‘Patio de Recreo’, by Richard Powers: in the fullness of his powers

It was Margaret Atwood who said that Powers is “unable to write a book that is not interesting.” And in the case of Powers, the ‘interesting’ perhaps is the way in which it has a more than considerable work arranging to transfer issues of interest (often scientific and very complex and, yes, cold and calculators) to the field of the novelistic and of the sentimental sIn that the precision of knowledge is lost along the way acquired or the surprise for the unpredictable and out of any calculation with which the human being makes of his divinely to err first and forgive or not later.

What takes us – in the event – to ‘Recreo Patio’ that, in some way, seems to follow the wake of its previous two novels. Because if the very awarded ‘The cry of forests’ dealt with the land and tree and ‘confusion’ of the cosmic and spatial, then ‘patio de recreation’ (name that name that name It alludes to the last/generation technology as a ancestral liquid mass) floats and immerses itself in the oceanic and submarine.

And it does – almost marked from the house – with a choral structure and alternative cast where a famous oceanographer, a native artist born in Atolón del Pacífico who resists the real estate invasion, stands out, the real estate invasion, A Literature Loving Prodigy and another illuminated by the computer that will lead him to take a giant step in what makes artificial intelligence while trying to escape the siege of a degenerative mental illness.

And all their lives will be converging in a kind of choreography —As the one that is put into practice in the GO, a decisive millenary game in the plot – that will unite and separate them at different times from their lives. And, again here, the mastery of Powers to be reconcentrated and expansive opposing and unfolding until counting everything: ardent feelings and cold scientific data often confusing but always illuminating the reader with an enviable ability to synthesize and clarity.

Let’s say it like this: what Netflix would take three episodes, Powers – who can already be considered King of Techno-Ecoccion; His is the science with conscience – he dispatches it in a couple of pages with a prose between precise and lyric in which, in this case, in this case, the oral narration of Jacques Costeau With the visual outbursts of Terrence Malick. Something that for a little tanned reader – or little Powerian – may be somewhat disconcerting.

But it is worth the effort and insistence to arrive at a final ‘twist’ that – in the most delicate of the utopics dystopia ‘cyberpunk’—He does the breath and returns the admiration that was never lost but that here intensifies even more before the deep vision of a powerrs in the fullness of his powers.