Book review: 'State Of Wonder'

Book: State Of Wonder
Ann Patchett
Bloomsbury
353 pages
Rs450

What if women could still conceive naturally at age 80? In State Of Wonder, Orange Prize-winning author Ann Patchett imagines an Amazonian tribe called the Lakashi whose women remain fertile until they die.

It is this tribe that scientist and gynaecologist Dr Annick Swenson has been researching for years. It has been so long that the pharmaceutical company funding her research is starting to worry that the profitable fertility drug may never actually materialise. So they send pharmacologist Marina Singh to track her progress.
Forty two-year-old Marina, a gynaecologist by training, had given up medicine after a botched surgery, and become a pharmacologist instead. Annick Swenson had been her toughest teacher in med school, and the reason Marina gave up gynaecology.

So Marina takes the prescribed third-world vaccinations and Larium (malaria medicine), even though it gave her nightmares when she travelled to India as a child. She lands in Manaus, a town on the banks of the Rio Negro in Brazil, without her luggage, and waits for weeks before Swenson shows up.

Marina follows Swenson into the heart of the Amazonian rainforest where the researcher has set up camp. To Marina, Swenson’s appearance brings back a host of memories: of guilt, regret, fear and failure. But the biggest shock  comes when Marina realises that the post-menopausal Swenson, at 78, is pregnant — she’s the subject of her own clinical trial. But women’s bodies weren’t meant to deal with childbirth after a certain age. Marina sees her teacher go through the consequences of a late pregnancy. Fertility is a strong theme in the novel. Swenson is pregnant with a child she doesn’t want. Marina wonders if she will ever be a mother. Both women find themselves maternally inclined towards Easter, an 11-year-old orphaned tribal boy.

Besides details about the sights and sounds of the Amazon, and encounters with snakes and insects, what really makes State Of Wonder worth reading is the complexity of the characters, each with a closet-full of emotional baggage.