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The Gold Bug Variations
The Gold Bug Variations | Richard Powers
1 post | 4 read | 5 to read
National Bestseller National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and the forthcoming Bewilderment, a magnificent double love story of two young couples separated by a distance of twenty-five years. “The most lavishly ambitious American novel since Gravity’s Rainbow . . . An outright marvel.” —Washington Post Stuart Ressler, a brilliant young molecular biologist, sets out in 1957 to crack the genetic code. His efforts are sidetracked by other, more intractable codes—social, moral, musical, spiritual—and he falls in love with a member of his research team. Years later, another young man and woman team up to investigate a different scientific mystery: Why did the eminently promising Ressler suddenly disappear from the world of science? Strand by strand, these two love stories twist about each other in a double helix of desire. The critically acclaimed third novel from Pulitzer Prize–winning author Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations is an intellectual tour-de-force that probes the meaning of love, science, music, and art.
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quietlycuriouskate
The Gold Bug Variations | Richard Powers
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My third Richard Powers, and the earliest and longest (675 pages) of his that I've read, this one had the least favourable effort to reward ratio. The plentiful, and lengthy, discussions of molecular genetics largely went over my head. (I didn't fare a whole lot better with the Bach.) The fact of someone's thinking to make this a major theme of their novel is strangely pleasing to me, but in practice reading it was hard work. Still a pick, though.