All too rarely in a reader’s life, we encounter authors who are so absolutely in control of the words, so sure of the emotional resonance of the story, that you come to trust them completely and will follow them anywhere they dare to take you. We come to inhabit their creations permanently, no matter how unreal they may seem at first glance. The first time you read these authors is like an epiphany, and you realize you are in the hands of someone who loves language as much as you do, and recognizes that it is the most serious plaything ever created.
I’m thinking of the feeling of first reading Jeanette Winterson, David Markson, Italo Calvino, John Crowley, or the utterly neglected Deborah McKay. And I’m adding Samantha Hunt to the list.
Reading The Seas was one of those cathartic moments that reminded me why I love reading and language and art. In her first novel, Samantha Hunt has created a spare, but incredibly vivid, universe of words that contains so much pain, longing, magic and dark eros that it’s hard to believe it’s only 192 pages.
In one telling passage, the narrator explains to her mother:
“I think it’s like chemistry. Like the letters are atoms, the words are molecules, and the sentences are elements. You just chose [sic] what scale you want to see the world in.”
It’s interesting that here we focus on language as fundament, since so much of The Seas is really about the spaces between concepts…love/hate, wet/dry, life/death, truth/myth, freedom/slavery, male/female, madness/sanity.
I loved this book.
Related Links:
- For God’s sake, buy The Seas.
- www.samanthahunt.net
- There was a really lazy review in the Village Voice that, although positive, seemed to really not “get it”
