The roots of life

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With their cast, Olivia and Nicholas prevent the deforestation of a thousand-year-old sequoia tree for almost a year

The roots of life (original title: The Overstory ) is the twelfth novel by the American writer Richard Powers . It was published in 2018 and tells, mainly acting in the western United States, of nine protagonists, whose lives are connected in a special way with trees and some of whom protest as activists with tree occupations for the protection of trees from deforestation.

content

The novel is divided into four parts, the names of which refer to the components of a tree.

root

This part introduces the novel's nine protagonists in eight chapters.

Nicholas Hoel is the 5th generation of a Norwegian immigrant who planted 6 chestnut trees on his farm in Iowa in the 19th century . Only one of the plants survives the decades in which almost the entire population of chestnut trees in North America dies , triggered by parasites from Asia , and develops into the most powerful tree in the whole area and the symbol of the family, which documents its growth through monthly photographs . When Nicholas visits his parents for Christmas during his senior year at the Chicago Art Academy, he finds them dead, dying of carbon monoxide poisoning .

Mimi Ma is a ceramic engineer and the daughter of a Chinese immigrant whose father gave him 1948 a. a. gives three precious rings, representing the past, present and future, on the journey. Sih Hsuin Ma calls himself Winston Ma in the USA and lives with his wife and three daughters in Wheaton , Illinois, where he plants a mulberry tree in his garden that symbolizes the future in his Chinese philosophy, like the third ring . When the tree becomes sicker and sicker due to bacterial attack, his wife becomes entangled in her religious world and his daughters move away, he ends his life in the garden with a pistol shot. Mimi Ma receives the third ring in the raffle among the sisters.

Adam Appich's father plants a tree for each of his five children. B. a maple for Adam born in 1963. In contrast to his siblings, he developed into a loner with special interests right from the start. At first he observes the many small creatures in nature and collects all kinds of things such as owl bulges and nests, later he does careful field studies about the migrations of ants. But after unsuccessful participation in a science competition, he breaks off this phase and his life gets off course. The accidentally discovered book by a psychologist with the title “The monkey in us” marks the turning point in his life, he feels converted and is motivated to study psychology .

The lawyer Ray Brinkman and the court stenographer Dorothy Cazaly begin their changeable and repeatedly interrupted relationship in St. Paul in 1974 after appearing together in an amateur theater production of Shakespeare's Macbeth . He plays symbolically the attacker Mcduff camouflaged by a tree, she the besieged lady. While Ray wants to bind his girlfriend tightly to himself and marry, she repeatedly fears for her independence and only agrees to a marriage after his insurances of separate accounts. After Dorothy was slightly injured in the collision of her car with a linden tree, she agrees to his proposal to plant a tree in her garden every year for her wedding anniversary.

Douglas Pavlicek has an eventful biography: orphaned at the age of 17, imprisoned in East Palo Alto for armed robbery at 19, as a loadmaster on explosives and military equipment cargo flights for the US Army in the Vietnam war zone and involved in defoliation of the forests with Agent Orange . After his machine crashed, his parachute got stuck in a fig tree , which saved him from a fatal impact. As an invalid and veteran, he then lived in Idaho , changed jobs and relationships several times, and finally traveled west to the highlands. Here he had a key experience when he discovered large-scale deforestation. He finds fulfillment in a life in nature and planted as forest workers on the cleared land thousands of Douglas - cuttings on.

Neelay Mehta was trained in programming in his childhood in San José by his father, a specialist in solid-state physics who immigrated to the USA from India , and thereby led more and more into a virtual computer world with fantasy creatures and thus to an alienation from everyday reality . After a conflict with his literature teacher, Neelay climbed onto a huge holm oak for fear of the domestic consequences , fell and has since been paralyzed in a wheelchair. Six years later he studies computer science at Stanford University and privately develops freeware computer games. Then he got the idea of ​​earning money with his programs and dropping out of studies. Exotic, unusually shaped trees on campus inspire him to create new scenarios for his projected saga. He wants to recreate nature artificially and perfect it more and more.

