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Lightning: A Novel, by Jean Echenoz
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Drawn from the life of Nikola Tesla, one of the greatest inventors of his time,
Lightning is a captivating tale of one man’s curious fascination with the marvels of science.
Hailed by the Washington Post as “the most distinctive voice of his generation,” Echenoz traces the notable career of Gregor, a precocious young engineer from Eastern Europe, who travels across the Atlantic at the age of twenty-eight to work alongside Thomas Edison, with whom he later holds a long-lasting rivalry. After his discovery of alternating current, Gregor quickly begins to astound the world with his other brilliant inventions, including everything from radio, radar, and wireless communication to cellular technology, remote control, and the electron microscope.
Echenoz gradually reveals the eccentric inner world of a solitary man who holds
a rare gift for imagining devices well before they come into existence. Gregor is a recluse—an odd and enigmatic intellect who avoids women and instead prefers spending hours a day courting pigeons in Central Park.
Winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Echenoz once again demonstrates
his astonishing abilities as a prose stylist as he vividly captures the life of an isolated genius. A beautifully crafted portrait of a man who prefers the company of lightning in the Colorado desert to that of other human beings, Lightning is a dazzling new work from one of the world’s leading contemporary authors.
- Sales Rank: #1618587 in Books
- Brand: Brand: New Press, The
- Published on: 2011-05-31
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.60" h x .70" w x 5.50" l, .55 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 144 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"Echenoz captures the spare beauty of Tesla, this often-drawn and much-translated figure, till his death at 86. He is a lean ghost in the history of power, electricity and invention. Echenoz fixes him even more firmly in our imaginations."
—Los Angeles Times
Starred Review. Not many nineteenth-century inventors would first dazzle an employer with unprecedented feats of electrical engineering and then relieve that employer from the unexpected burden of paying promised premiums for those feats by tearing up a contract worth millions. But readers meet such a rare genius in this engrossing novel, a finely etched fictional portrait of Nikola Tesla (here depicted as Gregor), a talented immigrant who begins life in the U.S. as an underpaid troubleshooter for Thomas Edison but whose exceptional gifts eventually make him Edison’s formidable rival. But readers see much more than the extensively chronicled Edison-Tesla rivalry. Probing deep into Tesla’s tangled psyche, Echenoz illuminates unexpected tensions. Fearless when enveloped by lightening, Gregor quails before an admiring woman. Able to penetrate the most elusive secrets of high-voltage power, he yields to the wildest delusions, succumbing to fantasies of Martian contacts and of Death-Ray weaponry. And, finally, this complex man, a human meteor who soars into America’s cultural stratosphere, sharing social space with John Pierpont Morgan and Mark Twain, carelessly tumbles into oblivion, keeping company mostly with park pigeons. Coverdale’s nuanced translation of Echenoz’s highly successful French original permits English-speaking readers to contemplate the human mystery that persists long after the scientific puzzles have been solved.
—Booklist
The affecting story of a difficult and misunderstood European visionary on American shores comprises this lyrical, slender novel by Prix Goncourt–winner Echenoz (Running). Born during a lightning storm "somewhere in southeastern Europe" in the mid-19th century, Gregor has many wonderfully inventive ideas from an early age—a rapid mail tube running under the Atlantic Ocean, harnessing the power of Niagara Falls for energy— and soon the bright young engineer lands in America, where he ends up working with Thomas Edison, who is less than convinced by Gregor's ideas about alternating current. George Westinghouse, however, is intrigued, and as AC becomes the electrical standard, everybody gets rich, even Gregor, for a while. However, with each succeeding electrical marvel, described by an admiring omniscient narrator who admits to being "mystified" by science, Gregor is increasingly dismissed as a crackpot, and other less than scrupulous inventors make off with his world-altering inventions. Echenoz constructs a sympathetic, stylized portrait of an isolated genius stricken by obsessive compulsiveness, a friend only to pigeons at the end.
—Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Jean Echenoz won France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt for I’m Gone (The New Press). He is the author of five previous novels in English translation and the winner of numerous literary prizes, among them the Prix Medicis and the European Literature Jeopardy Prize. He lives in Paris.
Linda Coverdale’s most recent translation for The New Press was Jean Echenoz’s Running. She was the recipient of the French American Foundation’s 2008 Translation Prize for her translation of Echenoz’s Ravel. She lives in Brooklyn.
Most helpful customer reviews
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Lightning strikes...
By Barry M. Wightman
Thomas Edison, masterminding a dubious turn-of-the 20th century media event, staged the electrocution death of Topsy, an unfortunate Coney Island elephant, on January 4, 1903. Blasting over six thousand volts through the poor pachyderm, Edison, a hardball entrepreneur, demonstrated the alleged dangers of a competing technology--alternating electrical current, otherwise known as AC. Edison's own technology, direct current, DC, was already electrifying upscale New York City neighborhoods and businesses, generating serious cash--much was at stake. Though that stunt may have won Edison the immediate public relations battle, he ultimately lost the long-term war. Alternating current, a superior and truly innovative technology, emerged on top of the heap, changed the world. QED.
