Patchett delivers a homage to the film “Fitzcarraldo” and its director, Werner Herzog, the patron saint of all thrillingly ill-considered voyages into the unknown. When Marina arrives, she imagines that “every insect in the Amazon lifted its head from the leaf it was masticating and turned a slender antenna in her direction.” When she reaches the Amazonian city of Manaus and goes to the opera, Ms. Or at least it can be found in small doses. Patchett’s title kicks in as soon as the plane touches down. “Should I wake you up,” asks the man in the next seat, “or just let you go?” We learn that Marina, who had to take anti-malarial medication to visit her father in Calcutta, is also plagued with drug-induced nightmares on her flight to Brazil. We learn that the half-Indian Marina is the child of a white mother and foreign graduate-student father who abandoned the family, a situation that “had become the stuff of presidential history.” This background left Marina with “all those translucent cousins who looked at her like she was a llama who had wandered into their holiday dinner” and a general sense of being a misfit. So “State of Wonder” is headed for Brazil. Swenson was a medical school professor of Marina’s and was so tough that she stopped Marina’s medical career in its tracks. Annick Swenson, a fierce if not exactly irreproachable figure. The letter announcing Anders’s death comes from Dr. Patchett has embedded many small hints about her much larger novel in this miniature scene. Patchett writes, “as if she were an extension ruler and her ankles and knees and hips were all being brought together at closer angles.” “There was inside of her a very modest physical collapse, not a faint but a sort of folding,” Ms. Marina suddenly grasps why people faced with sudden shock are often advised to sit down. Patchett gives a quick glimpse of how crystalline and exquisite her prose can be. In Marina’s reaction to this terrible news, which comes on only the book’s second page, Ms. Anders Eckman, has died of a fever in a remote part of Brazil.

Fox arrives to tell her that her research partner, Dr. She is having an unremarkable affair with Mr. Marina does unremarkable research on cholesterol. Marina Singh, the 42-year-old research scientist who is the heroine of “State of Wonder,” Ann Patchett’s most far-flung yet somehow least exotic book, is in her office at a large pharmaceutical company in Minnesota when the bad news arrives.

State of wonder patchett