Lightning

April 25, 2011
The affecting story of a difficult and misunderstood European visionary on American shores comprises this lyrical, slender novel by Prix Goncourtâwinner Echenoz (Running). Born during a lightning storm "somewhere in southeastern Europe" in the mid-19th century, Gregor has many wonderfully inventive ideas from an early ageâa rapid mail tube running under the Atlantic Ocean, harnessing the power of Niagara Falls for energyâand soon the bright young engineer lands in America, where he ends up working with Thomas Edison, who is less than convinced by Gregor's ideas about alternating current. George Westinghouse, however, is intrigued, and as AC becomes the electrical standard, everybody gets rich, even Gregor, for a while. However, with each succeeding electrical marvel, described by an admiring omniscient narrator who admits to being "mystified" by science, Gregor is increasingly dismissed as a crackpot, and other less than scrupulous inventors make off with his world-altering inventions. Echenoz constructs a sympathetic, stylized portrait of an isolated genius stricken by obsessive compulsiveness, a friend only to pigeons at the end.

April 1, 2011

The latest, very short novel from the French Echenoz profiles the eccentric genius of electrical engineering, Nikola Tesla. 

It follows two other fictional treatments of real people: Ravel (2007) and Running (2009), about the Czech runner Zátopek. Tesla (1856-1943) is called Gregor here. His early days as a Serb in southeastern Europe are dealt with briskly. He's "precociously unpleasant," and from the start his projects are large-scale, even grandiose. He's 28 when he leaves for America and is hired by Edison as a troubleshooter; he invents a generator for alternating current which Edison embraces though refuses to pay him for. Soon after, the majority shareholders of his own company stiff him after his invention of an arc lamp. Clearly, Gregor is no businessman. He goes to work for Westinghouse, Edison's rival, at Western Union; his lectures on alternating current draw huge audiences and make him a celebrity. Yet he remains intensely private and has extraordinary quirks. He is obsessed by the number three. He is beset by phobias: germs, hair, jewelry. Women adore him, but he stays celibate, reserving his affection for pigeons. Yes, dirty old pigeons—only with them is there real communication. This is a wholly unsentimental portrait of a freaky inventor. Our sympathy is not required; all Echenoz requires is our attention, which he secures through his lapidary prose, buffed to a high gloss in this excellent translation. The omniscient narrator shows Olympian detachment coupled with wry humor. Gregor's ups and downs continue. He lives large at the Waldorf, but his latest patron J.P. Morgan turns him loose after Marconi appropriates his patent for radio, the result of a dirty trick perpetrated by Gregor's nemesis, a nobody called Napier. This key development is merely outlined, a disappointment for readers hungry for dramatic flourishes. At the end of his long life, all Gregor has are his pigeons, and even they will turn on him.

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Starred review from May 15, 2011
Not many nineteenth-century inventors would first dazzle an employer with unprecedented feats of electrical engineering and then relieve that employer from the unexpected burden of paying promised premiums for those feats by tearing up a contract worth millions. But readers meet such a rare genius in this engrossing novel, a finely etched fictional portrait of Nikola Tesla (here depicted as Gregor), a talented immigrant who begins life in the U.S. as an underpaid troubleshooter for Thomas Edison but whose exceptional gifts eventually make him Edisons formidable rival. But readers see much more than the extensively chronicled Edison-Tesla rivalry. Probing deep into Teslas tangled psyche, Echenoz illuminates unexpected tensions. Fearless when enveloped by lightning, Gregor quails before an admiring woman. Able to penetrate the most elusive secrets of high-voltage power, he yields to the wildest delusions, succumbing to fantasies of Martian contacts and of death-ray weaponry. And, finally, this complex man, a human meteor who soars into Americas cultural stratosphere, sharing social space with John Pierpont Morgan and Mark Twain, carelessly tumbles into oblivion, keeping company mostly with park pigeons. Coverdales nuanced translation of Echenozs highly successful French original permits English-speaking readers to contemplate the human mystery that persists long after the scientific puzzles have been solved.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)