Review by Booklist Review
This is a thoughtfully wrought, intentional, atmospheric character study, decidedly not the novel one anticipates from the man responsible for introducing Sony's PlayStation. Yet this is the latest novel from Olafsson, an Icelandic scientist, author, and the executive vice president of Time Warner. The story revolves around Magnus, a New York neurologist studying patients who have suffered extreme head traumas and are assumed incapable of thought or expression. His research endeavors to prove that such individuals may actually be conscious and accessible. The theme of attempting impossible connections reverberates through Mangus' relationships with three women, most literally with a patient he earnestly believes is desperate to communicate with him; his recently deceased fiancée, whose death he grapples with; and his mother, a phenomenally talented but forgotten classical pianist. Throughout their portrayals, Olafsson weaves threads of love, grief, betrayal, and forgiveness. He also meticulously crafts poignant and evocative descriptions that create calm within plotlines fraught with tension. The result is a remarkably tender, touching exploration of a man's emotional journey to reconcile the past with the present.--Uhrich, Katharine Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Magnus, the narrator of this new novel, the fifth by the Icelandic author of Restoration, is a distinguished New York neurosurgeon. His area of research involves ways to communicate with comatose patients. Raised in England by his cold and difficult mother, Margaret, and his clueless father, Magnus still has trouble relating to people. He had finally found love with Malena, a beautiful Argentine dancer, but she is now lost to him. Now there is more parental drama. After a lifetime of failing to find success as a classical pianist, Margaret is on the verge of being rediscovered and receiving the acclaim she feels she deserves. And Magnus hopes that he is on the edge of a breakthrough with a new patient, an unidentified young woman who was left for dead after a terrible accident in New Mexico. Verdict With cool Nordic reserve, Olafsson explores such timeless themes as love, its loss and its lack; the failure to communicate; and finding strength in adversity. Will either Magnus or his self-absorbed mother attain the success they seek? There is enough drama and suspense in this thoughtful and intelligent novel to keep the reader intrigued to the end.-Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In Olafsson's fifth novel (Restoration, 2012, etc.), set in a rarified world of high-achieving intellectuals and artists, a neuroscientist attempts to unravel mysteries in his personal history as he recovers from a tragedy.Magnus grew up in England but now lives in Manhattan and commutes to a hospital in Cold Harbor, Connecticut, where he works on a project studying human consciousness in seemingly comatose patients. As the novel opens, he describes being put into an artificial state of physical paralysis for two hours just to experience it. Unable to move or communicate, he hears the sea outside his open window for the first time since his lover, Malena, visited him at the hospital the previous fall, a moment when he "should have known from her voice that something was wrong." Malena, an Argentinean who taught modern dance at Julliard, has since died under cloudy circumstances that Magnus spends the rest of the novel trying to fathom. In elliptical snatches he recalls their intense affair, which he repeatedly claims was close to idyllic. While still mourning Malena, Magnus is thrust back into interaction with his parents, Vincent and Margaret, whom he reluctantly agrees to visit at their home in Hertfordshire for his mother's 70th birthday. Both Vincent and Margaret have always believed that emotionally fragile Margaret is a musical genius whose virtuosity on the piano has been cruelly ignored. Vincent comes across as a pathetic charlatan who pours cheap bubbly into expensive champagne bottles. Magnus has always felt that Margaret, who showed him little maternal affection when he was a child, blamed him for her lack of success. When Margaret becomes something of a media sensation after Vincent releases her new recordings, Magnus begins to questions his perspective on his childhood. Meanwhile he begins to work with a new patient, a woman who appears to be comatose but may understand more than she lets on. Olafsson's emotionally chilly tale raises interesting questions about the capacity and limits of science and about how hard it is to know another person, but for all its braininess the novel never develops a beating heart. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
