The Gold Bug Variations
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| Recent paperback edition | |
| Author | Richard Powers |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | William Morrow & Company |
| Released | August 1, 1991 |
| Media Type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-688-09891-6 (first edition, hardback) |
The Gold Bug Variations is a novel by American writer Richard Powers, first released in 1991.
[edit] Plot introduction
The novel intertwines the discovery of the chemical structure of DNA with the musicality of Johann Sebastian Bach's piano composition, the Goldberg Variations.
The plot hinges on two love affairs: the first, set in the 1950s, between two scientists intent discovering the mysteries of DNA; the second, in the 1980s, between two lovers who befriend the scientist featured in the novel's flashbacks.
[edit] Plot summary
Stuart Ressler, a brilliant molecular biologist in his mid-twenties, sets out in 1957 to crack the genetic code. His efforts are sidetracked by other demanding codes - social, moral, musical, spiritual. He falls in love with a married member of his research team, Jeanette Koss. His passion for her as well as a growing understanding of the pattern-making and the pattern-searching urge underwriting all life lead Ressler to abandon science and disappear.
Years later, in the early 1980s, Ressler is discovered by Frank Todd, a young, drifting art historian and computer programmer. Todd finds Ressler, now a taciturn recluse, doing an anonymous night-shift computer job, and he enlists the research librarian Jan O'Deigh in tracing Ressler's past and determining what has happened to the former scientist. Todd and O'Deigh's code-breaking attempt is itself rendered intractable by their ambivalent love for each other and for the old man.
These two love stories twist about each other in a double helix of desire. The four protagonists are driven toward a provisional definition of life in all its chemical particulars - the secret shorthands, the compositional impulse of evolution, the links laid down between the cell itself and the complex organism that would try to understand it. Each must discover something of the unified diversity of the life molecule, its endless, mutating variations on a four-note theme.
[edit] External link
- Theme and Variations, a site on mathematics and the Goldberg Variations that quotes Powers.
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