Patricia Westerford has had hearing and speaking problems since childhood in the 1950s. More than in reality Patty lives in an animistic natural fairy tale world. Her favorite book is Ovid's Metamorphoses with the first sentence that determines her life: I want to sing of beings transformed into new shapes . As a child, she accompanied her father, an agricultural consultant, on tours to farms in Ohio and learned a lot about plants. This knowledge helps her with her botany studies in Kentucky . Doing her doctorate with a thesis on tulip trees , she works as a lecturer and researcher and publishes a paper on her finding that trees as living beings with a consciousness communicate with each other via a biochemical network and e.g. B. warn in solidarity against hostile bacteria. At first she met with a lot of public interest in her research idea, but professors clearly criticized her theory as a scientist, so that she lost her work. From then on she got by with odd jobs and lived for a while in the eighties without a permanent home in a community with the plants in the old forests in the north-west. She later got a job as a forest overseer in the forest administration and by chance meets scientists who confirm their idea of ​​the natural forest with its life-die-life cycle and their theory and help her to work as a researcher again, to rehabilitate and join a Group of like-minded people to find.

Olivia Vandergriff's three-year student life is determined less by her actuarial studies than by drug parties, sex with trance music, and a spring- mood marriage with a two-year argument. She has no interest in trees and hardly notices the cedar in front of the house of her student flat share . Now, in December 1989, the divorce from her husband Davy is final and she hopes to somehow pass the final exam and then get her life in order. But while under the influence of drugs, wet hands come into contact with the electrical wiring, electric shock and cardiac arrest .

tribe

The storylines of the 1st part will be continued in 1990 and gradually connected over the course of a two-year development. The personal relationships of the protagonists correspond to their attitude towards trees.

The focus is on six of the nine main characters: the scientist Patricia Westerford and five idealistic environmental activists who use methods of passive resistance and civil disobedience to fight to preserve the centuries-old trees in the mountains in the north-west of the USA and who are radicalized out of disappointment over their defeats.

1. Patricia Westerford continues her studies on the cycle of life and the interconnectedness of trees and can rehabilitate herself as a scientist. In a remote hut, she writes the book The Secret Forest, which is aimed at the general public and deliberately written for emotional impact . It becomes a bestseller and influences u. a. also the five activists. Due to her professional reputation, she is invited as an expert in a court case about an objection by environmental associations against clearing. She argues so convincingly in favor of contiguous primeval forests with dead wood and against monocultures with cleared soil that the court suspends the planned deforestation. Later this injunction is lifted by another instance, so that the clearing takes place to the great disappointment of Patricia and her partner Dennis. Video recordings of the blockades in which Mimi and Douglas were injured confirm the scientists' opinion that protecting the trees on site does not and will never work. Patricia sees the futility of the protests against people's mania for growth and founds something like an ark , a consortium of four universities, under the name Global Gene Archive for the Preservation of Plant Biodiversity . In this seed bank with grains from many tree species all over the world, which can survive for thousands of years, the plants are to be stored for the future.

2. Olivia and Nicholas form the first pair of activists: Olivia survives the electrical accident and has a near-death experience , as a result of which she radically changes her life: she breaks off her studies, quits drug use and drives west by car. On a television in a shopping mall she sees a report about environmental activists in California and decides to follow the ghost voices of the intermediate realm she has experienced and to travel there. On the way, on a street in Iowa, she notices the chestnut tree at Nicholas Hoels Farm and she stops. She meets Nicholas, who wants to give her his paintings and shows the slowly dying family tree. His relatives sold the farm for economic reasons and he is in the process of closing down the business. He doesn't have a plan for the future yet and accompanies Olivia to California. There they both join a group of activists from the Life Defense Force movement who live spartanly in the forest. With media-effective protest campaigns, they want to draw attention to the destruction of nature, in particular to the profit-driven felling of sequoias by the company Humboldt Timber . As part of this protest, Olivia and Nicholas - with the aliases girl hair and guardian - entrench themselves in the crown of a thousand-year-old sequoia tree, called Mima, and stay there for almost a year because they have not been detached. However, this cannot prevent the trees from being cleared in the surrounding forest.

