Book Report: The Shipping News

4. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News (1993) (2/28/2020)

I first read this book many years ago and was blown away: by the poetry of the prose, the substance of the characters, the drama and humor and poignancy of the lives portrayed, the sweep of the Newfoundland landscape. On this second read, I was perhaps even more impressed, especially on the drama-humor-poignancy front—and perhaps a little less so on the poetry-of-the-prose front: too many sentence fragments made me conscious of the artistry, which is not such a good thing. I was reminded of a 2001 Atlantic article by one B. R. Myers titled "A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness of American Literary Prose," in which he tears apart (among others') Proulx's writing. (But also consider a rebuttal some years later by one Garth Risk Hallberg titled "The Soul-Sucking Suckiness of B. R. Myers," which tears apart Myers's tearing-apart. Everything in moderation, I guess.) I think one just has to relax a bit and not be too literal-minded when reading Proulx; but that still doesn't let her off the hook for all those fragments, not this time around. (The cover I show here is the cover of the book I read way back when. The cover of the recent book features the movie stars—Julianne Moore, Judi Dench, and, unfortunately, Kevin Spacey. I'm glad not to have to look at his mug anymore, now that I'm done with the book.)

In any case, a few of the other things I enjoyed—again—about The Shipping News were the use of The Ashley Book of Knots (a volume Proulx found at a garage sale) as thematic grist; the peppering of humorous would-be newspaper headlines to underscore the hero, Quoyle's, bumbling humanity; the very understated way Quoyle and Wavey Prowse fall in love (and even have sex); the backdrop of the sea and fishing, and of the newspaper biz. Very little adds up to plot in this book—but a heckuvalot happens, all of it adding up to life negotiated, puzzled out, lived. It's a quiet progression, the story of a man learning how to belong, how to be content—how, finally, to find love and life "without pain or misery."

I marked two passages for the prose, though I could have marked many, many more. The first struck me for the beauty of characterization through detail:

Suddenly he could see his father, see the trail of ground cherry husks leading from the garden around the edge of the lawn where he walked while he ate them. The man had a passion for fruit. Quoyle remembered purple-brown seckle pears and size and shape of figs, his father taking the meat off with pecking bites, the smell of fruit in their house, litter of cores and peels in the ashtrays, the grape cluster skeletons, peach stones like hens' brains on the windowsill, the glove of banana peel on the car dashboard. In the sawdust on the basement workbench galaxies of seeds and pits, cherry stones, long white date pits like spaceships. Strawberries in the refrigerator, and in June the car parked on a country road and the father on his knees picking wild strawberries in the weeks. The hollowed grapefruit skullcaps, cracked globes of tangerine peel.
  Other fathers took their sons on fishing and camping trips, but Quoyle and his brother had blueberry expeditions. They whined with rage as the father disappeared into the bushes, leaving them in the sour heat holding plastic constainers. . . .
  The man spent hours in the garden. How many times, thought Quoyle, had his father leaned on his hoe and gazed down the rows of string beans, saying "Some sweet land we got here, boy." He'd thought it was the immigrant's patriotic sentiment, but now balanced it against the scoured childhood on a salt-washed rock. His father had been enchanted with deep soil. Should have been a farmer.

The second struck me for the social commentary:

"Billy said to tell you there's a rumor Sea Song might be closing three plants next month. Said he hears No Name might be one."
  "Jesus! You think it can't get worse, it gets worse! This business about allocating fish quotas as if they was rows of potatoes you could dig. If there's no fish you can't allocate them and you can't catch them; if you don't catch them, you can't process them or ship them, you don't have a living for nobody. Nobody understand their crazy rules no more. Stumble along. They say 'too many local fishermen for not enough fish.' Well, where has the fish gone? To the Russians, the French, the Japs, West Germany, Easy Germany, Poland, Portugal, the UK, Spain, Romania, Bulgaria—or whatever they call them countries nowadays.
  "And even after the limit was set the inshore was no good. How can the fish come inshore if the trawlers and draggers gets 'em all fifty, a hundred mile out? And the long-liner gets the rest twenty mile out? What's left for the inshore fishermen?" He spat in the water. . . .
  "Fishery problem? Fuckin' terrible problem. They've made the inshore fishermen just like migrant farm workers. All we do is harvest the product. Moves from one crop to another, picks what they tells us. Takes what they pays us. We got no control over any of the fishery now. We don't make the decisions, just does what we're told where and when we're told. We lives by rules made somewhere else by sons a bitches don't know nothin' about this place." A hard exhalation rather than a sigh.
  But, Quoyle thought, that's how it was everywhere. Jack was lucky he'd escaped so long.

