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Article: Narrative Powers: Richard Powers as Storyteller.
- Article from:
- The Review of Contemporary Fiction
- Article date:
- September 22, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Review of Contemporary Fiction. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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In Richard Powers's Operation Wandering Soul, Linda Espera, a rehabilitation therapist on a ward of desperately ill children, regularly reads stories to her charges: "Read-alouds, the oldest recorded remedy, older than the earliest folk salves: these are her only way to trick her patients into downing, in concentrated oral doses, the whole regimen of blessed, bourgeois, fictive closure they have missed. Tales are the only available inoculations against the life they keep vomiting up for want of antigens."(1) One of the stories she reads to them is about an innkeeper's wife who dreams of a treasure to be found in the city. In the city a man tells her that he has dreamed of ...