After ten months at a height of 60 meters and shortly before the forced abandonment of the occupation, Adam climbs up to them. After studying psychology at Fortuna College in Northern California, he completed a graduate course in social psychology in Santa Cruz and developed a study on the “aberrations of idealism” for his doctorate on the subject of identity formation and classic personality traits in plant rights activists. To do this, he interviewed 250 environmental activists on the Lost Coast (northwest coast of California) to create their personality profiles. In this context, he visits the tree-squatters Olivia and Nick. In view of the violence of nature, he doubts the meaning of his investigation and experiences with the two of them the task of the action. By a police helicopter flying very close to the tree, causing significant wind and swaying, the three are forced to leave the tree and then sit five days remand . Adam then evaluates his survey in Santa Cruz before returning to the north.

3. At the same time, the second activist couple Mimi and Douglas operate from Portland . Mimi has made a career as a ceramic mold casting engineer and received a post at the Portland, Oregon headquarters. She earns well and lives as a single in changing short international relationships. From her open-plan office she has a relaxing view of a group of pines. One day she discovers that these trees are supposed to be felled because of the risk of fire and that a town hall wants to prevent this.

This is where Douglas enters the action. After planting 50,000 saplings, he celebrates it in pubs in Portland and witnesses the nightly deforestation with which the authorities anticipate the announced protest. Douglas is arrested while trying to protect the trees. As a punishment for his disturbance of the peace he has to plant ash trees in community service. At the scene of the clearing, he accidentally met Mimi while looking at the tree stumps together. Together they decide to go to California and join a demonstration against mechanical tree clearing in a state forest. The blockade is broken by the authorities and the two are temporarily detained. In another action in the wooded area in the western Cascade Mountains, in which they chained themselves to trees as weekend activists, the police used targeted pepper spray and Douglas was injured by the police and woodcutters. After a televised occupation of the headquarters of a logging company, both of them are arrested again and Mimi loses her job because of her involvement in the illegal occupation.

4. Adam travels back to the forests in the northwest and joins the approximately 100 mostly young activists as “Professor Ahorn” to find out how far the tree protectors' resistance is. In the Fort Lincoln Log of the Cascadia Free Bioregion , he met a. on Olivia, Nick, Douglas and Mimi (called Mulberry ). The once peaceful demonstrators seem radicalized to him after the defeat in the occupation of trees and the clearing of the entire area. Adam helps set up the camp, which is fortified with walls and ditches. Journalists and congressmen visit the demonstrators and promise to lead the protest against repeated distress sales, particularly those damaged by arson in Washington state forests. The police forcefully dismantle the camp, which injures some of the occupiers, some seriously. B. Douglas and Mimi in the face. In revenge for the attacks, the five plan arson attacks from Mimi's sickbed, first on a machine shed in the Willamette National Forest, then on a sawmill near Solace, California. Together they decide to protest against forest clearing with one last big signal. After learning that the forest agency is leasing state forest to private speculators and investors in several US states, they travel to the Bitterroot Mountains in Idaho to the construction site of a holiday home complex in Stormcastle. While they are placing the incendiary devices with an electric time fuse at night, an incendiary device explodes prematurely, fatally injuring Olivia.

At the beginning of the third part the reader learns that Adam, Nicholas, Douglas and Mimi burn Olivia's body after the unsuccessful attack. Then they flee by car. They are known as activists from the arrests of the police and know that they will be looked for too. Therefore, they cover all traces and separate to minimize the risk of their capture. Olivia's body is found but cannot be identified and the investigation is suspended.

The stories of the other protagonists of the “roots” are told in separate storylines.

5. The paraplegic Neelay runs a small company called Sempervirens in Redwood City , then in Palo Alto , which develops his, similar to Second Life , parallel world game Mastery and publishes it with great success. The company brings several successors to the game on the market, so that it gains significantly in value and Neelay is getting wealthier. However, his paralyzed body deteriorates increasingly, he suffers broken bones and works from a bed in his office. From there he gives his employees instructions, e.g. B. for Mastery 8 . His ambitious goal is to offer players online a life in a virtual nature that is supposed to be much richer than their offline or real life, but he increasingly regrets his isolation, and that of his players, from the real environment.

