Fiennes seems mightily preoccupied throughout his narrative, but he never articulates exactly with what. As a result, it’s...
A vaguely eccentric journey on the trail of the snow goose, from British newcomer Fiennes (Granta, TLS, the London Review of Books, etc.).
Recovering from an unspecified illness at his childhood home outside Oxford, the 26-year-old Fiennes finds himself taken with the local birds, in particular with their freedom that contrasts so sharply with his bed-bound state. The snow goose, with which he had some bookish acquaintance in his youth, strikes his fancy. Longing to be free of his confinement, Fiennes experiences some of the bird’s migratory restlessness and when released hops a plane to Texas, where the snow goose winters. There, he begins his travels with the bird—a journey that will take him all the way to its Baffin Island breeding ground. As Fiennes haltingly pushes north, up through the Dakotas and Manitoba, past Churchill and the Hudson Bay to Foxe Land, he fills his story with the bulging bag of tricks birds use to get where they’re going: their grand circadian and circannual rhythms, their sun and stellar compasses, their sense of magnetic fields. The author has a tendency to overportray his human traveling companions, people he meets along the way (a woman on a bus, a family he stays with), who aren’t as interesting as the space they command, but he can turn a lovely phrase: when he pulls a book from the shelf, “the books on either side of it leaned together like hands in prayer,” and a heron lifts off, “its wings making the whup-whup of someone walking in a sarong.” Meantime, the farther afield Fiennes goes, the more his thoughts drift from migration to homesickness and nostalgia. “My journey north with the snow geese was not quite the shout of freedom I had presupposed,” he concludes rather rapidly, anxious to get home long before we really get to know him or understand the discomfiting melancholy he wears like a hair shirt.
Fiennes seems mightily preoccupied throughout his narrative, but he never articulates exactly with what. As a result, it’s difficult to get a grip on anything here, and The Snow Geese makes no lasting impact.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50729-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
A vessel as enchanting as the symbolic and shimmering freight it carries.
A book of trees–both real and imagined–that taps some very deep roots of the human psyche.
Here are a handful of arboreal specimens full of divine wonder and aesthetic pleasure, those for which we have special affinities and that resonate on the atavistic level. They speak of our species’ first homes, of life, of good and evil, of the oracular. Bulgatz (More Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 2000) paws around the earth from which these trees sprouted, discovering allegory, parable and metaphor in the process. He is a playful guide, sometimes speaking as a cherub, sometimes as a scholar discoursing on the cooperative relationship of the plant and animal kingdoms in the “Barnacle Goose Tree” and the “Vegetable Lamb of Tartary.” He introduces readers to the farcical folk of Chelm, into whose hands one day came a miraculous box of oranges (“It was a gift, the paper enclosed said, sent from ‘Harry and David, Fruiterers of the World.’ ”), and to the blessed Shmoo Pear, a tree that adapted perfectly to the Atkins diet. But the laughs are spaced out amongst the author’s deeper exploration of our desire to anthropomorphize trees. Far from a pathetic fallacy, Bulgatz sees within these stories–Philemon and Baucis, the Tree of Liberty, Yggdrasil, the forest-intoxicated Celts, the age of the sacred grove–a profound exercise of the imagination.
A vessel as enchanting as the symbolic and shimmering freight it carries.Pub Date: June 23, 2005
ISBN: 1-4134-8422-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Tales from a high-plains pothole by Janovy (Vermilion Sea, 1991, etc.), a man much smitten with the sound of his brain ticking. Secreted in the Nebraskan countryside is Dunwoody Pond. Its weedy, teeming waters serve as a vibrant life-science laboratory, a primal stew he hopes will enter his students' souls as well as their collecting nets. His students are an estimable bunch: Tami and her damselfly parasites; Bill and his leeches; Rich and his black beetles; Skip and his gill tissue suckers. They all get deeply, sweetly immersed in their creatures. It's Janovy who's the problem. He wants to know what inspires these young naturalists, but he tells us more about himself than about his charges. In the process, Janovy scurries all over the place in a free association that he clearly finds charming; but it comes across as Brownian motion—which is to say, directionless and tedious. Too often he writes, ``And that is the main point of this story, even though we have taken a short diversion.'' He can be painfully smug (asking, for instance, why anyone would choose to be a physical therapist when one could be a parasitologist); he comes out with presumptuous statements that are utter rot (``Every dead soldier's mother is convinced that it is right for her to bear the death of her child in obeyance to a commander-in- chief''); and he strains analogies with the best of them. Enduring the chapter ``Conversations at the Rock'' is as pleasurable as being locked in a closet with a logorrheic methedrine freak. The one time Janovy cuts sharp is in his chapter on cliff swallows—gentle, humorous, insightful, and without a single mention of himself, even obliquely. As a place, Dunwoody Pond may have lit the passions of an undergraduate clutch; as a book, it is a pompous embarrassment of sputters and fizzles.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11456-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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