The Overstory

By: Richard Powers

Narrated by: Suzanne Toren

Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 2019

A monumental novel about reimagining our place in the living world, by one of our most "prodigiously talented" novelists (New York Times Book Review).

The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late 20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits 100 years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another.

These and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by trees, are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest. There is a world alongside ours - vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

©2018 Richard Powers (P)2018 Recorded Books

Astonishingly powerful writing.

Where does The Overstory rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

It’s up there with the top three.

Did the plot keep you on the edge of your seat? How?

As a book of short stories some resonate more than others. HOWEVER, you would just listen for the exquisitely skillful writing, it’s really quite beautiful.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No. Well yes, I wanted to but the beauty of the short story is you can try them on in different moods, times of day, it’s in bite size pieces. There is an overarching narrative where each story reveals its connection to its neighbors. But, the skill of the writer is such that the spirit of each tale stays with you. You can stop and start and never risk missing the culmination. Most impressive book I’ve read in the past year, maybe longer.

BLINK OF THE EYE

Humanity’s years of life are but a blink of an eye. Richard Powers, like Cervantes’ Don Quixote, tilts at a windmill that neither generates power, grinds corn, or pumps water.

You love Powers way with words but come away from “The Overstory” feeling like Quixote’s relatives–mourning his loss of sanity but rejoicing in his belief of love and life.

In travels around the world, one witnesses China’s ecological crises when everyone, including indigenous Chinese, drink bottled water. Our guide in India notes his country is teetering on the brink of ecological catastrophe. And, our American President denies global warming by calling it a hoax. It seems unlikely the world will wake up before it is too late.

Trees may have a language, but technology is unlikely to provide any translation that humanity will accept. One hopes Powers’ imaginative story is a Cervantes’ tale; not a prophecy.

Gorgeous story

And the narrator really didn’t fit this book for me. Toooooo ponderous, too serious. And I wonder why she used such a painful speech pattern for a character who had hearing issues, when it was pretty clear from the text that this character no longer had her “childhood speech impediment” in most situations. Meh on that, but magic story.

the world around us

read it over a long weekend. filled my world and transported me to a different one.

Powerful, mind bending, emotional

I had to take several breaks while listening to this book, for it brought me to despair for my species so many times. But I don’t give up, even in the face of my own cowardice, and I’m glad I stayed with the story, the characters, and the life so richly portrayed. I’ve only just finished and cannot leave an adequate review yet; in fact, this is a book I will buy to read in print (though obviously not a printed version).

Highly, highly, HIGHLY recommended if you are a breathing, thinking human.