Word: novelness
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...Beatrice and Virgil” were a piece of music, it would be an extended fugue, beginning so quietly as to be almost inaudible, and culminating in a moment of overwhelming noise followed by silence. With each new piece of his story, Yann Martel examines the form of the novel and how it functions as a means of communication. The Holocaust is his vehicle for this exploration, as he tries many different styles of writing in his attempt to find a voice to protest this act of genocide. The novel contains fragmentary portions of a play, as well as another...
...when word went out that Ian McEwan's new novel, Solar, would be about global warming, climate researchers might have hoped they'd found their champion. With his portrait of a relentlessly rational science writer in Enduring Love and his detailed descriptions of neurosurgery in Saturday, McEwan is the rare novelist who understands the scientific world - and the mind-set of the scientist. If anyone could make a best seller out of the sticky stuff of climate science and a hero out of one of its practitioners, it would be McEwan. (See the top 10 fiction books...
...dismissal of global warming changes when his unhappy home - his current wife is cheating on him in response to his half-dozen extramarital affairs - and his stalled work collide on the full-length polar-bear rug in his living room. (Updating Chekhov: If the author of a climate-change novel shows you a polar-bear rug in the first act, you can be sure it will bare its teeth in the next one.) Quite suddenly, Beard discovers what he believes is the solution to the problem of climate change: artificial photosynthesis, harnessing sunlight to split water and yield hydrogen...
...Artificial photosynthesis is a real idea, although it's further from deployment than the novel suggests. McEwan's background research is so seamlessly displayed that scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - busy working on the same topic - might wonder if he's nicked their notes. But where Solar really succeeds - beyond the dark comedy, too long missing in McEwan's gentler recent work - is the author's ability to reveal the nature of the climate conundrum in the very human life of his protagonist. Beard is a Nobel Prize - winning mess, an obese man who can't stop eating...
...Child in Time This 1987 novel features mind-bending discussions of quantum physics and the nature of time, circling around the tragic disappearance of a 3-year-old girl