Petru PopescuAlmost AdamMonika says:
The Dogilani is a savannah in the heart of Kenya. Paleoanthropologist Ken Lauder ends up here on the run from alleged poachers who were ordered to make him disappear because his research is no longer well received in high places. Alone in the wilderness his fate seems to be sealed, but his encounter with a young boy he later affectionately calls "Long Toes" not only saves his life but also shakes his scientific convictions. In this remote region where hardly ever a modern man sets his foot two species of hominids have survived whose evolution seems to have progressed at a much slower pace than that of the homo sapiens sapiens. Lauder has the unexpected chance to expand his research from fossil bone finds to living representatives of two species thought extinct for three million years. Charles Darwin wasn’t the first to ask the question about our origin. What did our ancestors look like and how did they live? Bones can’t answer all the burning questions. In Popescu’s novel Ken Lauder meets the australopithecines, the species of hominids the famous Lucy belongs to. Three million years ago they already walked erect even if their brain with a volume of 500 ccm still was that of an ape. Against the background of political uproar in Kenya that proves to be life threatening Lauder experiences things in the savannah he never would have dreamt of. Popescu manages to transport the reader into a world that lags about three million years behind our present day. But are those hominids really so different from us? His speculative vision of our ancestors clearly says no. Actually Long Toes is not so different from Popescu’s own son Adam, whence his title ALMOST ADAM. The two kinds of australopithecines, one robust and one gracile, already learned to hate the strangeness in the other, an all too human characteristic. The book is full of suspense and coherent, the events are speculative, but the plot never seems as construed as those of two other recent books dealing with rediscovered hominids, namely Philipp Kerr’s ESAU and John Darnton’s NEANDERTAL. Avon Books, 1997
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Last changes: 02-09-03 Copyright 2000 Christina Gross & Monika Hübner |
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