6. Ray and Dorothy's relationship has changed, as has their play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? symbolizes. It is their last appearance together on stage and they are no longer planting trees on their wedding day. An important reason for the alienation is their childlessness and the dispute over an adoption after an unsuccessful artificial insemination . Nevertheless they stay together, v. a. in common but separate reading. Dorothy finds in it a substitute satisfaction in immersion in the female souls of the heroines. The break occurs when she disguises a sexual affair with her participation in choir rehearsals and he suspects the truth. When she realizes the futility of her game of hide and seek, she wants to end the marriage. He suffers a stroke and is taken to the hospital, where part of his brain has to be removed.

Crown

As in the first part, the individual storylines linked in the second part are again separated in terms of personnel, but thematically held together by reading Patricia's book The Secret Forest . The actions of the eight protagonists stretch over about twenty years. Some events can be dated to the new millennium 2000, Ray and Dorothy watch the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 on TV . Ten years later Adam and Douglas meet by chance near the disaster site in Manhattan. The consequences of the attack on the holiday center determine the life of the protagonists.

1. Douglas and Adam are arrested.

After the accident, Douglas keeps dreaming of his friends and hearing "girl's hair" prophecies. He tries to connect with Mimi several times, but she rejects him for fear of investigations and disappears from the city without a trace. He gives up his job in a hardware store and drives around aimlessly. During a visit to Stormcastle, he saw that the leisure facility was being intensively built and that their action had no consequences. He then lived for ten years as an overseer and tourist guide in a forest management hut in a mountain range in Montana and wrote down his activist experiences with the attacks. During a tour, it slides twenty meters on a steep, snow-covered mountain slope and a spruce tree saves it from a fatal fall. He told this story to tourists for years. Two months after he sheltered the hiker Alena for one night, his hut is searched by the police and his incriminating records are found. The FBI makes a deal with him: He gets seven years in prison with probation after the second year if he gives clues about the apprehension of his former accomplices. One result of this collaboration is Adam's arrest after the two met in New York City .

Adam returns to Santa Cruz, evaluates his research and five years later becomes an adjunct professor at Ohio State University in Columbus . In his first home, he learned from the news of a bomb attack on a research laboratory in Washington state that was working on the development of genetically modified poplar trees , and reads the slogan "Rule kills, community heals" on a wall at the crime scene, it is the saying of his fellow activists and he wonders whether one of his companions is responsible for it and he fears that his group will continue to be searched and that one day he will be found.

Ten years after the attack on the World Trade Center, Adam observes an Occupy Wall Street demonstrator camp in Zuccotti Park , Lower Manhattan, and accidentally meets Douglas there. While Adam teaches as a professor of psychology at the university , travels around the country as a recognized scientist with prizes and gives lectures, is now married to a woman who writes counselors and has a five-year-old son Charlie with her, Douglas is unemployed and supposedly visits friends in town. They talk about the time of their attacks, their unsuccessfulness, Olivia's death and the question of why Adam did not try to get help at the time, even if this effort would probably not have saved her. Douglas is still mad at him at this point. Shortly after they meet, Adam is arrested by the FBI on suspicion of murder at the end of a class given to students. His wife Lois organized the defense and obtained that Adam was temporarily allowed to live under house arrest with an electronic ankle cuff . She tries to get him to cooperate with the police to reduce the sentence. But he refuses to betray his fellow campaigners. A court found him guilty of arson and manslaughter and sentenced him to two 70-year prison terms. He accepts the punishment and realizes that he has lived his life with "hopeless hope".

2.Nicholas and Mimi go into hiding.

Nicholas returns to the place of his and Olivia's sequoia occupation, to Mima's stump, and lives for a while in a log cabin at the foot of the deforested mountains, before it is destroyed by a landslide caused by clearing after rainfall and he barely escapes death. In Bellevue, Washington, he then worked as a piecework as a forklift driver and shelf filler in a distribution warehouse for books. At night he sprays socially critical images on bare walls in the city with slogans that speak out in favor of preserving trees. Later he briefly returns to his former, now neglected and uninhabited farm in Iowa and digs out some boxes with his tree pictures and the photographs of the growing chestnut tree that he buried in the garden with Olivia before leaving and takes them with him as mementos the northwest.

Mimi sells her house and goes into hiding because she could be recognized by the large scar on her face. In an arts gallery in Chinatown in San Francisco, she has the old Chinese scroll inherited from her father with the Buddhist arhats , which she carelessly pinned on the wall in her office, appreciates, experiences their great value and sells them after consulting her sisters . With her share of the proceeds she can finance her future life. Five years later she trained as a trauma therapist and psychological consultant at the University of San Francisco and then treated rich patients in her practice under the name Judith Hanson: in silence and with intensive eye contact for hours in order to identify the core of their personality disorder. When she reads a report in the newspaper about an attack on the machine shed at a logging warehouse on the Olympic Peninsula, Washington state, in which the assassin left behind her slogan "Rule kills, community heals", she fears further investigation because she is in police wanted three states and hid their identities. She is one of the many listeners to Patricia's lecture and experiences her suicide.

The other protagonists continue their personal development towards an expanded ecological awareness from the second part.

3. Neelay dives deeper and deeper into his second world and learns from another Mastery player that he thinks life in the game is worse than real life because someone else always comes after you've built something up in the game And break everything Then and after reading the book The Secret Forest , he wants to change the orientation. The focus is no longer on the unlimited further development and enrichment by finding new mineral resources and technologies, the discovery of new continents or the resurrection of living beings from the dead, but the limitation of the resources that are available to the players, also with a view to environmental friendliness . His employees are not enthusiastic about it because they know the expectations of the players and fear loss of sales, but he continues to tinker with his project of earth exploration and the collection of ideas on how to preserve nature. Patricia's book about the regeneration of the forest is his guideline, he listens to her lecture in San Francisco and tries in vain to stop her from committing suicide by shouting.

4. Dorothy cares for her husband Ray , who is paralyzed because of the stroke and can hardly speak, at home during the day and reads him novels from world literature, etc. a. Tolstoy's war and peace with a situation similar to theirs (Andrej Bolkonski and Natascha Rostov). Then her parallel life begins: every evening she visits her lover Alan, a violin maker. When he asks her to decide to divorce and marry him, she ends the relationship because she cannot leave the helpless Ray alone. She is now fully involved in her situation and is interested in the trees in her garden, determines the different species with the help of books and thereby promotes her husband's interest in life, who regenerates a little mentally and can better articulate himself linguistically. She finds her new stage of life confirmed in Patricia's book The Secret Forest , from which she reads to Ray. The two now let the garden of their house run wild - much to the annoyance of neighbors and the city administration - and are carrying out a private forest renaturation project.

5. Patricia consistently comes to an end on her own path: now in retirement age, writes her last book The New Metamorphosis , gives lectures on climate change and the clearing of old forests all over the world and collects donations for her work. So it can travel around the whole earth, although it causes greenhouse gases, and seeds of plants, v. a. collect the critically endangered, which are stored frozen in a bunker in Colorado. In Machadinho d'Oeste in the Brazilian Amazon jungle, she learns from environmentalists that the buyers of the wood felled by loggers come mainly from the USA. She is aware that her collection saves only a small fraction of the multitude of species that are disappearing each year, and she wonders who will plant their seeds in the earth in the distant future and whether the plants that will sprout from them will be viable without the current diverse networks will be. Years later, Dennis has since died, she explains the world of trees, which send messages to people that they did not understand.

While she lives in a log cabin at the research station in the Great Smoky Mountains in the Appalachians , she receives an invitation to a conference in San Francisco with many prominent participants on the subject of "Let's fix our house: Measures in a warmer world". She is giving a lecture there, which Mimi and Neelay are also listening to, about the alarming state of the earth's atmosphere and the need to preserve the trees, because like humans they have a memory and a consciousness. She answered the conference topic from the perspective of a tree: that of the so-called suicide tree Tachigali visicolor , which blooms and dies only once to make room for its seedlings, to open a hole in the roof of the forest for them and to create a breeding ground with the rotting trunk. At the end she drinks a glass with tree extracts and kills herself with it.

Seeds

In the fourth part, most of the protagonists withdraw from real life, only Nicholas announces his “nevertheless” message with his installations.

Adam accepts his sentence and is only afraid of the long imprisonment. But perhaps, he reflects, prison is a refuge from the punishment that flourishes in the outside world.

Douglas is doing an audio course on dendrology in his prison cell . The guilt of having betrayed Adam weighs heavily on him.

