This book was SO frustrating. Seduced by the gorgeous cover, I bought it on impulse, thinking that the author and I would share a keen sense of wonderThis book was SO frustrating. Seduced by the gorgeous cover, I bought it on impulse, thinking that the author and I would share a keen sense of wonder in the natural world and a love of good writing, and that this would be the middle ground between a professor of English and a field biologist.
Instead, I got a series of essays that used each featured biological organism as a connector (often very tenuous) to Aimee Nezhukumatathil's memoir-ish writings about what seems to be a pretty ordinary life: growing up brown in middle America, getting married, having children. I came for the corpse flowers and octopuses, not
The wiggle of [the ribbon eel's] body - the undulation to end all undulations - is like my own tongue, excited to tell my husband all the minutiae of a day spent alone with our three-year-old and our infant son, Jasper.
I really, really doubt it.
And
If a white girl tries to tell you what your brown skin can and cannot wear for makeup, just remember the smile of an axolotl. The best thing to do in that moment is to just smile and smile, even if your smile is thin. [...] An axolotl can help you smile as an adult even if someone on your tenure committee puts his palms together as if in prayer every time he sees you off-campus, and does a quick, short bow, and calls out, Namaste!.
As one brown first gen American to another, I agree that racism sucks. But I thought this would be about amphibians.
This is just not the perspective I'm looking for in my nature writing, and despite the occasional interesting tidbit of fact, I would argue this is not nature writing at all. I wrote in my reading notes, "I resent the way this author has taken some of my favorite organisms and made them about human experiences." They're not so much subjects as metaphors, never mind that these are evolutionary wonders that exist beyond human consciousness, that have lives and sentiences that we cannot fully understand but definitely go beyond, say, the judginess with which Nezhukumatathil anthropomorphizes octopuses. For a book entitled World of Wonders, there's little wonder in here, plus a weirdly circumscribed view of the non-human world.
It's like Nezhukumatathil thinks she has her finger on the pulse of each ecosystem she explores, but she's using her thumb, so the pulse she feels is actually her own. It's fine if you like memoir and enjoy reinforcing (inevitably, to some extent) anthropocentric worldviews, but what I'm looking for in nature writing (see The Trees in My Forest, The Living Mountain) is a profound relationship with and active curiosity in an ecosystem beyond its relevance to human emotions and memories.
I was disappointed in the writing as well. What are they teaching in schools these days? Nezhukumatathil comes across occasionally as coy (a bird is "three apples tall" - is that three mini lunchbox Galas tall, or three statuesque Cosmic Crisps tall?), an accent is "coconutty," and when it comes to children, things get stickily sentimental.
From a bit about the cara cara orange, which I thought I'd love (my second favorite citrus!):
You and your brother are the very plump and sweet fruit she'd always hoped to one day squeeze. When daily news seems to bring forth another fresh grief - more children killed, the Amazon rainforest ablaze for weeks - I think of this orange, its sweetness and the smiles it brings to so many families.
I also put this book down in outrage at a page-long account of the dying of a hunted octopus, at which the author claims to feel "sheer despair," then notes, "My son never ate an octopus again." Yeah? What about you? How long did that despair last before you started eating this intelligent and intriguingly alien animal again?
The one bit I felt completely in sympathy with the author was when she talks about using her love for chasing corpse flower blooms around the country to filter out bad dates. If I ever find myself dating again, I will be sure to bring up my deep love for poisonous plants, timing the bit about Socrates for when they take a sip of wine.
Unrated due to book/reader mismatch, but for me, World of Wonders was as irritating as a papercut, and I cannot recommend it to anyone (but especially - misanthrope biologists, steer clear).
Edited one month later to say: I'm still angry about this book, so one star it is. ...more
DNF - 33%. For the record, I'm not a purist, nor a classics scholar, nor anti-feminist, and I was down for a revisionist and redemptive story arc for DNF - 33%. For the record, I'm not a purist, nor a classics scholar, nor anti-feminist, and I was down for a revisionist and redemptive story arc for a woman who is largely reviled in Greek mythology. But. This is no Circe: if Madeline Miller's writing is silk, Costanza Casati's is cheap polyester, and it...itches.
Clytemnestra, if you need a refresher (I did), was Agamemnon's wife during the whole Trojan mess; she took a lover while Agamemnon was away at war, and then they killed him when he returned a decade later.
Casati tries to make Clytemnestra more sympathetic by bringing in a first husband (Tantalus), (view spoiler)[later killed by Agamemnon (hide spoiler)] an instalove romance in exactly 21 pages. I can't figure out why she chose the name Tantalus, possibly a reference to a son of Zeus in mythology, whose name gave rise to the word 'tantalizing' after he sacrificed a son to the gods and was punished by having to stand in water with fruit dangling above him, able to reach neither fruit nor water. Or, Wiki tells me that there's a historical Tantalus who is the great-great-grandfather of Agamemnon and Menelaus (how weird would it be to marry one guy, and then a few years later marry his great-great-grandson?). (view spoiler)[Anway, I was expecting Tantalus to do terrible things to their son, but instead they both get slaughtered through treachery. Boring. (hide spoiler)]
There's also a strong whiff of #girlboss vibes as the book opens with Clytemnestra slaughtering a lynx, later wrestling like a proper Spartan girl, having a say in her family politics, and generally proving herself to be Not Like the Other Girls. She's an anachronistic ally to her lesbian sister (like, I don't think that's how sexuality worked in ancient Greece, but it has been two decades since my last classics class - a class provocatively titled 'Monsters, Barbarians, and Women'). Apart from the large-cat-killing and resentment about not making it into epic poetry like the bros, Casati's Clytemnestra comes across as strangely modern.
I could have blithely ignored all of this had I enjoyed the writing, but I find Casati's writing clunky and imprecise; it's actually hard for me to read because it's so distracting. The descriptions are frequently irrelevant and uninteresting, the figurative language is so odd that it yanks me out of the story, and to call the dialogue wooden would be an insult to trees (secondary vascular growth is fascinating and marvelous, and you can even tell different species apart by looking at wood cross sections under a microscope - true facts!). These gems are from my reading notes:
His hair is as black as obsidian and his eyes turquoise, like the most precious gems.
I'm just too old for this kind of redundancy.
He is eating some grapes out of a bowl, juice staining his beard.
How do you eat grapes in such a way that they stain your beard?? Grape flesh has clear juice; it's the skin that has pigments, and you'd really have to gnaw the skin and then rub it on your beard to get any kind of staining. ...Or you could just pop a whole grape into your mouth like a normal person.
As he speaks, she is stricken by how wonderful and scary it is to hang on his every word and to wish she could listen to him forever. It is like jumping over the edge of a cliff and falling, her heart racing, yet always longing for more.
I dunno what to even say about this one, or whether the jumbled similes or treacly sentimentality bothers me more.
They climb to the peak, where the air is cold and wet and trees pierce the sky like spears. Clytemnestra stops to sit on a large rock, and Helen kneels at her side, her golden hair sweaty and scattered with twigs. From up there, the valley is brown and smooth, the patches of dry yellow land like scars on a warrior's back.
See? Weird. It sounds like the warrior has vitiligo or something. Also, can something be 'scattered with twigs'? Shouldn't twigs be scattered in hair instead? And that's a lot of twigs. Even after a really rough field day scrambling through dense willow thickets, I rarely have more than two twigs in my hair.
tl;dr: poorly written, unnecessary retelling that doesn't add anything to the original story. No thank you....more
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