Machine [Import] [Hardcover]

Peter Adolphsen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 27, 2008

"Machine" is a unique piece of fiction that encapsulates the very essence of earthly existence: how chance and random events influence seemingly unconnected lives and matter. Two stories of metamorphosis entwine: the first chronicles the life of a drop of oil from its very beginning within a small prehistoric horse's heart to its combustion within a Ford car engine in Texas, the second follows the lives of the passengers within the vehicle. Clarissa picks up a hitchhiker on the Interstate to San Antonio. She is a young, intelligent student willing to experiment with LSD. The hitchhiker is Jimmy Nash, who has been granted asylum in the United States from the Soviet Union and has successfully reshaped his identity. He reads Emily Dickinson's poetry and until a horrific accident had worked on an oil field. Both their lives appear to alter in direct correlation with the changing molecular structure of this single drop of oil.From the very start, the reader is seduced by the author's unusual vision of the world we live in, from the drowning of Eohippus or 'the dawn horse' fifty-five million years ago to the inhalation of carcinogenic particles by a young woman in the 1970s. The elegant prose is both lyrical and technically astounding and delivers a fascinating journey that will play on the mind and tempt an immediate second read.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Peter Adolphsen was born in 1972 in Arhus, Denmark and has written Sma historier (1996), Sma historier 2 (2000), Brummstein (2003). Machine was published in Denmark in 2006. He is currently working on two projects, En million historier and Katalognien. His books are translated into German, French, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 80 pages
• Publisher: Harvill Secker (May 27, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 184655103X
• ISBN-13: 978-1846551031
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.6 x 8.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,006,769 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Peter Adolphsen was born in 1972 and attended the Danish Writers School from 1993-95. At 25, he made his debut as an author with a collection of short prose entitled SMALL STORIES, followed in 2000 by SMALL STORIES 2. His novel MACHINE was published in English in 2008.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A mind-bending examination of time, circumstance, and destiny, June 30, 2008

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Machine (Hardcover)

What does a prehistoric horse that died in the Eocene era have to do with a nine-year-old boy in Austin, Texas, in 1975? In MACHINE, a "story of a speck of matter," it takes Danish author Peter Adolphsen less than 100 pages to explain the seemingly improbable but totally convincing connection.

This very short novel starts 55 million years ago when a storm frightens a herd of prehistoric horses no bigger than fox terriers. One of these was a five-year-old mare who gets separated from the others and injured. Although she survives one night alone and hurt, she falls again into a muddy river the next day, and this time she dies. Over millions of years the river changes: it dries up, and the body of the little mare is covered with tons of sediment, which turn to rock, her own body changing to oil.

Fast forward to 1973 when a young Azerbaijani named Djamolidine Hasanov (or Jimmy Nash, as he is now known) is working on an oil pipeline in the Uinta Basin of Utah. He was born in Baku in 1948 and as a child was an avid and somewhat successful competitive cyclist for his national team. But he longed to escape the Soviet Union, and his athletic abilities helped earn him passage to the United States. One day an accident at work blows his arm off.

Clarissa Sanders is a 22-year-old biology student in Texas when she picks up Jimmy hitchhiking. They spend the afternoon together taking LSD and eating snacks. Since she was seven, Clarissa had had a fear of dying and a fear of going insane, so she had no desire to take drugs. However, when Jimmy held out to her the small square of paper soaked in acid, she impulsively accepted.

Later that day, her car's exhaust pipe released its emissions into the air, and one speck was caught in a spider's web. That speck of soot will find its way into Clarissa's throat and eventually transform her body. A witness to this change in Clarissa is a young neighbor whose life will be impacted, as were Jimmy's and Clarissa's, by the oil that was once the beating heart of an animal.

Woven into this story is the science that make everything 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 dry (yet fascinating) scientific details. Readers find out less about the characters of the book than about the processes that shape them. Still, we learn that Jimmy writes haiku and that Clarissa has full confidence in science as a problem-solver. Adolphsen also interjects some interesting tangents on subjects such as ethnic/linguistic/cultural identity, American advertising and Mormon history.

MACHINE is an odd novel: an experiment in style and content. It is vast in its subject yet extremely concise, and the story it tells is often obscured by the method of telling itself. Adolphsen plays with the Chaos Theory and the idea of coincidence, unpacking these complex ideas with rapid speed. Life and death, oil and identity, and over 55 million years in less than 100 pages may not seem possible. But Adolphsen's attempt is admirable, interesting and sometimes even beautiful.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Life, Death and Transformation, January 21, 2011

By 

litaddiction (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

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This review is from: Machine (Kindle Edition)

From MACHINE:
"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."

Translated from the Danish by Charlotte Barslund, MACHINE is a short novella that explores life, death and 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 carrying 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 will read more by Adolphsen.

4.0 out of 5 stars this man has style, November 3, 2011

By 

R. Bagula "Roger L. Bagula" (Lakeside, Ca United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Machine (Hardcover)

I can't say that I like this book.
What I can say that it has style and form.
Was it worth reading?
Following the souls or hearts of dawn horses
through a series of modern events
does seem to have interest
and is a unique approach to the development
of the world?
I,for one, question the motives of such a spirit guide.