The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [0]
Title Page
Praise
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
Acknowledgments
THE SEAL WIFE - A READER’S GUIDE
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
SUGGESTED READING FROM THE AUTHOR
About the Author
Also by Kathryn Harrison
Copyright Page
Praise for Kathryn Harrison’s THE SEAL WIFE
“A simple story of love and obsession . . . Ms. Harrison narrates these events with uncommon grace, limning the frozen landscape of early-20th-century Alaska with the same easy authority she brings to the delineation of Bigelow’s turbulent state of mind. She demonstrates, with more assurance . . . that she is capable of writing historical fiction that possesses all the immediacy and harsh poetry of reportage. . . . She . . . demonstrates her ability to evoke the sensual qualities of everyday life, while using language that is considerably sparer than she has used before but equally hypnotic. . . . Ms. Harrison not only makes us understand the destructive consequences of sexual obsession, but also makes us appreciate its power to shape an individual’s sense of self, its ability to inspire and perhaps even to redeem the past.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“[Harrison] has a real talent for conjuring far-flung times and places—a patient zeal for assembling odd, telling details that convey the look and feel of a particular era. . . . Her novels . . . [display] ample evidence of her subtle intelligence. . . . The novel’s awareness of the natural world gives it a sturdier, more philosophical underpinning. . . . Harrison imbues her solitary silence with a stately air of self-possession.”
—Maria Russo, The New York Times Book Review
“A beautiful novel, elegant and brief, profoundly reverent toward the dignity of its characters and the redemptive possibilities of passion, endurance, and work.”
—Vince Passaro, O, the Oprah Magazine
“Prose as pristine as ice droplets.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“[A] darkly passionate tale of a distant time and dramatic place.”
—Glamour
“From the first page, the reader immediately slips into the narrative. The passion glides easily and the reader rolls along, swept up as if in love. Harrison captures passion’s cadence in the soul—the slip-sliding into love, the swirling actions guided by nothing logical but still making total sense. Harrison’s style is flawless, balancing the measurable with the intangible, her short chapters alternating between science and soul. Her sentences are spare, using a rhythm of writing that lulls the reader into Bigelow’s compulsive worlds of love and work.”
—AP Weekly Features
“In perfect control of the spare narrative, Harrison writes mesmerizing, cinematically vivid scenes. . . . Harrison’s excellently assimilated research about the early days of weather forecasting and about the conditions in Alaska during WWII add credibility to a novel about the inner landscape of desire.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Painterly in its pearlescent evocation of the Alaskan landscape, steeped in myth and the magic of science, this is a delectably moody, erotic, and provocative cross-cultural love story.”
—Booklist
“[Harrison] will amaze readers with the ostensibly effortless manner in which she describes both the bleak terrain of Alaska and the alien terrain of Bigelow’s own compulsive thoughts. At the root of this story is the interplay between seclusion and desire. Harrison forcefully develops this primal conflict.”
—Library Journal
H. S. J.
1890–1984
HE IS TWENTY-SIX, and for as long as he’s lived in the north there has been only the Aleut woman.
Several evenings a week he comes to her door with a duck or a rabbit and she asks him in. Not asks, exactly. She opens the door and steps aside so he can enter.
She lives in a frame house hammered together fast out of boards and tar paper, a house like all the others in Anchorage, except it isn’t on First or Fourth or even Ninth Street; instead it is off to the east, marooned on the mud flats. But she has things in it, like anyone else, a table and two chairs, flour and tea on a shelf, a hat hanging from a peg. She wears a dress