But Nikola Tesla, the Serbian inventor and equally showy pitchman of world-beating alternating current, a steampunk Steve Jobs, ultimately didn't win much. He died many years later, broke and broken amidst the debris of fast lane 20th century life, a tragic genius of electrical power, his long list of inventions--alternating current, radar, wireless transmission, ubiquitous, yet somehow beyond his grasp, his interests diluted and lost thanks to his naivet� with big-time investor patrons like J. P. Morgan or George Westinghouse. Tesla, in a fit of crazed magnanimity, actually tore up a contract with Westinghouse that had entitled him to an amazing royalty of $2.50 per horsepower of electric power sold by his AC technology--not a wise move.
In this charming, quirky novel, the venerable French writer Jean Echenoz tells a short Faustian technology tale, a roman a clef, of Gregor, fictionalized stand-in for the great Serbian visionary, a Beckettian lost man, one of the 20th century's great coulda-shoulda's. Gregor didn't make a deal with the devil, but maybe he should've.
Echenoz, a present master of French fiction, born in 1947, is a risk-taker, a bit of a throwback to the exotic writers of the nouveau roman movement of the 1950s and `60s. Zigging when everybody else was zagging in postwar relief, these writers threw fizzing bombs at conventional fiction, tossing plot, description and character under the revolutionary literary bus. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras or perhaps even Samuel Beckett, produced crazy novels of pure description, cinematically detailed, with surface-only views of life, unreadable for many. For these writers, the interior world or brooding theatrical moralizing was of little interest.
And in Lightning, (published in Paris last year as Des Eclairs, the third in a series of brief, biographical novels, Ravel, and Running, both tales of notable early 20th century lost men), Echenoz skims the sepia-toned, impeccably dressed, impenetrable surface of Gregor, a weird, asexual, lightning-obsessed, germaphobe, bird fancier--the equal of TV's strangely brilliant Monk, the obsessive-compulsive, detail-mad detective. What makes Gregor tick? Why's he like that? Was it because he was born under a bad sign, a cataclysmic lightning-laced thunderstorm, beautifully depicted in the novel's opening? We'll never know.
But fear not, Lightning, is a delight to read, beautifully translated from the French into a smoothly colloquial English by Linda Coverdale. Though the tale's load of electrical engineering wizardry detail is part of the novel's fabric--which may be for some a bit daunting, the reader has the benefit of knowing how the big technology picture turned out. Pretty well, thank you. And English majors are welcome and may successfully apply. Really. It's Echenoz's narrative voice, his teller of tales present tense, chatty voice, a self-deprecating, friendly `I', that does the trick, completely engaging the reader like a Donald Barthelme matter of fact Jiminy Cricket on-our-shoulder guide as we watch Gregor bumble on his picaresque journey through life--working to fulfill his lifelong dream: free energy to everybody, free energy to power the world or his visionary "wireless world system of communications." Sound familiar? These are some goals.
About that voice. Here's Echenoz's narrator, commiserating with the reader about Gregor's obsession with New York's pigeons:
"Pigeons? I mean really. The skulking, deceitful, boring, silly, feeble mindless, vile, vain pigeon....one should above all remember that when buying at the butcher's, pigeon is not very expensive."
Then, moving directly to the first line of the next chapter, continuing the thought:
"Because now Gregor is stone broke."
Echenoz deftly breaks that reader-author scrim, engaging and seductive.
And then, the narrator goes on:
"Personally, I've had about enough of them, these pigeons. And you've had enough of them too, I can tell. We've had enough of them and to tell the truth, fickle and ungrateful things that they are, the pigeons themselves have had enough of Gregor."
But it's not only the endearing voice. It's the magical writing itself, the lyrical language. Here, Echenoz describes Gregor, giving a product demonstration, holding an audience rapt:
"A tall wading bird in a swallow-tail coat, white tie, and patent-leather shoes with thick insulating cork-lined soles that put him, along with his top hat, at close to seven feet, Gregor stands out at first against the gloom of the stage, but spotlights gradually reveal around him a panoply of high-frequency equipment. A dim alcove contains Gregor's softly glowing coils, fluorescent lamps, and his eternal tubes, all gleaming off and on as if they were breathing. Here and there, flashes of light dart crackling from revolving gears. Small copper spheres or ovoids spin all by themselves atop velvet-draped tables, reversing direction at regular intervals."
This, then, is the ultimate magic of this tale of invention and innovation--the words, each in their precise place, obsessive in their detail, like Gregor. We also marvel at the visionary technology, which, as always, is indistinguishable from magic. Yes, it's a shame about Gregor (Tesla) and his tragically raw deal, but, in the end, we're living his future and it's rather fabulous. Lucky for us. There's something very satisfying about that.
Topsy did not die in vain.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Good Science Read
By BD
Written like a novel. Great background about an amazing scientist, Tesla. Very quick read. if only the poor guy could have seen that his pigeons legacy has turned into automobiles today!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating
By Johnnbg13
Based on the life of Nicholas Tesla this is a colorful fast reading, beautifully written novel. A brilliant, tragic story about the life of an incredible man.
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