(I have had The Shipping News in mind ever since this post of mine, about knots.)

Book Report: End of the Earth: Voyages to Antarctica

3. Peter Matthiessen, End of the Earth: Voyages to Antarctica (2003) (2/25/2020)

In this book, Matthiessen, author of so many wonderful books, including The Snow Leopard, The Wind Birds, The Birds of Heaven, and The Tree Where Man Was Born, details two voyages he took to Antarctica: first, in 1988, to the Antarctic Peninsula, via South Georgia Island, and three years later to the Ross Sea on the opposite side of the continent. As always, he has marvelous descriptions of landscapes and of wildlife, explanations of geology, animal life cycles, and the various journeys of exploration to discover and then navigate the great white southern planet. At the end of the first part (of four) he lists the three species that they did not succeed in spotting on the Peninsula trip: emperor penguins, Southern Ocean orcas, and Ross seals. At the end of part three, in which they travel, via icebreaker, as far as Cape Crozier, before turning back toward Tasmania, he has spotted all three. That search is, in a certain sense, the “bones” of the book, if you will. Without those elusive creatures, I suppose, it would have been more nearly a simple travelogue, with occasional politics, conservation, science (the ozone hole, for example), and natural history thrown in.
  Some of my favorite passages, however, reflect Matthiessen’s personal passions: the human impact on this planet and understanding what moves him (or any of us) to go where we go, seek what we seek, in the world. Here are a couple of examples:

Watching for hours from bow and bridge, I am awed by these creatures and their adaptations and migrations, as I also am—please forgive these digressions—by icebergs, whales, the sea and ships, circumpolar currents, geologic time, the origins and evolutionary histories of life-forms, the quirks of birds, birders, and explorers, antifreeze in fish blood, the blue in ice, human folly, the ozone hole, and the earthly balances upset by global warming—in short, the mysteries of the natural world in their endless variations, the myriad petals of creation that open and fall away in every moment.
  Therefore I seek to understand phenomena that might help our self-destroying species to appreciate the shimmering web of biodiversity in the Earth process—the common miracles, fleeting as ocean birds, which present themselves endlessly to all our senses, to be tasted, experienced, and fiercely defended for our innocent inheritors against the rape and dreadful; wasting of this beautiful and fragile biosphere and its resources. In the forgetting that we, too, are animals, a part of nature, as dependent on its health and balance as any other mammal, we foolishly permit the unrestrained destruction of our Earth habitat that promises to leave mankind as desolate and bereft of hope as a turtle stripped live from its shell.

And this, speaking to “the longing for the ice”:

Just why, only three years after our first trip, with much work undone at home, I wished to make a far longer voyage to the ice was an intricate question. “To see the emperor penguin” was not good enough. I might mutter uncomfortably that Antarctica is monumental, an astonishment. Perhaps (if pressed) I might declare that its excrutiating purity and vast ringing silence ring with creation, ancient and yet new and fresh beyond imagining. More than any region left on Earth, I plead, Antarctica is immaculate, inviolable, a white fastness of pristine air and ice and virgin glacier at the farthest end of Earth, where frigid seas abound in marine creatures in a diversity still marvelously intact—all true, all true. Yet there is something else. [He goes on to quote various explorers: a sense of a “giant force which is visibly, before his eyes, carving out the world” (Cherry-Garard), of a “worthwhile life” (geologist Griffith Taylor), of “pierc(ing) the outside veneer of things, . . . see(ing) God in his splendour, hear(ing) the text that nature renders . . . reach(ing) the naked soul of man (Ernest Shackleton).]
  “The ancient and indifferent ice gives up its secrets slowly,” someone else has said. At its glacial pace, the ice eventually relinquishes its mystery, whatever that might be. It clearly remained beyond articulation even by men who knew the ice firsthand under hard conditions.
  Thus I struggle to find words for such wordless feeling: What draws me eludes me to the same degree, and seeking to understand rather than simply apprehend it may be just the problem.

Later in the book he speaks to an overwhelming desire to simplify, not his life, but his “self”:

In the sea rhythm and the wind on deck, I fill my lungs with ocean emptiness and the pure wind circling the Earth; in hard weather, driven below, I kneel on the spare bunk and peer out of my window at the waves, awaiting the passage of light-boned ocean birds in their fragility and their taut strength, astonished anew by and to the degree that I am able to let go of mind and body and escape all boundaries, I soar with them in the unity of being.

