{"id":208,"date":"2003-01-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-12-30T21:58:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushlamckinney.wordpress.com\/?p=208"},"modified":"2024-12-31T13:07:38","modified_gmt":"2024-12-31T00:07:38","slug":"the-seal-wife","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2003\/01\/01\/the-seal-wife\/","title":{"rendered":"The Seal Wife"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-large-font-size\"><strong>Kathryn Harrison<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-large-font-size\"><em>HarperCollins<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\">Otago Daily Times, 2003<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Even today, Alaska is an extreme and challenging landscape, wild and unforgiving as she swings from night-less day to day-less night. Isolated even in today\u2019s networked world by geography and the uncontrollable, unpredictable vagaries of weather, it takes a special strength to survive in both body and spirit. Imagine, then, how it must have been in 1915, when the young meteorologist, Bigelow arrives in Anchourage. Sent north by the government to provide forecasts for the Alaska Engineering Commission, he finds himself in a no-mans-land of displaced railway workers, hard-bitten pioneers and native Indians <em>\u201cwithout so much as a heavy coat or felt boot liners. Without matches, knife, or snow glasses. Having never held a gun.\u201d<\/em> But for Bigelow, it is psychological, not physical survival that is the constant struggle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">When he meets the Inuit woman, he finds himself centred in some fundamental but inexplicable way. Mute (by choice or necessity?), she accepts him without question, but always on her own terms. He is free to enter her house at any time, but she will not accompany him beyond the doorstep when he leaves. She mends his clothes, skins and cooks the game he brings with him on every visit, but refuses any gifts he tries to give in return. She sleeps with him but forbids any caresses, kisses, attempts to pleasure her. Bigelow longs to know her, pierce the shell of her silence and self control, but she is remains an enigma, as uncontrollable as the weather or the countryside itself. And when one morning she suddenly disappears without trace, his world falls apart. He tries to bury himself in his science to distract him from his grief, patronises the local brothel to relieve his sexual frustration, but physical release does nothing to ease his emotional agony. Thinking it is her silence that so bewitched him, he pursues the unspeaking daughter of the local storekeeper, but her neediness serves only to push him further under the nameless woman\u2019s spell. So he waits, hoping without hope, that she will return before he is lost, for <em>\u201cthere\u2019s nothing, nothing to hold, nothing to keep with him.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><em>The Seal Wife<\/em> is a hauntingly beautiful novel, a love story and an allegory of isolation and contact, possession and freedom. Written in a spare, contained style, it consists of a series of contrasting images, at times more poetry rather than prose, at others almost shockingly mundane. Forecasting is \u201crecording ephemera:clouds, a fall of rain or of snow;hailstones that, after their furious clatter, melt silently into the ground. Like recounting a sigh.<em>\u201d But it is also \u201c13 degrees;barometer 29.90, falling.\u201d <\/em>Romantic, idealised images of love contrast with the physical, earthy realities of sex and desire. With as much left unsaid as said, you surface from its depths with regret.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kathryn Harrison  <br \/>\nOtago Daily Times review 2003<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[6,370,421,422,18],"class_list":["post-208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-6","tag-fiction","tag-historical","tag-kathryn-harrison","tag-odt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1385,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions\/1385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}