Category Archives: Literature in the Lymes

Literature in the Lymes: ‘The Life Impossible’ by Matt Haig

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Matt Haig has written some wonderful books.

I recommend The Midnight Library especially and I was pleasantly surprised to find something new in The Life Impossible. Many authors embrace a certain vein but Matt Haig takes a step further with each new book.

Seventy-two-year-old Grace Winters is ready to call it a day. She is a retired, widowed math teacher mourning the death of her only child 30 years ago. Nothing will change. How could it and why in God`s name would she want it to?

She has come to terms with her grief and her passionless existence until a letter arrives from a woman she cheered up one lonely Christmas in 1979. One Christina van der Berg has bequeathed Grace a house in Ibiza … Ibiza, Spain; what on earth?

While she is semi-upside-down having, “Minimally invasive, radio frequency-based vein ablation surgery”, Grace decides to go.

Through the format of a story told to a former student in an email, she tells us of her impossible new life.

It’s a wonderful, humorous, often lonely journey of putting one foot in front of the other. Grace is braver than she expects. She goes diving at night in a tie-dyed bathing suit! She finds a mysterious jar of sea water that fills itself. Finding herself talking to a goat she starts to question her sanity.

Alone in a new place she seeks out people who knew her friend Christina, to try to find out what happened. How and why did Christina die? How did she know it was going to happen? Many things seem unanswerable … but they are.

Nothing she is expecting is there. Nothing we can possibly expect is there. What she finds is more than unexpected. She finds connections to people, to a place, to an unearthly source of strength and consciousness and thought that will save Ibiza.

It saved Christina.

It will save Grace.,

About the author: Jen Petty Hilger grew up in New York and London, England, but finds herself happily quiet living by the water in Old Lyme. She and her husband have six children between them and a myriad of rescued animals.

Literature in the Lymes: ‘The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among Great White Sharks’ by Susan Casey

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I think it’s safe to write about sharks after Labor Day. I try not to do this earlier on in the summer for obvious reasons. It isn’t nice doing it early on. We all like sharks but we all like the beach too. I watched Jaws for the umpteenth time the other night and just thought, “Nope.”

Susan Casey appears to not have these thoughts. She is an editor and sports writer for outdoor magazines like Outside and Sports Illustrated. She was the editor in chief of O, the Oprah Magazine. She has written extensively for Time, Esquire, and is the author of some great books.

She is brave. “Nope” probably isn’t in her vocabulary. She climbs and dives. She seeks adventure, especially in the water. She has explored the Mariana Trench among other exceedingly deep parts of the ocean. 

In November of 2000, she secured an invitation to travel to the Farallones islands west of San Francisco. The Farallones are a 211-acre archipelago 27 miles west of the city and the gathering spot for the largest congregation of Great Whites in the world each September through November. It is home to the Farallones White Shark Project led by Scot Anderson and Peter Pyle . 

Getting an invitation/permit wasn’t easy. Very few outsiders are allowed and initially she is only granted a US Fish and Wildlife media pass. But when they motor out in a whaler and come face to face with the sharks, she’s all in.

She will do whatever it takes to come back.  “… I lost track of time, crouched in the whaler’s scooped-out bow, bouncing from one railing to the other while the massive fish cruised under us like submarines; I could have kept it up, I think, forever.”

She travels to the nearby town of Port Reyes, to check in with Scot and Peter as often as she can and develops a friendship with the two men . There are conflicts with tourism operations and government operations.

People want to cage-dive, to see the “monsters of the deep” for themselves. People want to dive for abalone [highly-prized marine snails.] Other scientists are studying the birds on the islands. It has become a very complicated political /financial web to navigate.

In 2003 she gets a weeklong pass to stay if she writes an article about the birds. She agrees. Her accounts are scientifically fascinating. Detailed but not boringly so. Her personal stories are wonderful.

It takes a strong, colorful personality to survive on a poop-covered, man-eater-surrounded, cold, wet, isolated rock for months at a time. And, oh, there’s a ghost. (Susan immediately regrets bringing an antique ouiji board for example.) 

It should be an horrific, miserable, nasty experience but it’s not. It’s majestic. It’s ethereal. It’s incredible. 

Or to put it another way, to quote both the book and German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, “ Every angel is terrifying.”

About the author: Jen Petty Hilger grew up in New York and London, England, but finds herself happily quiet living by the water in Old Lyme. She and her husband have six children between them and a myriad of rescued animals.

Literature in the Lymes: ‘Piranesi’ by Susanna Clarke

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I just know I can’t really do this book justice. I love it and writing about it immediately takes some of the magic away but I suppose if Susannah Clarke could do it, I can at least try.

Who is Piranesi? Where is he?

He is writing this book as a journal from a place that is both a world and a house. This house has tides. This world has floors and wings and grand halls. There are ballrooms and statues and sweeping staircases that are underwater as the tides change. 

Piranesi navigates the halls as the moon cycles to anticipate the waters. He salvages bones and seaweed to wear in his tangled hair. He visits his favored statues as honored ancestors. He lives as a recluse, who is both aware of and in respectful fear of the Other. 

This Other shows himself occasionally to bestow gifts or shower food as tokens from above. 

