Book: State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

A wonderful, fantastical novel. Like where would YOU rather live: deep in Amazon basin or in Minnesota? What a sophisticated imagination Ann Patchett must have. My sister, Faith, who lives in the Washington, DC, beltway heard Ann Patchett speak at Politics and Prose, a lively thriving bookstore near her home. She mentioned how she enjoyed listening to the author so I reserved her latest book at our local library here in Kalispell, Montana. It took several weeks to arrive but finally it was here. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Marina and Anders work for a pharmaceutical company in Minnesota, in Eden Prairie, Minnesota to be exact. They have worked together for seven years and are friends, nothing more, but Marina is very fond of Anders. As the book begins, word has been received from South America that Anders, who went to the Amazon to check on an eccentric scientist/researcher, Dr. Anna Swenson, and to try to figure out how her research on a fertility drug was progressing, is dead...that he died of a fever.

The company's CEO sends Marina to found out what happened and Marina agrees to go, in part because of Anders' grieving wife and his three small sons, all quintessential midwesterners, although Marina soon discovers how unfair and simplistic this assessment is. It was interesting to me how the author portrayed a prototypical Minnesotan family with finesse and without apology. Anders loved his wife and children fiercely, which Marina comes to realize, and she starts to understand the richness and complexity of their seemingly ordered lives, how blessed they are and how unfair it is that Anders has died. There are many questions and the need for some resolution to his abrupt death. The understandable coolness that had always existed between Anders' wife and Marina, the woman he has closely worked with for seven years, dissolves as their respect for each other deepens.

So Marina goes to the jungle. She finally connects with the reclusive scientist and is taken upriver to the village of the Lakashi where Dr. Swenson is doing her work, along with a handful of other researchers. This, being a good novel, offers surprises and adventure and understated larger questions of what happens at the crossroads of very different cultures and cutting edge science with huge implications for both cultures but in very different ways. There are parts that are almost science fiction; there is a fearsome anaconda, an endearing deaf child, native tribes with poisonous arrows, a million biting insects, incredible thunderstorms, the rivers, a possible malaria cure, hallucinogenic mushrooms, a species of trees and butterflies existing in symbiotic relationships with amazing pharmaceutical potentials, all part of the story about the quest for a fertility drug and the dedicated scientists working in this remote jungle.

I kept wondering how Ann Patchett conceived the plot. Did she go to the Amazon? Did she read something one day that was the seed for this story? Is she a scientist? or just gifted with an exquisite sense of curiosity?

WhateVer, this book is certain to entice and then captivate the reader.