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Time Travelers
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12116 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1994 |
2,215 Words |
| Author
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Linda Simon
Linda Simon is professor of literature at Skidmore College
and a frequent contributor to The World & I. |
THE HOLDER OF THE WORLD
Bharati Mukherjee
New York: Knopf, 1993
304 pp., $22.00
When John Keats contemplated the designs and inscriptions on a certain Grecian urn, he celebrated all that he did not and could not know about their history. "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter," he wrote. And yet there was much he wanted to discover about those enticing, elusive men and women whose figures graced a work of art. What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Although he concluded that beauty is the only truth the urn ever would reveal centuries after its creation, he yearned to know other truths about the passions that thrilled the souls of these Greek forebears. His yearning, of course, is shared by all historians.
Bharati Mukherjee recalls Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in the epigraphs for The Holder of the World, her fascinating, brilliantly imagined new novel. A longing to resurrect the past is shared by its two central characters: Beigh Masters, a young woman trained as a historian who works as an "asset researcher" finding valuable objects for wealthy clients, and Venn Iyer, "father of fractals and designer of inner space," a computer scientist from India working at MIT on an unusual historical project, a program called X-2989.
Venn and his colleagues have decided to research October 29, 1989, in order to restore a single ordinary day to virtual reality. "By `research,"' Mukherjee tells us,
they mean the mass ingestion of all the world's newspapers, weather patterns, telephone directories, satellite passes, every arrest, every television show, political debate, airline schedule . . . . do you know how many checks were written that day, how many credit card purchases were made? Venn does.
After the data base is completed, the team will work on ways to juxtapose people into the grid of information. By answering a thousand personal questions, each time traveler would produce a personality profile enabling him to
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