It was interesting, and meaningful, to read this book aboard the 26-meter Hans Hansson while sailing among the islands of the Antarctic Peninsula, reveling in that stark and beautiful and fragile landscape. This was one of the books in the shipboard library. A fitting inclusion.

Book Report: Bury Your Dead

2/30. Louise Penny, Bury Your Dead (2010) (2/16/2020)

This book is unusual in Penny’s series in that it takes up two mysteries—one begun in the preceding book, the other a new one, involving the old town of Quebec City and the ongoing strife between the Francophones and les Anglais. It also involves the search for the founder of Québec, Samuel de Champlain, and Chief Inspector Gamache’s recovery from an incident that begins the present volume. We meet a few new characters, including Gamache’s own chief from when he started his career, the now retired Émile Comeau, with whom Gamache and his dog, Henri, are spending a couple of weeks. We meet the board members of Quebec City’s Literary and Historical Society, an Anglophone enclave that most Québecois don’t realize exists, so “underground” are all things English in this strongly separatist city and province. Gamache is conducting some research at the “Lit and His,” as it’s called—the basement of which is where this book’s fresh corpse turns up, one Augustin Renaud, a fanatic who has spent his life searching for Champlain’s grave. Was he close? too close? to solving the mystery?

In the parallel story, Gamache’s right-hand man, Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir, returns to the bucolic town of Three Pines to open a new line of questioning on the murder that occurred in The Brutal Telling, for which beloved B&B proprietor Olivier was convicted. Perhaps, Gamache suggests to Jean-Guy, they should review the evidence from a different perspective. In the process, as he works solo, Jean-Guy learns a thing or two about witnesses, about facts, about relationships, about keeping eyes and mind open.

All through this, the story kicked off by the opening-scene incident gets replayed as well. The result is a complicated, but perfectly comprehensible, plot (or set of plots), which helps to deepen the humanity of all concerned. It is a good, rich book, and feels like a fine place to take a break from Penny for a little bit, and perhaps try some other mystery series for a change.

Here is a passage where Gamache and Émile talk about the murdered man, whose diary they have been studying:

Finally Émile lowered the diary and removed his reading glasses.
  “Poor man.”
  Gamache nodded. “Not many friends.”
  “None, as far as I can tell. The price of greatness.”
  “Greatness? You’d consider Augustin Renaud that? I was under the impression you and the other members of the Champlain Society considered him a kook.”
  “Aren’t most great people? In fact, I think most of them are both brilliant and demented and almost certainly unfit for polite society. Unlike us.”
  Gamache stirred his coffee and watched his mentor.
  He considered him a great man, one of the few he’d met. Great not in his singularity of purpose but in his multiplicity. He’d taught his young protégé how to be a homicide investigator, but he’d taught him more besides.
Gamache remembered being shown into Chief Inspector Comeau’s office his first week on the job, certain he was about to be fired for some mysterious transgression. Instead the wiry, self-contained man had stared at him for a few seconds then invited him to sit and told him the four sentences that lead to wisdom. He’d said them only once, never repeating them. But once had been enough for Gamache.
  I’m sorry. I was wrong. I need help. I don’t know.
  . . . Those four statements had changed Armand Gamache’s life. Émile Comeau had changed his life.
  . . . “I respect people who have such passion,” Émile was saying. “I don’t. I have a lot of interests, some I’m passionate about, but not to the exclusion of everything else. I sometimes wonder if that’s necessary for geniuses to accomplish what they must, a singularity of purpose. We mere mortals just get in the way. Relationships are messy, distracting.”
  “He travels the fastest who travels alone,” quoted Gamache.
  “You sound as though you don’t believe it.”
  “It depends where you’re going, but no, I don’t. I think you might go far fast, but eventually you’ll stall. We need other people.”
  “What for?”
  “Help. Isn’t that what Champlain found? All other explorers failed to create a colony but he succeeded. Why? What was the difference? Père Sébastien told me. Champlain had help. The reason his colony thrived, the reason we’re sitting here today, was exactly because he wasn’t alone. He asked the natives for help and he succeeded.”
  “Don’t think they don’t regret it.”
  Gamache nodded. It was a terrible loss, a lapse in judgment. Too late the Huron and Algonquin and Cree realized Champlain’s New World was their old one.
  “Yes,” said Émile, nodding slowly, his slender fingers toying with the salt and pepper shakers. “We all need help.”

