Her work is thrilling, but really, it's almost beside the point. I was thinking that maybe you hadn't been around her in a while, or you'd forgotten. She's such a force of nature. “Once you understand Annick you know there's nobody like her. Barbara Bovender, a Bohemian hired to look after Swenson's apartment in Manaus, describes the character of Dr. What's my takeaway from State of Wonder? Character.

The true purpose of this post isn't even a book review, but rather to take an element of the book and incorporate it into my own writing, to review Patchett's most salient fiction technique and reflect on it.

That's the basic plot, which I could unravel in more detail, but it's not the purpose of this post. Swenson and get an update about the research. Swenson, and also his mistress, to locate Dr. Fox decides to send another employee, Marina, a former student of the mythic Dr.

Swenson, but Anders, a jungle novice, contracted a fever in the Amazon and presumably died. Fox sent one employee, Anders Eckman, to seek out Dr. Meanwhile, Vogel continues to spend a ton of money supporting the effort.ĭr. Fox, is eager to receive an update about Swenson's research, but she is out of touch in the Amazon, and it has been 26 months since she last communicated with Vogel. Swenson's goal is to find out the secret of their fertility and develop a drug for Vogel, the pharmaceutical company sponsoring her research. Swenson, a medical professor specializing in reproductive endocrinology, has gone to the Amazon to live with the Lakashi - a tribe of indigenous people where the women can continue bearing children throughout their lives (this is not necessarily an advantage). The book begins at a slow pace but, as Janet Maslin notes in her New York Times review, the story catches fire when the narrator, Marina Singh, meets up with Annicka Swenson, the mythic professor of Marina's past.ĭr. Author in DITA and Publish with WordPressĪnn Patchett's State of Wonder, published in 2011, is a story about a pharmaceutical researcher's attempt to make sense of her lost colleague, presumably dead in the Amazon, while wrestling with a domineering academic professor who refuses to communicate updates about her research.Reflecting seven years later about why we were laid off.

A hypothesis about influence on the web and the workplace.

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