By Jane Kramer What drives Roden is the realization that through food "you could reconstruct a world".
Alan Matarasso, one of America's leading plastic surgeons, says: "Ten years ago you could reconstruct a woman's breasts for $12,000 now it can be done for $600".
Of his batting, the great cricket writer Neville Cardus wrote that if everything about batting was forgotten you could reconstruct its grammar from watching Graveney.
For the conceit of the novel is that we are made of words – our own, however stale and self-limiting ("I sometimes feel that you could reconstruct an entire marriage in 10 sentences"), and others', especially the legacy of literature.
I don't think you could reconstruct either Quauhnahuac or Tomalìn from "Under the Volcano," but, as Vicky suggests, the book, like Joyce's, does have the power to mimic consciousness.
If you unearthed them carefully enough, sifting the earth minutely for strands of hair and slowly brushing away the dirt from the orbits of the eyes, you could reconstruct a face and a life.
On a comment on a blog post, Michelle N. Meyer, a Academic Fellow, Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics at Harvard Law School, did a great job explaining why the idea that you could reconstruct a face from just a few DNA markers is, well, wrong.
You could confidently reconstruct the whole thing yourself in 3D.
You could virtually reconstruct the milieu of these almost ostentatiously average lives from Updike's books: the hot-dog stands and the gas stations; later, the country clubs and the swimming pools.
"If you could eventually reconstruct imagined conversations from brain activity, thousands of people could benefit".
