Word: naslund
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...step aboard the vaulting epic Ahab's Wife (Morrow; 668 pages; $28), by Sena Jeter Naslund, and almost instantly you are in New England in 1840, a charged, visionary realm atremble with religious longings and debate. Privets are shaped like sperm whales. Inns are kept by witches. Women ask each other in passing, "What do you think of the afterlife?" Your guide through this God-racked wilderness is a classically captivating heroine, Una Spenser, drawn equally to storms and speculations...
...follow this spirited skeptic as she looks at lightning head on (in a lighthouse), escapes to sea on a whaling ship (dressed, in Shakespearean fashion, as a boy) and takes Captain Ahab (who has the "mien of a weathered god") to her bed. Naslund is helping us, of course, to see the all-male world of Moby Dick through more compassionate eyes, and its protagonist as he might be glimpsed through "pity's tears." Yet what is remarkable here is not the revisionism. Naslund, author of four much smaller works of fiction, actually matches the master, Melville...
...Bronte sisters had gone off whaling. Yet for all the literary grandeur, much of the book possesses the reader like an unholy fever. A woman walks through the mist in a wolf-trimmed cloak. A madman cries, "Now we eat our fingernails. Now the spiny stars." Naslund writes with the fearlessness of her protagonist...
When, in its final passage, Ahab's Wife leaves Melville for dry land, it loses some of its fire; channeling her male precursor is what quickens Naslund into incandescence. By then, however, the soul has been shaken many times over...
...Marcus Naslund, a former Penguins first-round draft choice, scored his 28th and 29th goals of the season in the second period after Pittsburgh's Peter Skudra replaced an injured Tom Barrasso in goal. Vancouver scored on two of its four shots in the period...