This material doesn’t fit comfortably with the story line about Louisa’s burgeoning romance with the mysterious Arthur and her father Walter’s yearning for his long-dead wife. He’s forbidden them to clean his room, but Louisa, a chambermaid who frequently snoops through the guests’ belongings, can’t resist reading some of his papers, a device that allows the author to provide backstory about Tesla’s rivalry with Edison, his love for the wife of a friend and his idealistic refusal to profit from the inventions he believes should be freely available to all. I have given AC electricity to the world…radar, remote control, and radio to the world, and because I asked for nothing in return, nothing is exactly what I got.” He talks to a pigeon and a statue of Goethe in Central Park, and he believes they reply-no wonder the staff at the Hotel New Yorker, where Tesla hasn’t paid his bill in months, think he’s crazy. On New Year’s Eve, 1942, the 86-year-old inventor bitterly muses over his past: “I am broke. In her second novel, Hunt ( The Seas, 2004) imagines the final days of Nikola Tesla.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |