Peter Adolphsen

Peter Adolphsen's Brummstein is a peculiar little novella; the story of a weird, vibrating stone that's chipped off an ancient rock at the bottom of a Swiss cave in 1908, and its travels from hand to hand throughout the 20th century in Germany. It should be a drily humorous tall tale in the classic Scandinavian tradition (lately represented by Paasilinna, Jonasson etc), but it's ultra-condensed to 64 pages, with passages in allegedly untranslated German (Adolphsen is Danish), with long show more asides on tectonic plate theory and starting the story billions of years ago, both reducing and emphasising the changes of the last 100 years as just a blink of an eye in the larger scheme of things. And suddenly, the people who pass by become both completely inconsequential and completely alive, caught up in a whirlstorm of ideologies flashing by, all promising a revolution of political, spiritual, racial or artistic thought while the stone keeps humming with the same frequency it's done for millions of years. Weird. But I love it. show less

In 85 short pages, Peter Adolphsen manages to trace the complete history of a drop of oil from its origins in the early Eocene through a story of the last moments of a Hyracotherium (a tiny prehistoric ancestor to the horse) where this drop of oil started in this tiny animals beating heart, through its geologic development and migration, its extraction and refinement into gasoline, and finally through the combustion process of 1970s Ford Pinto where this single molecule will find its show more ultimate destination, drastically altering the life of one of the passengers.

Adolphsen plays with the idea of Chaos Theory and coincidence throughout the novel tying what seems like a series of highly improbable events into a single narrative history told in unique almost omnipresent first person. Throughout the narrative Adolphsen is preoccupied with the science that makes these series of events happen from life and death, to the creation of oil from living matter, to the brain on drugs and the combustion of a car engine. In fact, the majority of the book is concerned with these in my estimation fascinating scientific details. What you'll find with Machine is a novel less concerned about the characters and their individual story, instead the focus is more about the external processes that shape them that constantly apart of their lives but largely unnoticed. I realize that all the precise scientific detail and jargon might come off as a bit dry and boring, and is not seamlessly integrated with the story as some would like, but I found Machine to be interestingly straightforward and at times beautifully written book exploring big ideas in a way fictional setting that I understood. It certainly isn't a book for everyone, but I'll definitely be rereading this one again. show less

Death exists, but only in a practical, macroscopic sense. Biologically one cannot distinguish between life and death; the transition is a continuum. [...] The problem of defining death mirrors a corresponding difficulty with the definition of life: a living organism is formed of non-living material, organized so it can absorb energy to maintain its system, and death is thus the irreversible cessation of these functions.

Machine is a short novella: an exploration of life, death and show more transformation via the path of a drop of crude oil -- from its origins 55-million years ago in the decaying heart of a tiny prehistoric horse, through refinement to gasoline and into the tank of a 1970s car with a man and woman, and then... well you’ll have to read it and I wager you'll be surprised.

It’s a ping-pong of ideas, scientific and philosophical -- an essay (a tutorial at times) clothed in a fragmented, fable-like story. I’m not a fan of fables, but I am a fan of ideas and of short-form writing, and found Machine interesting to read. I would try more by Adolphsen. show less

"All around them, chemistry carried out its destructive business...."

A strange but engaging novella presented more or less in the language of a monograph on a scientific peculiarity, though the putative author knows more than he would have for complete verisimilitude. A useful structural comparator is Brooks's [b:People of the Book|1379961|People of the Book|Geraldine Brooks|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1239820658s/1379961.jpg|3020568], though here the point seems to be that human show more concerns and history are ephemeral and trivial, perhaps the opposite of Brooks's theme. show less