sioux City to care for him, hovers over his bedside, frantically hoping he'll recover.

This is a time of great sadness and uncertainty for Karin, plunged into untried topography in a situation she is incapable confronting. Intent to survive on her savings and her mother's life insurance policy, Karin holds vigil as Mark gradually begins to respond to treatment, but as the days go by, it quickly becomes evident that something is terribly wrong.

Mark sees Karin as an imposter, perhaps even someone who has been hired and whose intentions are to underhandedly masquerade as his sister. When she is told by the doctors that Mark was manifesting a condition called Capgras syndrome, it is almost impossible to fathom and comes as a terrible shock to both Karin and Daniel, her environmentalist ex-boyfriend who works at crane sanctuary near the Platte River.

Days later, Mark is still denying her. He assembles everything else: whom he was where he works, what had happened to him. But he continues to insist that Karin is an actress who looks very much like his sister.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars an intriguing miss -- 3.5 stars
"The Echo Maker" is the only novel by Richard Powers that I have read so far. It's obviously the product of a curious and interesting mind, and Powers can write effectively and... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Stanley Crowe
3.0 out of 5 stars Serious psychology in a novel
American author Richard Powers explores the ideas of mind, soul and self in this prize-winning novel. Read more
Published on 21 Oct 2008 by J. Cronin
5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding
Ignore all the negative comments here and read the (proper) reviews on the book itself. It's a book about people and their relationships, about emotions, identity and memory and... Read more
Published on 31 Aug 2008 by pencil
2.0 out of 5 stars Too Long & Too Much Jargon, and Where did the Plot Go?
I enjoyed the start of this book - and then it just seemed to drift, and go nowhere fast. There was two much technical information that did nothing for the plot. Read more
Published on 19 Aug 2008 by K. Ibbotson
3.0 out of 5 stars A Patchy Novel of the Mind
This book is like an extremely slow roller-coaster, there are highs, lows and the odd sharp turn, but ultimately moments of exhilaration are few and far between, and it's all a bit... Read more
Published on 23 July 2008 by Quicksilver
1.0 out of 5 stars Extremely unimpressed
I found this book very very slow in pace and hugely frustrating. I've never read a book until now that I've actually wanted to rip in half!! Read more
Published on 7 Jun 2008 by K. Whiteman
3.0 out of 5 stars Nonfiction Book About Brain Injuries and Consciousness Wrapped into a...
It's hard for me to know who would like this book. It contains a great deal of information about how the brain works, consciousness is created, and the quirks of various mental... Read more
Published on 14 May 2008 by Donald Mitchell
3.0 out of 5 stars Nonfiction Book About Brain Injuries and Consciousness Wrapped into a...
It's hard for me to know who would like this book. It contains a great deal of information about how the brain works, consciousness is created, and the quirks of various mental... Read more
Published on 14 May 2008 by Donald Mitchell
5.0 out of 5 stars An Echo of Greatness
The Echo Maker is Richard Powers nineth novel, and its greatness can be measured by the fact that it was a Pulitzer prize finalist and went on to win the National Book Award, 2006. Read more
Published on 9 May 2008 by Herman Norford
4.0 out of 5 stars An ambitious and thought-provoking novel
This is a big novel in every respect - over 550 pages long; tackling big themes like human identity and the fate of the environment; and bringing in the latest thinking from the... Read more
Published on 21 Feb 2008 by J. H. Bretts
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