Operation Wandering Soul
3.5/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
National Book Award Finalist
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and the forthcoming Bewilderment, an exquisitely rendered novel set in the pediatrics ward of a public hospital that examines the power, joy, and anguish of storytelling.
“If you have children or will have children, if you know children or can remember being a child, dare to read Operation Wandering Soul. . . [it] is bedtime reading for the future.” —USA Today
In the pediatrics ward of a public hospital in the heart of Los Angeles, a group of sick children is gathering. Surrogate parents to this band of stray kids, resident Richard Kraft and therapist Linda Espera are charged with keeping the group alive on make-believe alone. Determined to give hope where there is none, the adults spin a desperate anthology of stories that promise restoration and escape. But the inevitable is foreshadowed in the faces they’ve grown to love, and ultimately Richard and Linda must return to forgotten chapters in their own lives in order to make sense of the conclusion drawing near.
Richard Powers
Michael Connelly is an American author of detective novels and other crime fiction, notably those featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch and criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller. His books have been translated into 36 languages and have won many awards. He lives with his family in Florida.
Read more from Richard Powers
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Operation Wandering Soul: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to Operation Wandering Soul
Related ebooks
Subway Hitchhikers Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCaesar’s Column: A Fascist Nightmare of the Rotten 20th Century American Society Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTraveling Light Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCæsar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsotherwise you well? Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGenerosity: An Enhancement Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Red-funnelled Boat Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCaesar's Column: A Fascist Nightmare of the Rotten 20th Century American Society – Time Travel Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Titan Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTerminal Diagrams: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCaesar’s Column Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Waker Dreams Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Downsiders Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Caesar's Column Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lies and Misperceptions to Entertain and Distract You: Europa Toplovsky, #2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRomantic Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Voice of the Machines: An Introduction to the Twentieth Century Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsProspero's Staff Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Lookout Man Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHomelands Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Soft Path Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhy the Assembly Disbanded Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBert Wilson's Twin Cylinder Racer Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Time Quake!: An Adventure with an Engineering Genius Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPafko at the Wall: A Novella Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Airfoil: Origins: Airfoil, #1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCircuits in the Sky Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCity on Fire (Metropolitan 2) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Literary Fiction For You
Catch-22: 50th Anniversary Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Prophet Song: A Novel (Booker Prize Winner) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Man Called Ove: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confederacy of Dunces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leave the World Behind: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Covenant of Water (Oprah's Book Club) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Queen's Gambit Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Little Birds: Erotica Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Piranesi Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pride and Prejudice: Bestsellers and famous Books Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Master & Margarita Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tender Is the Flesh Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Handmaid's Tale Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Farewell to Arms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Demon Copperhead: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lady Tan's Circle of Women: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lagos Wife: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Tattooist of Auschwitz: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This Is How It Always Is: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Everything's Fine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5If We Were Villains: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Anna Karenina: Bestsellers and famous Books Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Invisible Hour: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5East of Eden (Original Classic Editions) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Reviews for Operation Wandering Soul
67 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Resident Surgeon Kraft's Depression weaves into his carefully crafted description of freeway travel,likely causing more than a few readers to avoid them forever.Yet, we are soon carried into a love plot torpedoed by Uber-streams-of unconscious-consciousnesswhich go on equally forever. The Navigator chapter was about the worst. Here again in Cryptomania.And why didn't Chriswick save the little girl from the molesting widower?Why not help the old man being hit by a baseball bat?And looking up more of the usual mystifying words:intercalary, antinomian, autoclave, and the one I always forget - biome.I read on only for Joy.And sometimes for the Richard and Linda dialogue...andfor, way too rarely, Richard Powers elevation of the commonplace with renewed connections,all while skewering rich American Greed."Bitterly frigid, a February beyond speaking."
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5During my reading of Infinite Jest I printed an interview with Mr. Wallace from salon.com. How quaint that memory remains: I printed an article and kept it with me for weeks: it was the 90s. He mentioned his favorite contemporaries, among which was Richard Powers. I had not a clue. I came across a copy of this a month later, perhaps?
