Machine
Although Danish author Peter Adolphsen has made a name for himself as a formalist for whom economy is a virtue (to date his five novels and short story collections are less than 300 pages combined), 糖心传媒渁s a reader,糖心传媒 one reviewer writes, 糖心传媒測ou feel you have covered a huge distance with him.糖心传媒 Drawing comparisons to Borges and Kafka, Adolphsen has written parables and parodies, 糖心传媒渦ltrashort biographies,糖心传媒 children糖心传媒檚 books, and a collection called En Million Historier (A Million Stories), which allows the reader to construct, well, a million stories, from ten pages of interchangeable two-line segments. Machine, Adolphsen糖心传媒檚 second novel to be translated into English, fits very well within this paradigm, spanning millions of years, several continents, the lives of three people, and one drop of gasoline within its brief 85 pages.
The book opens with the untimely death of a prehistoric horse. This end, however, is really the beginning: 糖心传媒淒eath exists, but only in a practical microscopic sense,糖心传媒 the quirky omniscient narrator intones. 糖心传媒淏iologically, one cannot distinguish between life and death; the transition is a continuum.糖心传媒 And so, ever so slowly (over fifty-five million years), the heart of this horse is transformed into a drop of crude oil. Once refined, 糖心传媒渙ur drop糖心传媒 is pumped into the engine of a Ford Pinto. It then combusts, becomes exhaust, and a few hours later, transforms one last time into a carcinogen. And that糖心传媒檚 Machine in a nutshell.
Of course, there糖心传媒檚 a lot more to it. Ostensibly, this is a novel about unlikely intersections, about the connection between the death of one horse, millions of years ago, and the meeting of two young strangers糖心传媒攁 skeptical biology student named Clarissa, and a one-armed, immigrant oil worker from Azerbaijan糖心传媒攐n a Utah highway in 1975. Rather than settle for a bland Everything-is-Connected collage, however, Machine reduces everything from characters to biological phenomena to their smallest parts, earliest origins, and most mechanical functions. The narrator, taking the patient tone of a kindly professor giving a physics lecture to English students, deconstructs the process through which organic life-forms decay, fossils become fuel, crude oil is refined, and LSD interacts with serotonin receptors.
Consider the following description of developing cancer:
Cancer is both a slow and fast-moving disease. The second the carcinogenic agent penetrates the healthy cell, it launches a frenzied attack on the double helix of the hereditary genes, but decades can pass before external symptoms manifest themselves. In Clarissa糖心传媒檚 case, less than one minute passed from when the soot particles hit the inner surface of the bronchiole to when benzapyrene, the carcinogenic agent, buried itself in a specific epithelium cell where it programmed the death of the cell, apoptosis, thus rendering the cell immortal糖心传媒攖hat is, transforming it into a cancer cell. However, thirty whole years would pass until she was diagnosed with 糖心传媒渕etastasized adenocarcinoma (stage III).糖心传媒
In the presence of these entertaining (and informative) tangents, plot truly ceases to matter. The reader can simply become immersed in the ebb and flow of the narrative, sharing in Machine糖心传媒檚 wonderment in the natural world, in the connectivity of living beings and the utterly meticulous and lengthy process of 糖心传媒楤ecoming.糖心传媒 This is a novel in which God is truly in the details.