The Overstory - A Novel

Richard Powers

W. W. Norton & Company

2018

512 páginas

17h 4m

ISBN-13: 9780393635522

An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers—each summoned in different ways by trees—are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.

In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity’s self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us? "Listen. There’s something you need to hear."

Resenhas (2)

4 (Muito bom)

Gostei muito do livro, mas não teria demorado tanto tempo se não tivesse que fazer anotações pra faculdade. A temática foi muito valiosa pra mim, porque eu normalmente leio ecocrítica sobre animais, mas nunca sobre árvores. Agora, meu Deus, que livro deprimente. Tô precisando de algo mais leve agora, porque é uma tristeza só.

Adorei que tem vários personagens diferentes (e muitos que têm vibes autistas 🫰) - gostei muito dos Brinkmans e das tretas entre eles. As cenas em Mimas foram poderosíssimas, graças também à dinâmica maravilhosa entre Nick e Olivia. O desmatamento no livro é muito impactante, com cenas de partir o coração.

Recomendo o livro demais, mas é forte no cocuruto. Principalmente no atual cenário mundial, vendo os EUA destruindo o país inteiro, incluindo a natureza deles.