This intriguing novella tells the story of a drop of oil from its earlier form as the heart of a prehistoric horse to its combustion in the engine of a Ford, where it intersects with the lives of two humans. On one of these, ‘the soot particles of the ex-heart of the horse’ operate as a lethal carcinogenic agent.
Related in brisk, incisive prose, the narrative consists of complex mechanistic chains that zoom from macro to micro, with chunks of technical detail that are more usually found in textbooks, or on helpful university websites, than in a novel. Of the phantom pain in Jimmy Nash’s missing arm, Adolphsen writes ‘… the lesions in the peripheral nervous system occasionally triggered erroneous transmissions to the neoceptive paths…’ Here is Clarissa’s arrival in her parking place:
The photoreceptors of her retinas adjusted to the distance, the light etc.
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