Babar prétend qu'il est Fernand de Magellan, 3a&b/100

We took Babar to meet Magellan today, in the form of the explorer's monumental statue in the town square. Babar immediately spotted Magellan's galleon, the Vittoria (let's just say that was the one he commanded; it is the only one of the five on his circumnavigation that made it back to Spain, though by then Magellan himself had been killed in the Philippines). Babar thought he might cut a fine figure standing on the bowsprit. What do you think?

He then insisted that we take his picture standing on the polished foot of the Tierra del Fuegan Native portrayed below Magellan ("The Natives: always lesser," he tut-tutted—for a roi distingué, Babar is very perceptive), the old camera around his own neck being worthless for selfies. We obliged.

A quick tour of Punta Arenas, Chile, 2/8

A geocache took us up to a grand viewing spot of the town of Punta Arenas,
the most populous (pop. 100,000) southern city (lat. 46° S) in the Americas.
I believe the cruise ship is the Norwegian Star. This is a jumping-off point to Antarctica
(together most notably with Ushuaia, Argentina).

View looking the other direction.

The Antarctic Peninsula (known as O'Higgins Land in Chile,
Tierra de San Martín in Argentina, the Palmer Peninsula in the US,
and Graham Land in Britain) is currently dotted with numerous
research stations and nations have made multiple claims of sovereignty.
The peninsula is part of disputed and overlapping claims by
Argentina, Chile, and the United Kingdom. None of these claims
have international recognition and, under the Antarctic Treaty System,
the respective countries do not attempt to enforce their claims.
The British claim is recognized, though, by Australia, France, New Zealand,
and Norway. Argentina has the most bases and personnel stationed
on the peninsula. (per Wikipedia)

The Goleta Ancud monument commemorates the crew that sailed in May 1843
from Chiloé to the Strait of Magellan with the objective of taking possession
of this strategic point linking the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic.
The statue includes the ship's captain, Juan Williams Wilson, and some crew;
animals the expedition carried (two dogs, three pigs, two goats, and chickens)
to establish breeding lines; as well as mythical figures of the island of Chiloé.

The pool beneath the monument was very busy on this
beautiful warm summer's day.

Many people were out enjoying the afternoon.

Looking toward the port area.

Imperial shags (Phalacrocorax atriceps)

The Magelllan monument in the main square of Punta Arenas includes
this Native man, whose toe is rubbed to ensure a return trip to Patagonia
(or a smooth sail across the Drake Passage, depending on who you ask).
We'll see if it works (whichever one).

Some views from our flight over Patagonia, 2/8

I absolutely adored the great meandering rivers—including this one,
with its marvelous glacial silt dump into the big blue lake.

SO many colors of blue!

Another meandering river

The big picture

Monte Fitz Roy. I love thinking about all the first climbing ascents
on this mountain, and just all the climbing history. When we lived in Berkeley,
and photographer/climber Galen Rowell still had his little
gallery/studio in Berkeley, we went to hear him speak about his own "epic"
(it ended up being remarkably straightforward, with a few mundane glitches) climb
of Fitz Roy in 1985. It's had a magic spot in my heart ever since.
I may not get closer than I did today, but I was *thrilled* to see it so clearly
from the air.

River of ice near Fitz Roy.

Babar arrive au Chili (2/100)

Babar is very pleased to have arrived on a new continent: his third. This is the "view" out his first-floor window. He wishes he had a third-floor window, to be able to look out over this new place, but concedes that this room might be one of the quietest ones in the hotel. He is looking forward to getting out and going exploring (and getting a better portrait of himself, perhaps, into the bargain).

Babar clandestin (1/100)

Some time ago I had a short run of Babar shots on Flickr, taken here and there. Babar loves to explore. I am hereby inviting Babar back out into the world, and will document 100 of his days over the next year. I'm doing this now in part because... we're off to Antarctica! And Babar has always wanted to go to Antarctica! So much so that he snuck into my carry-on. Here he is, hoping I won't notice him. But I did notice him, and I'm delighted that he wants to come along. We'll have a marvelous time! In the far South, and over the next year.

I actually wanted to do this project on Instagram, but Instagram is a pain, as far as I can tell. So yeah, I posted the first picture there, but without commentary. I'm not going to do a lot of typing on my phone. Jayzus.

Anyway: here's the first installment. 100 days of Babar! Vive l'éléphant curieux et audacieux.