It becomes increasingly more apparent that Piranesi is less alone than he thought. There may have been others here before him.

He finds human bones. Animal bones. His anthropological worship of these, honoring them with flowers, is touching.

What is really happening around him?

He appears innocently unaware of something much more sinister. Is someone named Ketterley attempting to control the uncontrollable?

From the journals that become less unfettered in their hallucinations, we see patterns. We see hints at something.

Where are these offerings really coming from? Who is this ‘other’ person? Who indeed is Piranesi? It has a very Neil Gaiman-esque otherworldly tone that I like and mixed with very concise, interesting writing, sets a fascinating—almost scientific—perspective. 

It reads like a lab journal from an experiment, which we find out is very close to a truth.

It’s just wonderful to be in Piranesi’s mind as he unravels the mystery of the magnificent world.

About the author: Jen Petty Hilger grew up in New York and London, England, but finds herself happily quiet living by the water in Old Lyme.

She and her husband have six children between them and a myriad of rescued animals.

Literature in the Lymes: ‘In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife” by Sebastian Junger

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Editor’s Note: We are delighted to welcome Jen Petty Hilger back to LymeLine. She wrote a very popular ‘Literature in the Lymes’ column for us until 2014.

One could suppose this is the afterlife of a book reviewer. Welcome to review Number 101 … after a brief 10-year hiatus. 

Sebastian Junger is a very smart man. He is a well-educated man. He is a brave man, a well traveled man. He is a man, who has questioned death many times and faced death a few times, but until the summer of 2020 he had never truly questioned its finality. The place where his very smart brain and his very real soul intersect is what fascinates me. 

This book about his literal “time of dying” is remarkable for its ability to translate the experience. If you’ve read The Perfect Storm, you know how well he captures a tale. His investigative prowess, journalistic experience and sheer narrative skill weave a fast-moving powerhouse of a story. 

This time it is his own near death experience. He barely, barely, survives a ruptured aneurysm. As a an atheist, he comes at his experience from a purely scientific angle and is astounded to encounter something inexplicably outside individual consciousness.

As the medical team at the Hyannis Hospital desperately, almost impossibly, tries to transfuse enough blood to keep him alive while locating the rupture, Junger slips almost away. He sees both his dead father above him and an abyss below him. Neither is comforting nor expected. 

What Junger encounters is previously unfathomable to him and he tries to wrap his mind around it while explaining, quite rationally, the arguments for and against it. While telling us in great detail, the medical trauma unfolding, he presents scientific and philosophical ideas on the biology of the spirit. He references great mathematical minds like Einstein, Schrödinger, Leibniz, and others. 

From the minutiae of quantum mechanics to the greatest expanses of the known galaxies, everything we discover leads to more we don’t know. We don’t know what we don’t know. Nothing interests me more than the opening of a mind; the moment when a light turns on and the room will never be as dark as it was before.

This experience forever changed the way Sebastian Junger looks at the world. He is the first to admit it. I look forward to his writing in the future and the impact this breadth of insight will have.

About the author: Jen Petty Hilger grew up in New York and London, England, but finds herself happily quiet living by the water in Old Lyme. She and her husband have six children between them and a myriad of rescued animals.

‘Dear Jen’ Debuts Today with Interior Décor Advice

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jennifermannWe are very pleased to debut another advice column today.  Unlike our popular ‘Dear Cammy’ column, which is targeted at middle-schoolers, this ‘Dear Jen’ column is for adults.  Our very own Jen Mann, who has been our incredible book reviewer for more years than we can remember, is turning her hand to yet another thing that she does extraordinarily well.  And that is dispensing advice … so read on and if you have a question for Jen, you can reach her at jpmann@sbcglobal.net

Dear Jen,

I need a change of décor in my living room, but I don’t want to hire someone or spend a lot of money. What small changes can I make that will make a big difference?

In A Rut.

Dearest in a Rut,

Not to worry.  This is not only an easy fix but a fun one.  Look around your room.  Take out 10 things.  Pictures, objects d’art, pillows, throws, plants, anything that moves.  Stick it in another room, better yet, put it on the dining room table where you can see it.

Now, look at the room.  Is there a difference?  If it looks noticeable barer, then you’re halfway there.  What colors stand out?  Walls?  A sofa?  The rug?  This is the color you want to work with.  Pick a color that you love.

If one doesn’t come to mind or you are having a panic attack, go to a paint shop.  Pull 10 colors you like.  Bring them home and stand in the doorway.  Hold them up one by one and see what appeals to you.

Then take that swatch or swatches with you around your house.  Do you have anything that jumps out?  You’d be surprised what you have.

If nothing grabs you.  Go to home goods with your paint chips.  Get a pillow or two.  Get silk flowers.  Get a throw.  A weird statue, a basket.  Anything that is this color is fair game.  Take your prizes home and place them around the room.  Move them around.  Nothing is set in stone.

Play play, play!

If you’re still in a panic, send me a photo and I’ll tell you where to put stuff.  The stuff you took out can be put elsewhere in the house.  Never be afraid to shake it up.

Hope that helps.

If not, there’s always the Monkey Farm Happy Hour…

Jen