The Waterworks

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Coming months, we will animate three future scenario’s, one of them ‘the valley of debt-free money’. More to come! The novel falls in two genres I'm interested in: Gothic and SF horror. Specifically, the story takes place in New York in 1871. E.L. Doctorow is excellent at creating a picture of the time. The corrupt politics of Tammany Hall. Maimed veterans of the American Civil War out on the street begging for alms.

The narrator is a journalist who caught a glimpse of his father--which is a surprise, for the narrator thought that his father was dead. The narrator investigates this mystery and discovers that his father, along with some other wealthy men, are not dead. These men are being kept alive by Dr. Sartorius. Sartorius, a brilliant and innovative Army surgeon during the Civil War, had invented treatments that were then unknown to medicine: blood transfusions, dialysis, bone marrow transplants and others. His dark secret is that young children must be sacrificed for their blood and somatic cells. These treatments are done in a secret locale. If the novel didn't go overboard on the ellipses, and were written at novella length, I would have given this 5 stars. This novel has been described as a kind of tribute to Poe by Doctorow (whose parents gave him his first name Edgar in specific tribute to the writer) and it’s a superb detective novel in the tradition started by The Murders In The Rue Morgue. The policeman Donne is a classic sleuth. The man they end up hunting, the mysterious Dr Sartorious, has wonderful tinges of Poe’s creepy villains, as well as all those morally discomforting Victorian men of science like Dr Jekyll and HG Wells’ Invisible Man. The climactic scenes in the Croton Reservoir are as ghoulish as anything from the original Edgar’s opium-inspired nightmares. The Waterworks has a community garden, where local volunteers grow their own fruit and vegetables. The park has two children's playgrounds. The Waterworks is also a popular spot for walkers and offers several varied routes. The park has a multi-sports facility. We have installed public access defibrillators for park users. History of the WaterworksI managed to finish this ... book, but just ... barely. Will I read another by this author ... I don't think so. Did I enjoy this ... book? No ... I did not ... enjoy ... this book. Why?

The novel is in the first person, fictionally written by the character McIlvaine some thirty or forty years after the events.Scheduled Saturday “Park runs” of 3 miles around the Waterworks for walkers and joggers are fun events and attract lots of families and people of all ages and fitness. Recently, we went international. Since May 20, the waterworks is the centerpiece at the Dutch Pavilion of the Architecture Biennale of Venice, and on June 14, we published the English video animation of ‘The Waterworks of Money’ (part I, part II will be published at the end of the summer): People didn’t take what Martin Pemberton said as literal truth, he was much too melodramatic or too tormented to speak plainly. Women were attracted to him for this - they imagined him as some sort of poet, though he was if anything a critic, a critic of his life and times. So when he went around muttering that his father was still alive, those of us who heard him, and remembered his father, felt he was speaking of the persistence of evil in general.” So you won't think I'm exaggerating about the ellipsis, here's an example copied straight from the book:

