by Richard Powers
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Product Description
Winner of the 2006 National Book Award
The Echo Maker is "a remarkable novel, from one of our greatest novelists, and a book that will change all who read it" (Booklist, starred review).
On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schluter has a near-fatal car accident. His older sister, Karin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when Mark emerges from a coma, he believes that this woman--who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister--is really an imposter. When Karin contacts the famous cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber for help, he diagnoses Mark as having Capgras syndrome. The mysterious nature of the disease, combined with the strange circumstances surrounding Mark's accident, threatens to change all of their lives beyond recognition. In The Echo Maker, Richard Powers proves himself to be one of our boldest and most entertaining novelists.
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Average Customer Review:
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 Intelligent and entertaining, 2008-08-19
This novel, the winner of the 2006 National Book Award, addresses the question of how we know who we really are. This novel is extremely well-crafted and a worthwhile read. Intelligent and entertaining.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 Worst book I've read in a long time, 2008-07-28
I purchased this book because I had read some great reviews. I was immensely disappointed and wish I hadn't wasted the time suffering though the book. The characters are dull and not very likeable. By the end I really didn't care to know what happened to any of them.
One thing in paticular that irked me was that the author attempts to allude to a mystery surrounding the circumstances of the accident. However, by the time the mystery is revealed the reader is no longer interested. Overall, a boring book and a waste of money.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 Case History, 2008-07-25
There is much interest in this book, but not enough to justify a novel of 451 closely-set pages. Set in Kearney, Nebraska, where migrating cranes come annually to forage around the Platte River, the vast sandhill countryside evokes pages of lyrical writing from the author that show his love for the area without necessarily awakening a similar rapture in the reader. Against this, he sets a story that is simple in its outlines. Mark Schluter, a mechanic in his mid-twenties, drives his truck off a road at night, for no apparent reason. Even when Mark emerges from his coma and regains most of his functions, he still refuses to recognize his sister Karin, who has given up her job to look after him, calling her a cunning look-alike sent to trick him. This apparently is a disorder called Capgras Syndrome, whose rarity brings celebrity neurologist Gerald Weber out to study the patient. As Mark improves in many respects, but degenerates in others, many other people are drawn into the web of remembering, rediscovering, and denying.
There are many stories here. There is the mystery of why Mark crashed, and who left a mysterious get-well note by his bedside, but the accident is really too commonplace for this to sustain the tension of the book. Another mystery surrounds a nurse's aide, Barbara Gillespie, who cares for Mark during his rehabilitation, but who seems to be more than her lowly position would imply; Barbara is a sympathetic character, but I think she would have been a lot more interesting if her origins had not been wrapped in mystery. Weber, a neurologist presumably modeled after Oliver Sacks (author of THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT), is shown at a crisis in his personal life and career, but the author cannot decide between recounting a string of Sacksian case-histories and really exploring Weber as a person; by the time the book reaches its climax, it is hard to feel with him or to care. It is hard also to care about Mark himself, who is neither very interesting nor very likeable; he makes a very weak subject for everybody to get so worked up about.
In contrast, fortunately, there is Karin, by far the most fully-realized character in the book. Her year with Mark involves her going back into her past, examining her failing ambitions, her relationships with two former boyfriends, and her upbringing by fundamentalist parents. There is certainly material for an engaging small-town novel here on the lines of Ann Packer's THE DIVE FROM CLAUSEN'S PIER, though not at this length or diluted with so many other materials from so many different genres.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
So Disappointed, 2008-07-13
Where to start? How in the wide world did this heap of literary confusion warrant a National Book Award? What could have been a compelling mystery-driven plot is soured by poor dialogue, cartoonish characters with unbelievable quirks and motivations, and a profusion of overwrought similes and metaphors. A description of approaching verbal conflict between lovers: "They'd get onto thin ice within minutes, then stay out there, spinning arm and arm, a whole pairs freedance routine." That's just bad. I kept with it, thinking that the payoff of the solved mystery would make it all worthwhile. It doesn't.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Who's Who Anyway, 2008-07-02
This is quite a book. I'm not even sure I liked it but I couldn't stop reading it. The characters are so clearly crafted that I'd wake up each day and wonder how Mark was doing. How's Karin today? I truly believed that if I flew to Nebraska tomorrow, they'd be there in Mark's crummy little trailer near the Platte River. The plot of the novel is quite convoluted and I think many people will find it hard to follow. I had to read many sections over again to try to understand what the heck was going on. But, in some ways, that's what the whole story is about...what do we understand and who are we really anyway. The books is filled with imposters. There are no heroes in this story, just flawed human beings groping each other and the world around them to figure out what they are doing here on Earth. The only constant, and maybe the only heroes of the story, are the cranes who migrate through Nebraska every year on a schedule that was drawn up about 2.5 million years ago. The cranes provide the only comfort for both the reader and the characters because they are a purposeful constant in the otherwise swirling mess of ambiguity the human brain creates to navigate the passge of time and people.
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