A mind-bending fable of science, philosophy, art, history, and love. Fifty-five million years ago, during the early Eocene period, a sudden burst o...
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Feb 17, 2009
Megan
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Machine seems like a literary narrative exercise in six degrees of separation, though it sometimes reads more like a technical document or science text. I feel this is more a concept book than something to be enjoyed, nonetheless it is kind of quirky and fun and interesting at turns, and at only 85 pages a real breeze - I read it on my morning commute. Don't expect to care about characters, or to be involved in plot... this 'novel' is more an examination on chaos theory and coincidence, and a so
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Jan 19, 2011
Corey
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I first heard of this book looking up translations from Charlotte Barslund after finishing another one of her translations: "I Curse The River of Time." Minutes after finishing this book I have one word to describe this book. Genius. I really don't know how else to describe these 85 pages. The sentence structures are beautiful; varied not only in length (both long and short extremes), but varied in content. Adolphsen makes science something romantic, something desired and maybe ev
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Nov 06, 2011
Kevin
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In 85 short pages, Peter Adolphsen manages to trace the complete history of a drop of oil from its origins in the early Eocene through a story of the last moments of a Hyracotherium (a tiny prehistoric ancestor to the horse) where this drop of oil started in this tiny animals beating heart, through its geologic development and migration, its extraction and refinement into gasoline, and finally through the combustion process of 1970s Ford Pinto where this single molecule will find its ultimate de
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Aug 09, 2010
Adam
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Billed as fiction, but doing very little of what fiction has traditionally done--a number of times the narrative of this book is interrupted by texty passages that feel like the driest of all high school lectures. After reading a third of it, I skipped to the end and laughed at the cop-out explanation for how the narrator could know the details of events that occurred 55 million years ago. Essentially, it's a dopey Darwinian fairy tale.
Nov 23, 2010
Nadia
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I picked this book up because I liked the cover. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that eventhough it was short and an incredibly quick read, it was really interesting.
Feb 10, 2009
Larissa
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Jun 21, 2008
Very European, very densely packed and well-researched, and, since it is such a short novel, consequently very lyrical. I liked this book a lot. It's a book about coincidence.
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