Whale Fall - Softcover

O'Connor, Elizabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593686012 ISBN 13: 9780593686010

Verlag: Vintage, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW NOTABLE BOOK • A stunning debut from an award-winning writer, about loss, isolation, folklore, and the joy and dissonance of finding oneself by exploring life outside one’s community

"Whale Fall is a powerful novel, written with a calm, luminous precision, each feeling rendered with chiseled care, the drama of island life unfolding with piercing emotional accuracy." —Colm Toibin, New York Times bestselling author of Long Island

In 1938, a dead whale washes up on the shores of remote Welsh island. For Manod, who has spent her whole life on the island, it feels like both a portent of doom and a symbol of what may lie beyond the island's shores. A young woman living with her father and her sister (to whom she has reluctantly but devotedly become a mother following the death of their own mother years prior), Manod can't shake her welling desire to explore life beyond the beautiful yet blisteringly harsh islands that her hardscrabble family has called home for generations.

The arrival of two English ethnographers who hope to study the island culture, then, feels like a boon to her—both a glimpse of life outside her community and a means of escape. The longer the ethnographers stay, the more she feels herself pulled towards them, reckoning with a sensual awakening inside herself, despite her misgivings that her community is being misconstrued and exoticized.

With shimmering prose tempered by sharp wit, Whale Fall tells the story of what happens when one person's ambitions threaten the fabric of a community, and what can happen when they are realized. O'Connor paints a portrait of a community and a woman on the precipice, forced to confront an outside world that seems to be closing in on them.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ELIZABETH O'CONNOR lives in Birmingham. Her short stories have appeared in The White Review and Granta, and she was the 2020 winner of the White Review Short Story Prize. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Birmingham, specializing in the modernist writer H.D. and her writing of coastal landscapes.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

I was born on the island on 20th January 1920. My birth certificate read 30th January 1920, because my father could not get to the registration office on the mainland before then. There was a great winter storm and no one could leave the island. When we were finally able to cross, my mother used to tell me, the beach was covered in jellyfish, like a silver path of ice. My mother survived the birth, thank Jesus, because no one could have come to help her.

The island was three miles long and one mile wide, with a lighthouse marking the eastern point and a dark cave marking the west. There were twelve families, the minister, and Polish Lukasz who worked in the lighthouse. Our house, Rose Cottage, was set into the side of a hill, where the wind wrapped a fist around it. Tad said the army should have made tanks out of our windows, the way they stood against the weather. The glass had warped and splintered in places but still held fast to the frame. In the bedroom, at night, you could hear our neighbours’ goats calling out to their young through a crack in the pane, and sometimes you could see a candle in their house burning like a coin balanced on the top of the hill.

-

Tad always called me by the dog’s name. On the day of the whale, he passed me in the yard, calling for the dog. I was trying to clear dust from the hearth-rug, but watched as it formed a silvery layer over my clothes instead. I had to bat the midges away from my eyes.

"I’m going on the boats, Elis," Tad said.

"Manod," I said. "Not Elis. Elis is the dog’s name."

"I know, I know that."

He waved me away. He headed down the path towards the sea. His rubber boots made a sucking sound on each step.

"That’s what I said," I heard him say. "Manod. That’s what I said."

On the other side of the yard, Tad dried mackerel by stringing them up on a line. He loved the dog: there was one section of dried fish just for him. My father barely spoke to me or my sister, but at night I heard him mumble long conversations with Elis. In the yard, Elis ran circles sniffing at the lichen between the slabs of stone, barely stopping, barely looking up at me. I cut a fish down for him, and he ran into the hawthorn ungratefully, sending up a small cloud of dried dirt and leaves.

I rubbed at a smear on my dress. It was an old one of my mother’s, dark flannel with loose threads trailing at each hem. Mam made her own clothes and then taught me. She made them practically, with wide pockets and space for moving around. I liked to copy the patterns in the magazines women left behind in the chapel. Mainland trends. From them I realised most people on the island dressed ten years behind everywhere else. Sometimes suit- cases were washed up the shore and in them I found old garments to wear or take apart for the material. I found a ballgown once, with only a small tear at the hip, in anemone-red silk. It had a small pocket on one side, and out of it came a gold-plated powder compact, shaped like a scallop shell. The powder puff was still orange from contact with its owner’s skin.

