I want to thank The New Yorker’s Dylan Kerr for recommending Morten Strøksnes’s Shark Drunk
(2015). What a great book! Part memoir, part natural history, part adventure story, it’s an account of Strøksnes’s and his friend Hugo Aasjord’s quest for the Greenland shark in a tumultuous Norwegian fjord called Vestfjorden. I’m about half way through it, and I’m savoring every line. Here, for example, is Strøksnes’s description of a sperm whale:
(2015). What a great book! Part memoir, part natural history, part adventure story, it’s an account of Strøksnes’s and his friend Hugo Aasjord’s quest for the Greenland shark in a tumultuous Norwegian fjord called Vestfjorden. I’m about half way through it, and I’m savoring every line. Here, for example, is Strøksnes’s description of a sperm whale:
In front of us is one of the largest of all toothed whales. As we approach, it starts to arch its back. When we’re a hundred feet away, it blows one last time and then lowers its head into the water. The flukes and hind part of the body stick vertically up from the surface, iconic as a rock carving, before the sea closes around them. The whale is gone, as if someone had pulled a string, drawing it down into the abyss.
Here’s his depiction of water:
All is quiet around me and Hugo, except for a soft, musical sound from invisible currents lapping against the boat. Elsewhere around us the water licks at the underside of its own surface, which gleams above the hollows and high shoals.
That “licks at the underside of its own surface” is inspired! Shark Drunk brims with such descriptions. I’m enjoying it immensely.
No comments:
Post a Comment