Get Access Oh Pure And Radiant Heart Fashioned By Lydia Millet Accessible As Hardcover

book filled me with anxiety and gave me nightmares, I highly recommend it. I was drawn in by the premise, but I liked the idea of it more than the actuality, and in the end it was a struggle to finish.
I quite liked the historical interludes, more so than the actual plot, Almost defies categorization. Really surprising based on the synopsis, I didn't have high expectations that this story would be my kind of book.
But wow, this was one of the best things I've read all year, so, is it ok to review a book I didn't finish well, I'm going to do it anyway, this book has such great potential, the premise is brilliant and the narrative is simply poetic at most points, it's just too long, and filled with too many sanctimonious segues about nuclear war, maybe someday I'll finish it, or perhaps read an abridged version, Imperfect and emanating beauty, mystery, and luminously dark truth, Millet is a sage. My favorite of the five Millet books I have read, A realistic scifi mash up of abomb scientists and religious nut jobs, which drags a bit in the middle.
The writing is at times quite beautiful, and Millet shows that she can do good dialogue when she wants to.
Definitely not a blast, and sometimes a test,
but this long walk down atom bomb lane still
gets a rating of a thousand cranes.
stars. i didn't expect to like this book as much as how the dead dream, but i was held completely enthralled throughout.
. . Oppenheimer's first full day at the motel was devoted to television, He located the remote on the bedside table, where it sat beside the enigmatic telephone with its sheet of intricate numeric instructions, and eventually by pressing the button marked power discovered its function.
from OH PURE AND RADIANT HEART

In Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, the three dead geniuses who invented the atomic bombRobert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and Enrico Fermimysteriously appear in Sante Fe, New Mexico, in, nearly sixty years after they watched history's first mushroom cloud rise over the New Mexico desert in.
One by one, they are discovered by a shy librarian, who takes them in and devotes herself to them.


Faced with the evidence of their nuclear legacy, the scientists embark on a global disarmament campaign that takes them from Hiroshima to Nevada to the United Nations.
Along the way, they acquire a billionaire pothead benefactor and a growing convoy of RVs carrying groupies, drifters, activists, former Deadheads, New Age freeloaders, and religious fanatics.


In this heroically mischievous, sweeping tour de force, Lydia Millet brings us an apocalyptic fable that marries the personal to the political, confronts the longing for immortality with the desire for redemption, and evokes both the beauty and the tragedy of the nuclear sublime.

This book is so curious it feels a little bit like a Kurt Vonnegut or Tom Robbins novel, but the diction is higher and the philosophizing more rampant.
I can only conclude that Lydia Millet is so smart it hurts, because she can create scenes of intense intimacy and introspection see the interiority of Ann and her thinking about her relationship with her husband Ben and also of nearepic sideshowness see the novel's climax, which involves miraculously resurrected Abomb scientists, an army of Christian fundamentalists, a matching massing of neohippie/raver trust fundies, a SWAT team, and an impossibly large flock of whooping cranes.
If there's a novel that more closely captures this particular moment in time's engagement with war and warmongering, I don't know it.
Should be read in high schools everywhere, couldn't finish it, alas. Just so much internal dialogue of the poetic bigdeepthoughtsaboutlife sort so frequently, I tired of it quickly, I love books where the prose starts affecting the way I think, This book makes it so easy to slip into the minds of the characters and for them to slip into yours.
It was effort to finish this one, On one hand, I LOVED the historical/factual information peppered beautifully through this novel, It was also written in a format Id never seen before rapidly shifting between character inner thoughts, storylines and from speech to mental conversations.
I also appreciated the commentary on radical belief and the characters that grew from radicalism,

On the other hand, it was, . . hard to really get into, You dont really like the main character, nor get to understand her at all, The novel starts with promising foreshadowing of deep character development, but you never really get anything more, Dont expect deep character development from any of the characters though I think the author was more concerned with the agenda that nuclear weapons are prolific and horrific.


To summarize: the factual portion was definitely well researched and I did enjoy googling all the historic events.
I learned a lot but the fiction was esoteric, hard to digest and left me disappointed,

Also, the editing was poor, Several glaring grammatical, printing and storyline errors, This book isn't perfect, but it has stuck with me more than so many of the other books I've read recently, probably because the message is so important.
Nuclear weapons have definitely done so much damage to the planetand not just to Hiroshima and

Nagasaki, but to all the beings and wild places on the planet where they were tested.


The book itself in so many ways is a bit of a miracle, Prior to reading it, I saw so many references to Vonnegut and DeLilo and I saw those for sure, but there's definitely more than a touch of Tom Robbins in there too and I won't be spoiling the fun by giving the similarities away.


As I said in the opening, the book isn't perfect, It lags in places and can be overly didactic, But it also has an endearing protagonist and some interesting commentary on a variety of topics from gentrification to religious zealots.
And, as noted, this one just has just stuck with me, novels this ambitious nuclear science militaryindustrial complex American religion, fascinating, imaginative Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilard come back from the dead!, and funny great satire of the sun belt rich don't come along all that often.
They should be read when they do,

But, as everyone who has read this book has pointed out, OPRH could have been cut by a quarter without really losing much of anything.
The problem is: which quarter do you cut

Some readers could do with a great deal less of Ann and Ben's relationship.
Their argument is generally not that Ann and Ben could be eliminatedthey play an important narrative role, at leastbut that there is far too much of them given how uninteresting they are.


