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This was a weird, weird book. Absolutely bonkers narration (I've never read a book narrated by a microorganism before, and doubt I will again), and took me the first 50 or so pages to really get into it. But dang it, if it wasn't one of the best books I've read so far this year! There's something captivating about the story, even as it is concerning.
I can't rate this book because for now at least it's going in my DNF pile (well corner?). I got this book through a giveaway in exchange for an honest review and I have given it a serious chance. I'm about 50 some odd pages into it. In the hopes that the pace might pick up or there actually be a real story I kept reading. But no. Maybe it's just not for me but I wanted so badly to love this book, I was so excited to receive it given the blurb. When I actually started reading it however I was bey...
so urgent and funny
I was truthfully very excited to read this book. It caught my attention on the "new books" shelf at the library and the premise was too interesting for me to pass up - I mean, a book from the perspective of a 3.8 million year old Archean about the genetic seepage of human social qualities into the animal kingdom? Of course I'm gonna pick it up. However, I think a lot of it unfortunately went over my head. There were definitely funny moments, usually quick witty bits that made me appreciate Druck...
Synopsis: The adoption of human behaviors by other species. Humans would call this phenomenon 'uplift.' They are especially eager to notice unusual acts of cross-species compassion and are quick to label this uplift of animal creatures as an advancement of that animal species. From the perspective of an Archaeon, this is seen as downdrift, the seepage of traits across species. An Archaeon is the most ancient creature on Earth - approximately 3.8 billion years old - a living network of individual...
The satirical episodes that comprise this story began to sound all the same soon after the book began. I ended up skipping through most of it.
3.5 raised to 4. Fascinating satire on evolution and today's ecological and environmental movements. The part-time narrator is a length of genetic code surrounded by cells, called an Archaeon. The work describes what the Archaeon calls "downdrift", the adoption by non-human sentient species of human behavior, traits and even thinking. The "story" is built on the foundation of the meeting of an elderly lion [coming from Africa] and a calico house cat, Callie, from Boston. Drawn together by some s...
An imaginative tour de force.
Johanna Drucker’s Downdrift is the first (and probably only) book I’ve ever read that was narrated by a microorganism. Funny enough, this isn’t the strangest thing about the novel. This novel imagines a world in which animals, from lions and house cats to mice and badgers to flies, start to behave like humans. They stop hunting each other (except for some hold out species) and start social networking, data-mining, building homes, breeding hybrid, species, running food stands, suing each other, a...
Aug 24 2018 update: I've found myself thinking a lot about this novel in these last few days while visiting a friend who had a serious accident this summer and needs a lot of help still. Unnecessary things like yard work have slipped...the squirrels have found the stuffing in the lawn swing pillows and are busy borrowing it for themselves...the raccoons are bolder...and I began to think again about the changes that come across the world in this novel, where events unfold in a very interesting mi...
Such a strange, almost plotless book that talks - kind of cutely - about animals taking on human characteristics and activities (otherwise known as the down drift). Charming descriptions of squirrels knitting, pandas having bamboo breath, crows smoking, dogs driving etc etc, but also with an underlying sadness and commentary on climate change and humans destroying the world. the super vague plot is of a cat and a lion travelling around the world observing other animals and eventually meeting - I...
For the first thirty pages or so, I couldn't get enough of this book--I loved the focus, the characters, the style, the writing, everything. And then, at some point... I realized it was all hitting the same note, and I needed more.There's no doubt that Drucker's writing is clever and lovely, and I kind of adored the few characters she focused in on, but in large part, this novel felt more like an experiment than a cohesive story. There just wasn't much of a plot, and what plot there was felt lik...
This book takes place in the near-future, when non-human animals are mysteriously adopting human traits (the "downdrift") and the mutual psychic desire of a housecat in Boston and a lion in Africa to meet. On their journeys they pass many comical scenes of animals acting human, though the tone of the overall book is somber. Not written for climate-change deniers! The comic scenes were a little too silly for my taste, and the somberness a little too intense for me to enjoy.