To use our price comparison to get the cheapest price, please click on the "Find the Cheapest Price" button located above for Galatea 2.2: A Novel by Richard Powers (ISBN-10: 0312423136, ISBN-13: 9780312423131).
At this time we have not yet written a review for Galatea 2.2: A Novel by Richard Powers (ISBN-10: 0312423136, ISBN-13: 9780312423131). Please continue to keep checking back to this page as we are constantly adding reviews.
Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
After four novels and several years living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2—Richard Powers—returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for exisiting.
for computer scientists with nougat and nuts (short version)
| Customer Rating:   | SHORT VERSION: Galatea 2.2 is (in essence) Richard Powers' novelization of the ideas laid out in Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach. It's well-crafted (if a bit pretentious with the language at times) and (with no small irony) a bit recursive. It's also tragically humanist. I was half-blind with cross-eyed, hopeful denials of determinism toward the end there; or perhaps I'm thinking of naive humanitarianism? Helen's cynical abandonment (a cognitive suicide) was not anticipated but neither was it surprising. The odd moment of recognition? Suddenly I was once again in the final moments of Ian McDonald's River of Gods, cradling Aj's dying body, suffering the same disappointments.
I closed this book feeling indicted. |
When do I get hooked?
| Customer Rating: | I'm 100 pages into this book and have continued to read only in hopes that I will become engaged. I rarely give up on a book but I think I'm finished with this one.
The author is clearly a brilliant mind but the story so far seems insignificant and uninspiring. The characters are not believable or compelling. The main character, Powers, is too sensitive, self absorbed, even defensive. I'm bored with it all. The plot just doesn't grip. The reader is not made to have a steak in the AI project or in the author's love life. The author's command of the language is undeniable but there is no power in the story.
As for the writing itself, it requires tremendous attention. The style is not immediately accessible. Nevertheless, I kept at it hoping the hooks would set and I'd be compelled to read further... but I've given up.
Not all stories are for everyone. I should have stuck to my rule that if the firs 5 pages don't draw me in then its time to abandon ship.
If this is your first look at this author, I'd suggest trying another title.
|
What Is Love? (Baby, Don't Hurt Me)
| Customer Rating: | I'll read anything by Richard Powers. For my money, few authors are as insightful or as capable of delivering that insight in a manner that is simultaneously mind-boggling and relevant. I'm pretty sure the man is a genius, but he's capable of building rungs into his writing, of making it accessible to those who don't mind putting in the work to make the vertical climb.
The problem with "Galatea 2.2" isn't Powers' ability to sculpt a sentence. He's in top form here (I've never read him in any other form, honestly). I take issue with the story itself.
The title is derived from the Greek myth of Pygmalion, king of Cyprus. With his own hands, Pygmalion supposedly crafted a statue of a beautiful woman. He named the creation Galatea and fell in love with it. Aphrodite eventually answered his prayers to animate the statue, and the two of them married and lived happily ever after. It's one of those tales that eschews any discernable point; it's less about dedication and devotion and more about a fractured self-love that fails to recognize itself as such. Scholars debate over whether or not the ending could accurately be classified as "happy."
Powers, it seems, agrees with this ambiguous assessment, because his novel takes the story to a place that is anything but vague. The Galatea in his book is a neural computer-network that eventually achieves something that could be artificial intelligence. It is called Helen. The Pygmalion? The author himself.
The story is one of those weirdly-turned "quasi"-"auto"-"biographies," with the writer inserting recognizable elements of his own life into the text, and then filling in the spaces with stuff that may or may not be "based on a true story." A story so de-fictionalized, only your author knows for sure.
Powers (the character, not the writer), has just come out of a really rough relationship with a woman named "C" and has decided to return home to Illinois to his old alma mater (lovingly referred to as "U") where he is spending a year as an "in-house author." I'm not sure what that is, or who is to benefit from the arrangement other than Powers, but it sounds like a sweet gig.