-

Our neighbour appeared soon after Tad left, his clothes and hair dripping. I could see him come over the hill to where his wife was milking one of their goats. I could smell him from where I stood, the damp of his sheepskin jerkin and his soaked shirt beneath. His wife ran to him and cupped his face. I felt awkward watching them, and stood combing my fingers through my hair. I could hear snatches of what he told Leah: We thought it was a boat. Do you think it’s a bad sign? I watched Leah’s hands stiffen, the breath catch in her throat.

-

Not one person on the island knew how to swim. The men did not learn how, and so neither did the women. The sea was dangerous and I suppose we had lived with its danger too long. A popular saying amongst them: Out of the boat and into the water. Out of the frying pan into the fire. Out of the boat and God help you.

There used to be a king on the island, who wore a brass crown. When he died in the previous decade, no one wanted to do it anymore. Most of the young men had been killed in the war, or were trying to get a job on the mainland. The ones left were too busy on the fishing boats. So it goes. According to my mother, the women were not asked.

-

My sister spread butter over bread with her fingers, eating the bread and then licking her fingers one by one. You’re too old for that, I told her, and she stuck out her tongue at me. I poured tea into three cups on the table, and watched it steam.

Llinos turned the cup around in front of her, as though inspecting it from every angle. She combed her fingers through her hair. I thought of something my mother used to say about us: Ni allaf ddweud wrth un chwaer oddi wrth un arall. I can’t tell one sister from the other. There are six years between us, but only one of us is still a child, so that is no longer true.

"What’s the English word?" I asked her.

"I don’t know."

"Yes, you do."

Llinos gulped her tea, and winced. "Hot," she said.

"It’s whale."

I looked over to Tad to support me. I had been trying to improve Llinos’s English all summer but she was stubborn. Tad sat with his head hanging back, his eyes closed. One hand in his lap and the other holding Elis’s muzzle. His clothes were drying in front of the fire, mixing the smell of laundry with the smell of fish. Ours was a small front room: space for a table, chairs, fire and a small dresser. The dresser was covered in drips of candle wax. Tad had taken out his dental plate with its three pearlescent teeth, and left it in the centre.

By the door was a bucket with the lobsters he had caught that day. In the silences of our conversation, I could hear them move in the water, claws scraping against the bucket’s metal side. I watched a shadow rise and fall on the other side of the room, and realised it was my hand. I collected the plates and asked Tad if he had seen the whale.

"Out at sea," he said, rubbing a calloused patch on his knuckles, "normally you see more than one."

"Didn’t Mam used to talk about whales?" Llinos said.

Dark turn. "Surely they are bad luck."

"You sound like a mad old woman," I said.

I cleared our plates, gave the scraps to Elis on the floor. Tad held my wrist after I took his cup, then moved his hand over mine.

"Marc was asking after you today. Said how nice you looked at chapel."

"And what did you say?"

Tad shrugged.

"I told him to ask you."

"You can tell him no, I don’t want to." Tad sighed and looked at his hands.

"You should be thinking about getting married. It doesn’t have to be Marc. It could be Llew."

"I’m eighteen."

"The time goes fast." His voice softened. "I can’t have you here forever."

"Who would look after Llinos?"

Elis had reared up onto his hind legs next to Llinos’s chair, twisting his head to lick up crumbs from the table. Llinos turned and caught his front paws. She stood up next to him, so that they looked like a couple dancing. They swayed from side to side, and Elis opened his mouth wide and panted.

I looked at the bottom of my cup. The milk had formed a film over the surface and puckered, like a strange kiss.

-

In the night I dreamt of a long dinner table, with whales dressed in formal clothes laughing over their plates. I was with them, in a dress I saw in a magazine once, made of pear-green silk, and a hat with a long white feather. After- wards they danced and I could not say how they were moving, if they were on the tips of their tails or sliding from side to side, just that I was lifted from my feet and spun and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Vintage
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593686012
• ISBN 13: 9780593686010
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: EDITIONS GALLIMARD; ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it; ; Via Verdi, 8.; Assago Milano; 20090; Italien