“Uan ingeniously structured narrative, which branches and forms a canopy, like the trees at the center of the story, whose wonder and connectivity echo those of the humans who live among them”, described the Pulitzer jury, at the time of awarding the prize, which came confirm the growing prominence of novels focused on environmental issues.
Also a finalist for the Booker and PEN/Faulkner awards, ‘About the sky’ (‘The overstory’), published in Portugal by Presença, translated by Nuno Quintas, explores the connections between humans and nature, through the story of nine characters who come together to protect an ancient forest.
These are people who have a personal relationship with trees and who, throughout history, have put their lives at risk in increasingly aggressive confrontations against powerful interests, going beyond the limits of retaliatory violence, in the hope of saving trees and defending the living world.
The book begins with the stories of each character, presented separately at the beginning of the novel, but which end up intertwining in an “unexpected and brutal” way, describes the publisher.
An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same chestnut tree, the great doomed American tree. A university student electrocutes herself, dies and comes back to life at the hands of creatures of light. An Air Force pilot is shot down in mid-flight, in the Vietnam War, and saved by falling into a fig tree. A scientist with speech and hearing difficulties discovers that trees communicate with each other.
The character of the scientist, said Richard Powers, in an interview with The Washington Post, is a composite of several people who inspired him: “I would like to think that she is a kind of representative or emblem of many people who, when you say the phrase ‘ the real world’, don’t immediately think of the fake world that we humans have created, but who dedicate their lives to understanding this place that we need to make our home and that we need to understand if we are to stay here much longer” .
These four characters and five other unknowns will all, somehow, be summoned by the trees and will come together for a final and violent battle to save the last hectares of virgin forest on the American continent.
The story unfolds over decades and the stories of trees and people intertwine as they become activists in the fight against forest destruction and overexploitation of natural resources.
The novel ends in an epic court battle, which has profound consequences for all the characters.
On the occasion of awarding the prize, Richard Powers said that, as this is one of the main North American literary recognitions, the fact of having been “awarded to a book that intends, above all, to take seriously non-humans and the relationship with those outside the human world is encouraging”.
For the writer, the current state of the environment is “a desperate moment”.
“If this prize means anything to me, it’s not just for the book, but for a boost to literary writers who want to broaden their scope of concern from the personal and domestic to the environment and everything that lies beyond the world we’ve created. “, he said, in the same interview with The Washington Post.
In Portugal, Casa das Letras publishes ‘O eco da Memória,’ winner of the National Book Award and finalist for the Pulitzer, a novel about neurology and brain disorders, and “Generosity”, a fiction whose story is based on genetic research.
Last year, Presença published ‘Assombro’ (‘Bewilderment’), the last’ novel by Richard Powers, originally published two years after ‘About the sky’, whose characters are a father, a scientist who discovered how to look for life on other planets, and her 9 year old son, a peculiar child. At the base of the story is also the threat against the planet and the challenge to anthropocentrism.
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