State of Wonder (2011) by Ann Patchett has been on my TBR stack forever, so I was really glad when it was a monthly book group pick. I even knew lore about it, as the writer Elizabeth Gilbert writes about her exchange with Ann Patchett about this book, in her 2015 creativity book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, which I highly recommend.
I really enjoyed it, though some of it was bewildering. From the title, maybe that was the p0int?
As the novel opens, Dr. Marina Singh, a big Pharma researcher, finds out that her research partner, a married father of 3 kids, has died on a trip to the Amazon to follow up on field research being conducted by a former medical professor of Singh’s, Dr. Annick Swenson. At the request of her manager/ lover, she agrees to go to the research station to find out what happened, bring her research partner’s body home, and see if she can get an update on the research, which is why her research partner went in the first place.
What follows has the qualities of a fever dream, which is apropos, as the malaria medication Singh takes as a preventive causes nightmares. Swenson has done a lot to avoid being dropped in on by her big Pharma sponsors, but Singh eventually succeeds, and she is astonished when she finds out what the research really is, and what happened to her research partner.
It is not perfect, but I enjoyed the ride. I did not mark any anti-fat bias, so consider it weight-neutral.
Reading While Fat 