It's not so sweet for Powers, who has a particularly virulent case of writer's block. He has the first sentence, but the more he tries to build on it, the more he realizes that it's the first sentence that has HIM. He starts to wonder if it's not a jagged shard of his past that has stuck in his brain and refuses to be removed.
Powers eventually meets a scabrous researcher named Lentz who convinces him to take part in an experiment to teach a computer all of the canonical works of Great Literature, from Shakespeare to Seuss. Powers gets down and dirty with the work, the two men building a thought-machine that ends up spanning the globe, an interconnected webwork of systems and databases that collectively becomes known as Helen and that, amazingly enough, starts to simulate real thought and emotion.
This is, truly, an astounding breakthrough, so I wondered why no character in the book treated it as such. Moreover, Powers seemed mostly bored with his Helen plot-thread, coupling it with constant flashbacks to his relationship with "C." Although they form less than half of the novel, these remembrances were so tedious and ill-placed that they seemed to take up most of the book. Engorged with sentimentality, they could have been perhaps revealing or even a fine counterpoint to his relationship with the computer, Helen, if the character of "C" hadn't been so crippled by histrionics and narcissitic ambivalence. It was never, EVER clear to me why Powers was so in love with this woman. Although, if there's one thing love does do on a consistent basis, it is cloud the minds of the normally sane; Powers (the character) never really seems to know why he loves her, either.
It gets tiresome. You've got the intriguing progress of Helen (and the mysteriously crabby character of Lentz) propelling one half of the novel with a good deal of steam, but it's dragging this gigantic corpse of a plot-line behind it, gouging out a scar in the ground that Powers lovingly describes in patient, probative detail. His past is an important element to the story, but I was never convinced it was important enough to necessitate so much meandering, so much redundancy, so much fondling.
That's what you get when you have a book that doesn't have the guts to announce how real it is to the world. If Powers really wanted to bare his soul, he should've been bold enough to discard every excess bit of stitching. Instead, he tries to artfully clothe himself with fig leafs of fiction, and the result is, well, I'm reminded of The Simpsons where offended citizens get blue jeans put on Michelangelo's David. Except, in this case, the jeans are tacky bell bottoms.
Just as tacky is Powers' final point, the reason he has the parallel plots of "C" and Helen. Powers' message would be more at home in an episode of Sesame Street or on a PBS After-School special (starring Levar Burton, perhaps). The best and most poignant part of the whole book comes when Powers finally unsticks from his mind that tenacious opening sentence he could never complete. But that comes after a whole lot of instigating silliness, and the subtly beautiful moment propagates an ending of maudlin moralizing. I won't give anything away, but I will say that Helen's final symbolic act as an artificial entity that has reached self-awareness is so trite and formulaic, I was astounded that Powers even bothered.
It's a book about obsession (much less love) and dissociation from the self, the world, the heart. It's about redemption, revelation, and recompense for sins you didn't even know you were committing. It's a complex, tangled knot of ideas that could've been a treatise on something beautifully incomprehensible. Instead, Powers boils it down to its most generic parts. Beautifully written though it may be, this is a diamond with one facet. What happens when an amazing writer falls in love with his own work? He fails to see its flaws; he lingers painfully over even its dullest surfaces; he writes "Galatea 2.2." |
Just a big stinking let down.
| Customer Rating: | | I felt like the first hundred or so pages of the book promised a lot of truly vicarious devastation, but then I got to the end and Powers' had delivered nothing. This book is dullsville; read it and feel absolutely nothing during the story's climax. In all fairness, Powers writes very well, it's just that the content of this book bores me. Maybe my problem is that I was expecting it to be much more sci-fi and dramatic, and to me it read more like a semi-masturbatory litany of the sufferings of the author at the hands of his bipolar ex-girlfriend. |
Intricately turned phrases
| Customer Rating: | | It's funny, the reviews on the cover make me think that they didn't read the book. It's neither terse nor a thriller, but a poignant semi-autobiographical passage. This book sent me running to the dictionary every two pages, but I didn't mind because each sentence unearthed a penetrating revelation that was deeply satisfying to me personally. |
|