This was illustrtive in how we eat our young. Substitute our addled, our poor, our maimed per your whim. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The interest of this book, I think, is an antagonism between determinedly inventive language and overspilling emotion. It's a problem that dogs books that were probably influenced by this one, including some of David Foster Wallace's, and current writing like Sergio De la Pava's "Naked Singularity."1.About the language: it seems that every single sentence in the book was interrogated for clichés: except for brief exclamations and short bridging sentences, almost no line in the entire 352 pages is a report of ordinary speech or standard description. Sometimes that results in deliberate awkwardness. In one passage, a doctor, Kraft, is being invited to go dancing at the Pasadena Women's Club. He ruminates:"Well, so be it, if that's the last bastion of fox-trot in this fifteen-million-souled nation flying point for westward expansion's cliff-dive into the Pacific." (p. 204)Sometimes this tweaking and pinching leads to dense apostrophes, crowded with alliterative sequences, puns, intentional solecisms, and chained awkwardnesses, as in this description of the dance hall:"This place, this heartbreaking, magnificent, annihilating, imperialist, insecure, conscience-stricken, anarcho-puritanical, smart-bombing, sheet-tinned, Monroe Doctrined place... The searing, seductive, all-palliating, caramel curative of the been-through-the-Mills Brothers (sure, who else? you always hurt the ones you love) do their painted, slowed-down, lip-simulated, bastard-son-of-Dixieland instrumental interlude, returning only to insist that you're nobody. Till somebody. Cares." (p. 210)Most of the time it produces an effect of lexical hysteria, a kind of frantic search to escape ordinary language. This is a description of an annoying person who is assisting the doctor in an operation:"He hears the Millstone wind-tunneling in his ear, doing his geriatric Driver's Ed teacher a month before retirement thing." (p. 268)In many passages, on many pages, this kind of obsessive tinkering produces momentarily confusing and slightly enlightening twists in ordinary usage. Of a woman who wants to throw away a collection of milk cartons, Powers writes "She wants to rush the receptacles." (p. 280). Of the universal habit children have of torturing insects, he writes "Boyhood trains for this... in every country he had ever barnstormed." (p. 268)I read this because David Foster Wallace said somewhere that it was his favorite. It is easy to see one of the reasons why: Powers is determined not to write an ordinary sentence, but that determination produces a strange awkwardness of the kind that Wallace alternately relished and despised. The effect is definitely not simply "brilliant," "scintillating," "eloquent" or "magnificent," as reviewers tend to say. It is a condition, like the medical conditions of the characters in the book. As Wallace knew, this kind of virtuosity is an illness. Some passages early in this book remind me forcibly of Sergio De la Pava's "Naked Singularity": I think "Operation Wandering Soul," which was published in 1993, is one of the points of origin for certain practices of hypertrophied eloquence in books like De la Pava's, and in some McSweeny's authors.2. About the overspilling emotion: the book is about a hospital ward for children with chronic, rare, debilitating diseases and deformities, and their two principal caregivers (the doctor and a therapist), both of whom are emotionally pithed. Some of the children are presented briefly, and one is a sort of black comic relief, but mainly the book is about their suffering. The central character is a little girl who needs to have her ankle removed, and then, when the disease spreads, half her body. She ends up in intensive care, with her legs amputated, bruised by the breathing tubes, knocked out by sedatives, knowing her life is over. In that state, she writes her doctor a love letter. The emotion is wild, gushing, hot, and nearly unbearable, and -- this is the connection with the first point about language -- it is made that way by the straightjackets of language. What seems so odd about the book, so unsatisfying, is that it is clearly hopeless to disguise torrential emotion by torturing language. It doesn't work even from the first pages of the book. I think the idea was to produce more intense emotion by tying it up in knotted language games, and letting it squeeze out, drop by drop, in some ultra-purified form. But the result is that the emotion leaks out all over, spilling over every sentence, soaking the "brilliant" prose in bathos, a bath of tears, saline fluid, and blood. I don't think this would have been half the book it is if Powers's strategy had worked, and he had contained unspeakable tragedy in its Procrustean hospital bed. The book is about the excesses of excess: pain that leaches out in every overworked metaphor, every mangled image, every twisted, hypercomplex sentence.