Those who don’t like Poe and are put of by the reference should also know that Doctorow said he thought his namesake a “first rate bad writer”. He was aware of his faults as well as his appeal. Waterworks is far more sophisticated and carefully written than Doctorow’s doomed namesake generally managed. Another touchstone might be Wilkie Collins’ Woman In White, especially thanks to this novel’s clever flirtation with the supernatural, and fascinating, troubled character of the narrator. In short, the plot is crap, the characters are crap, the pacing is crap, and the writing is crap. If you like crap, you'll love this. If not, then don't bother unless you can find the version of the book that all the big-time critics seem to have read and rave about. (This other version must exist since there is no way they could have been reviewing the load of crap I waded through.) With the help of many international partners and contributors, we launched the first chapter in Dutch at Follow the Money in our home country the Netherlands in October 2022. Our first Dutch-language publication won a journalistic prize and was nominated for another one a few months ago. The works of art were exhibited from 16 October 2022 until 29 January 2023 at Rijksmuseum Twenthe, and are currently on view in the exhibition ‘The Future of Money’ at the KunstMuseum The Hague (14 April, 2023 until 8 September 2023), one of the leading museums in the Netherlands. An enlarged copy of the artwork is momentarily on display at the lobby of the Dutch Ministry of Finance and at Rabobank. Moreover, the works were exhibited at several festivals and educational institutes, and we gave tens of talks and organized tens of workshops based on the maps and Dutch animations last year. For me, McIlvaine is a marvellous creation. His voice is convincing, steady, reliable, wise and ideally suited to the strange and gripping tale he spins out. As Simon Schama explains in another (far warmer) contemporary review, it’s actually just right that he should have this “mutilated diction, broken by elisions and compressions of thought and utterance”.Waterworks has further affinity with Poe though in its lurid colouring (and “lurid” is a word used throughout the narrative), and fascination with physical unpleasantness. Until a few weeks ago, I would also have described the story as supremely outlandish in the Poe model too. But now (ignore this link if you want to avoid spoilers), science is starting to catch up with Doctorow’s imagination. The novel instead feels as perspicacious as it does outlandish. It still, however, has plenty of macabre appeal. The gothic side of the novel is a Frankenstein inspired plot, which begins when one of the freelance contributors to the newspaper sees his dead father in a carriage on Broadway. The father had been a rich man, his fortune founded on the slave trade and wartime profiteering, and his son had been disinherited following an argument about morality. But when Augustus Pemberton had died, the fortune had disappeared, leaving the widow and another son virtually destitute. These gaps in the sentences also, crucially, create the continual impression that McIlvaine is hunting for words, describing things that he can’t properly put into prose - things too difficult, too awful - deliberately leaving things out because they are... unreachable. Schama suggests it “positions him to value the aggregating skills of the police officer, Donne, since ‘enlightenment comes . . . in bits and pieces of humdrum reality, each adding its mosaic bit of glitter to the eventual vision.’” Serving eight local ales and twelve local ciders, nothing comes further than 28 miles. CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) popped in to see what was going on, and sip their way through the list.

A goodreads friend recenltly reviewed a novel by E.L. Doctorow, and that caused me to remember that I read another novel by E.L. Doctorow, _The Waterworks._ Two shortcomings of the novel. Doctorow overuses ellipses....This was a distraction for me, the reader....A second problem is that I felt the novel was somewhat padded....Though my memory might be at fault here...But I felt at the time that this story should have been told at novella length.... The narrator is a newspaper editor, who is in a good position to understand New York in this period of rapid change, as the city expands at an incredible rate after the North's victory in the Civil War while remaining under the corrupt government of the Ring led by Bill Tweed. A symbol of the changing city, which is the source of the title, is the vast reservoir behind high walls in the north of the city, providing water to supply industry and the expanding population. Now that I finally got around to actually reading it, I can confirm it all. Ta-Nehisi Coates includes the book in the 2015 list of the ten best of his life so far and states that it is "one of the most thrilling books I’ve ever read. And I still believe in that, you know? That stories should sometimes thrill people. Not all the time. But sometimes." Well, yes, absolutely. Augustus Pemberton: gained wealth from the slave trade and the production of low grade war goods during the American Civil WarMartin tells four people of the sighting: his editor, McIlvaine; his fiancée, Emily Tisdale; the family pastor, Dr. Grimshaw; and a college friend, Harry Wheelwright. When Martin disappears soon afterward, McIlvaine begins looking for him and talks to all four. He also talks to Augustus's widow (and Martin's stepmother), Sarah Pemberton, who has always liked Martin and is deeply concerned about him. From Wheelwright, McIlvaine learns that he and Martin secretly opened Augustus's grave and found a child buried there instead of the old man. From Sarah, McIlvaine learns that Augustus was diagnosed with a terminal blood disease and that with the assistance of his secretary, Eustace Simmons, he entered a private hospital said to be near Saranac Lake in upstate New York and run by a Dr. Sartorius. There, she was told, Augustus died. Sarah also reveals that Augustus's wealth seems to have vanished shortly before his death, leaving Sarah and her young son, Martin's half-brother Noah, penniless.