Mimi has lived in San Francisco under a false name for years . Upon learning of Adam's conviction, she feels complicit, but accepts Douglas and Adam's gift for not betraying them. On the Internet, she researched actions by environmentalists and discovered u. a. Nick's signature on a performance with the characters of their arhats. At the end of the novel, she pulls her jade ring from her finger in Mission Dolores Park and feels this as liberation. Leaning against a pine trunk, it has an enlightenment in the Buddha's sense that life in a network with air and earth continues in constant change and that one must not give up, but must multiply. The next morning a policeman finds her sitting motionless and silent under the tree.

While the Brinkmans fight against the city authorities to maintain their game garden, Ray dies , and Dorothy desires to follow him soon, perhaps along the lines of Ovid's Philemon and Baucis .

Neelay has developed a new game with colleagues and brought it to the market, the aim of which is to find out "how big life is, how much everything is connected with everything and what possibilities there can be for an end to suicide." The players have the task of gathering all information worldwide in order to creatively develop ideas for the preservation of life.

Nicholas lives in nature, builds large structures in the forest from uprooted tree trunks and other natural materials, films them and publishes the clips on the Internet. Mimi sees a performance and recognizes the artist from it: a giant sequoia tree is set on fire by figures who look like the Arhats on their Chinese picture scroll. Other people join his actions. Near the tundra they write the word “STILL” on the ground with tree trunks.

reception

criticism

One of the positive reviews is Volker Weidermann's in the Spiegel magazine . He found the novel to be "a book of tremendous gentleness, wisdom and beauty". One notices what is special about Powers in the novel, namely “the combination of extensive knowledge and the gift of being able to let go”, the author is “apparently up to date with the latest developments in forest research and forest biology.” The literary critic Christine Westermann raised it on WDR 2 What stands out about the novel as special and valuable is that it breathes “a high degree of friendliness” and that it “does not teach, does not want to indoctrinate”. It is true that the work has “considerable lengths”, “sometimes too much” pathos and is partly “in the middle” of kitsch, but as a reader you can endure that. Because it is “fascinating” how the author can bring nature to life and show with the novel that “we are lost if we destroy the trees.” The critic in the British magazine New Scientist similarly said: It is one A novel who succeeds in an exciting and touching way both to celebrate nature and to warn about it. The wonder about nature and an extraordinary depth of ecological insight would make a profound, urgent novel.

In the New York Times , the writer Barbara Kingsolver found the novel to be “delightfully choreographed” and “monumental”. He did what few living writers would have tried, and heart-first draws readers into a perspective so much more durable and deeply developed than the human role that “we get glimpses of an enormous, primal sensibility while we are see our own species gradually getting smaller. "

At Spiegel online , the critic Anne Haeming was less convinced. “Most incomprehensible” is that Powers is telling “an activism story from yesterday, about the redwood conservationists who occupied trees in the eighties” and “who today are only engaged in private strife”. Powers fails because of this “nostalgia”, which seems “bizarre” “in view of the omnipresent destruction of nature in North and South America”. Also Publishers Weekly ruled tend negative: The work was revived "a passionate, but unsatisfactory hymn to the wonder of trees." Few would the ernsthaftesten figures. "While the novel is teeming with people, information and ideas, it seems strangely dreary."

Awards

expenditure

English original edition:

German translation:

Reviews

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Richard Powers: The Roots of Life . Fischer Verlag Frankfurt a. M., p. 594.
  2. ↑ Volker Weidermann : Tolstoy for Hippies , in: Literatur Spiegel , November 2018, p. 3
  3. ↑ Christine Westermann : Richard Powers - The Roots of Life , in: WDR 2 from Nov. 18, 2018
  4. ↑ Rowan Hooper: The Overstory review - Richard Powers eco epic provokes awe , in: New Scientist , Oct. 16, 2018, accessed March 14, 2019
  5. ↑ Barbara Kingsolver : The Heroes of This Novel Are Centuries Old and 300 Feet Tall , in: The New York Times, April 9, 2018, accessed March 14, 2019
  6. ↑ Anne Haeming: Between Kitsch and Borke , in: Spiegel online from October 6, 2018
  7. ↑ The Overstory , in: Publishers Weekly , accessed March 14, 2019, original quotations: “an impassioned but unsatisfying paean to the wonder of trees.”, “While it teems with people, information, and ideas, the novel feels curiously barren. ”