The Stone Loves the World
A Novel
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A warm, inventive, and multilayered novel about two families - one made up largely of scientists, and the other of artists and mystics - whose worlds collide in pursuit of a lost daughter
Mette, a twenty-year old programmer of visual effects for video games, lives with her mother, Saskia, an aspiring playwright, in Brooklyn. Mette is a private and socially awkward young woman, who finds something consoling in repetitive mathematical calculations. But she has been recently rejected in love, and feels stuck in an endless loop, no longer certain of her place in the world.
As Brian Hall's new novel opens, Mette has gone missing. Her disappearance forces Saskia to reunite with Mette's father, Mark, an emotionally distant astronomy professor in Ithaca, to embark on a journey together to find her. Mette's path will take her across America and then to a fateful visit with her charismatic grandfather, Thomas, who formerly ran the commune north of Ithaca where Saskia was raised, and who now lives as a hermit in a windmill on a remote Danish island.
Playing out over nine decades and three generations, and stitching together a dazzling array of subjects—from cosmology and classical music to number theory and medieval mystery plays—The Stone Loves the World is a story of love, longing, and scientific wonder. It offers a moving reflection on the human search for truth, meaning, and connection in an often incomprehensible universe, and on the genuine surprises that the real world, and human society, can offer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hall returns to characters from The Saskiad in this strikingly original take on science, uncertainty, and the longing for connection to others and to the world. New Yorker Mette White, 29, a math savant and computer game programmer, shuns most human relationships. When her tentative romance with a colleague collapses, she considers suicide but instead gets on a Greyhound to Seattle, a destination chosen at random. Her mother, Saskia, an aspiring playwright who broke up with Mette's father, Mark, before Mette's birth and raised her largely alone, worries when Mette disappears. She calls Mark, an astronomy professor whose relationship with Mette consists mostly of emails filled with logic and mathematical puzzles. Unconcerned at first, Mark becomes as alarmed as Saskia when they discover Mette has flown from Seattle to Denmark to meet Saskia's father, Thomas, a former cult leader who repeatedly had sex with Saskia's friend when the girls were teenagers. Rushing to Denmark in pursuit, they miss Mette in transit but revisit their own fractured relationship. Hall shuttles the reader through time as well as space, depicting the unhappy marriage of Mark's parents and Saskia's loss of her mother two decades earlier. To allay their emotional pain, all lose themselves in information—whether about medieval mystery plays, prime numbers, or the physics of tire rotation. Hall takes a risk with sprawling, dense passages, and pulls it off by majestically drawing together the various threads of this consistently moving and entirely unconventional narrative. It's a stellar achievement.
