Salon | Excerpt: The Voyage of the Narwhal


Fiction Birds of America By Lorrie Moore Excerpt_\|_Review The Voyage of the Narwhal By Andrea Barrett Excerpt_\|_Review Blindness By José Saramago Excerpt_\|_Review Starting Out in the Evening By Brian Morton Excerpt_\|_Review Thirst By Ken Kalfus Excerpt_\|_Review Nonfiction The Professor and the Madman By Simon Winchester Excerpt_\|_Review A Beautiful Mind By Sylvia Nasar Excerpt_\|_Review At Home With the Marquis de Sade By Francine du Plessix Gray Excerpt_\|_Review A Slant of Sun By Beth Kephart Excerpt_\|_Review We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families By Philip Gourevitch Excerpt_\|_Review - - - - - - - - - - - Table Talk Join the Books discussion in Table Talk. - - - - - - - - - - -				__________________e__x__c__e__r__p__t ________________________- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The Voyage of the Narwhal BY ANDREA BARRETT FICTION NORTON 394 PAGES Here was the arctic, Erasmus thought, as the Narwhal moved through Davis Strait and the night began to disappear. Or at least its true beginning: here, here, here. His eyes burned from trying to take in everything at once. Whales with their baleen-laden mouths broke the water, sometimes as many as forty a day. Belugas slipped by white and radiant and the sky was alive with birds. The men cheered the first narwhals as guardian spirits and crowded around Erasmus as he sketched. With one of Dr. Boerhaave's excellent pencils he tried to capture the grooved spike jutting from the males' upper jaws and the smooth dark curves of their backs. Nils Jensen, out on the bowsprit, watched intently as each surfaced to breathe and called back measurements -- ten feet long, twelve and half -- which Erasmus noted on his drawings. One day the coast of Greenland appeared, the peak of Sukkertoppen rising above the fog and flickering past as they sailed to Disko Island. A flock of dovekies sailed through the rigging, and when Robert Carey knocked one to the deck Erasmus remembered how, as a little boy, he'd glimpsed three of these tiny birds in a creek near his home, bobbing exhausted where they'd been driven after a great northeaster. This one looked like a black-and-white quail in his hand. Bending over the rail to release it, he saw fronds of seaweed waving through ten fathoms of transparent water. As soon as they anchored at Godhavn he and Dr. Boerhaave sampled the shallows, finding nullipores, mussels, and small crustaceans. Then they saw people, floating on the water and looking back at them. In tiny, skin-covered kayaks the strangers darted among the icebergs; their legs were hidden inside the boats, their arms extended by two-bladed paddles. Flash, flash: into the ocean and out again, water streaming silver from the blades. The paddles led to tight hooded jackets; the jackets merged into oval skirts connecting the men at their waists to the boats -- like centaurs, Erasmus thought. Boat men, male boats. It was all a blur, he couldn't see their faces. Sean Hamilton tossed them bits of biscuit and Erasmus revised his first opinion: This was where the journey began, with this first sight of the arctic men he'd read about for so long. That these Greenlanders had traded with whalers for two centuries, been colonized by the Danes and converted by Moravian and Lutheran missionaries, made them less strange: but they were still new to him. On the first night in port, over a dinner of eider ducks at the huge-chimneyed home of the Danish inspector, he looked alternately at a bad engraving of four Greenlanders captured near Godthaab and brought to Copenhagen and, out the window next to the portrait, at the jumble of wooden huts and sealskin tents into which the mysterious strangers disappeared. SALON \| Dec. 21, 1998 Andrea Barrett, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction (1996), has also received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and an honorary degree from Union College. She has taught at the M.F.A. program for writers at Warren Wilson College, and has been a visiting writer at colleges and universities and a faculty member at numerous writers' conferences, including the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She is the author of four previous novels and lives in Rochester, N.Y. "The Voyage of the Narwhal": ORDER A COPY__\|__SALON REVIEW - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - G O+T O+\| Fiction Awards \| Nonfiction Awards - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.