april – Page 19 – ~*LunaSea*~

Naslund, Sena Jeter. Ahab’s Wife or, The Star-Gazer. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. Ahab

This took me forever to read! I tried to twice before starting the BookLust Challenge and practically groaned when I saw it on “the list.” It’s not that it isn’t a wonderful book. It is. It’s beautifully written for sure. The only problem is that is it so long! Una’s marriage to Ahab, the namesake title, Ahab’s Wife doesn’t come to pass until page 359! There’s a bit of back and forth on the timeline but all of that is explained at the end.
My other “issue”? Una’s life experiences are shocking yet she handled every single one with heroic resolve. Nothing fazes her for very long. Her father committed suicide, her mother froze to death, her first born died, her first husband went mad, she experienced cannibalism first hand, she braved hurricanes, blizzards and fires. Laced in with all the events are the scientific, political, and sociological happens of the era. Una is submerged in it all: slavery, the womens movement, astronomy. Many famous people parade through the second half of the novel.
Despite the length of Naslund’s story, I loved the language. There were passages that held my attention and caused me to read them over and over. “I have ever feared the weathervane in me. I point toward Independence, isolation. Sometimes I rotate- my back to Independence – and I need and want my friends, my family. with a force like a gale” (p190). I too, find myself wanting to be alone much of the time. Yet, when I need the ones true to my heart the longing comes over me strong and hard. I can relate. Another passage I identified with was on the very next page, “The very atoms I’m made of come apart in a kind of sparkle. A cloud of sparkle propelled by will” (p191). It reminded me of that partical theory I have.
Probably the best part of Ahab’s Wife or, The Star Gazer is the many, many references to literature. If I had more time I would create a reading list from everything Una mentions in her narrative. Shakespeare, Keats, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass to name a few…

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lustin the chapter of “Lines that linger, sentences that stick” (p143). Pearl points out the opening sentence “Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last.”

Boyle, Andrew. The Climate of Treason. London: Hutchinson, 1982.

Maybe it was a bad idea to read Treason at the same time as Children of the Souls: A Tragedy of the First World War. I started to get the accounts confused when Treason started mentioning Cambridge and All Souls. Of course there would be overlap. Of course there would be similarities. Both take place during World War I, after all. What I didn’t expect what the recruitment of Cambridge students. But, even that should have made sense to me. Soviets would want intellectuals for their spies. The smart boys.
Treason does have funny moments in between the seriousness of Communism and spying. One such spy was subject to a shake down and described the moment as thus, “all three men made a dive for it, spreadeagling themselves across the table. Confronted by three pairs of buttocks, I scooped the scrap of paper out of my trousers, a crunch and a swallow, and it was gone” (p 155). I could picture the moment and had a good laugh out of it.
Something I hadn’t considered before reading Treason was the duality of a spy’s life. A “controlled schizophrenia” (p.190). To avoid detection, to be as underground as possible, the outside world must view the traitor’s political thinkings, cultural ideals and patriotic enthusiasm to be on par with their own. The traitor has to exert enough energy to convince both sides he is on their side and their side alone.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the ever-funny chapter “Spies and Spymasters: The Really Real Unreal World of Intelligence” (p 223).