Some readers could do without the history of the USA's nuclear program, Their argument, in short, is "I hate learning, Keep facts out of my novels, "

I don't think anyone would want less of the final quarter: the story of Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilard coming back from the dead.
All three are wonderful characters their actions dramatize perfectly the problems of scientific knowledge, social ignorance, political activism, and religious belief.
That said, some would probably prefer a more convincing ending, Millet could have left it open, but this is a roman a these, and I understand why she ends as she does.


Some readers could do without the philosophizing that the characters get up to, particularly Anne, who is given to thinking things like "If a country were more like a crowd, with feeling rippling among the ranks, instead of a network of institutions all distant from each other.
it would not control itself with such coldness and such economy, If a country were more like a body, then it might have a chance to know itself,", Is this satire Ann/Millet must know that bodies don't know themselves, right That bodies react to external stimuli without mediation So if a country were more like a body, not only would it not know itself, it would probably start a war every time someone brought one too many bottles of wine back from the Rhine geopolitical version of a mosquito bite.
Later we get even more immortal thought along the badRilke lines of wouldn't it be great to be an object so then you couldn't choose things and then you'd be content, why don't people just accept this objecthood and embrace it Because, Ann, then we'd all be dead.

Ben is guilty, too: "It is the world with its animals, . . tides and seasons, he thought: it is the world that gives us such a soul as we have, It gives us life and we all it our own,", If this seems a little less silly than Ann, don't worry, Ben will get absolutely moronic twenty pages later: "If the world gave us our souls, why were the souls so impoverished" Because, you know, the world is so naturally full and perfect.
"We have obscured the world, he said to himself, . . we have forgotten what the world is, We believe we are it, We can't see past ourselves to the world, he thought, " Right, that's it! The world is perfect, it gives us our soul, but we've done something wrong with those souls, though I suppose the souls should have caused us to act as we did and.
. . the naturalist's rather theological dilemma: if everything is natural, what causes evil
Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilard also get into a bit of the old codphilosophizing, but at least with them it's often just a reaction to how much the world has changed since their last memories of it in the midcentury.


Now, you might think I've tipped my hand fairly heavily here, as to what I'd like to see less of.
Yes, I like the very short bits on the history of nuclear weapons,

Obviously, you think, I object to the philosophizing, But not so, my friend! If I were to cut, Ann and Ben would get the axe, It's important to have some kind of domestic arrangement here, it holds the book together, but we only need connective tissue.
Millet just doesn't make the very mild ups and downs of their relationship matterin fact, the only time I was at all interested was when I realized Ann's obsession with the scientists could be read metanarratively, as Millet's obsession with the scientists.
That fits well with the most intelligent aspect of the novel: how to make the impossible choice between complete domestic happiness, and social activism.
But it's a bad sign for the romance angle when it functions best as commentary on another part of your book.


Now, that said, the philosophy expounded here is horrific, I'm fine with books that philosophize, at great length, I object, however, to books that

i stick words and thoughts in the characters' mouths, when those words and thoughts are fairly obviously those of the author.
This is what a narrator is for: to say things the author thinks, Millet is too far into close third person for that to work, This is a technical issue that can't be overcome,

ii go on at great length with bad philosophy, This is my third Millet book, and I'm fairly sure she's setting herself up as the Tolstoy of deep ecology.
Nothing wrong with that, but if you want to make the case, for goodness sake, at least make it well.
There's no reason to become a positivist "what is is the world, and the world is right", You can stop just short of that, at nature mystic at least then you're not claiming that there's any rational basis behind the feelings outlined so clearly by Freud in his work on religion.


iii expound a philosophy that directly contradicts the Oh Pure and Radiant Heart's form, as here, You can't be a positivist, and write close third person, There is no close perspective in positivism, only bodies being pushed around,

That's an awful lot of criticism, so let me repeat: novels this ambitious, fascinating, imaginative, and funny don't come along all that often, and they should be read when they do.
And, of course, I might be wrong: Millet might be presenting the deep flaws in ecological thought, and not affirming that thought itself.
In any case, Millet forces you to think in ways that the average novelist can only dream of, As I said: Tolstoy of deep ecology, Honestly I didn't finish this book, It was interesting at first but then got progressively weird, Who knows, someone may love it, but not my cup of tea, Lydia Millet's book is one of the best I've read in the past year, It's beautifully written, smart, filled with the sense of the impermanence of existence, the frailty of our species, the beautiful foolishness of our attempts to tamper with Nature.
It will make you think differently it might make you weep, It has some amazingly beautiful lines and observations, The plot becomes fantastical at the end you have to be willing to go on the journey with Millet, but it's a hell of a ride.
Thanks, Telaina, for turning me on to this great book! I read this book for grad school and HATED it.
I later heard that the author further edited the book down, so maybe it got better, I think our teacher only assigned it because the author was a friend of hers, Yuck. .