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Published on 5/15/08
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Follow along. More than 50 million years ago, a lightning storm frightens a small horse that looks like a dog, which separates from the pack and falls into a lake, drowning. Its body, compressed into the sediment, decomposes to the point where its heart recomposes into a drop of oil, which workers in 1970s Utah exhume from the earth and refine into gasoline, where it swishes into the tank of 22-year-old Clarissa Sanders’s Pinto in 1975. Combusted and tossed out as fumes from her car, it settles as sediment (again) in the eaves of her home, where she’ll inhale it and, 30 years later, it will have metastasized into cancer that kills her. Got it?
Danish writer Adolphsen has crafted a strange little novel about the action of science on our lives and the cold comfort understanding that science brings. We first encounter the horse, then are taken through the life of Jimmy Nash, nee Djamolidine Hasanov, a Ukrainian immigrant to the U.S. who loses half his right arm while working the oil pumps that bring the former horse heart out of the ground. Clarissa picks up a hitchhiking Jimmy, and the two drop acid and, as best they can, address the issue Adolphsen raises: What control do we have over our lives?
Chaos theory is nothing new, and when a book shares the same basic premise as an Ashton Kutcher film, we’re wary. But Adolphsen pulls out some surprising stops and neatly investigates the need for our belief in free will, while knowing that biology—and 50-million-year-old horse hearts—dictate the rules.
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