Ahab's Wife or, The Star-Gazer

I started this book with high expectation given the author’s credentials and so many good reviews. The first 50 pages didn’t disappoint but then the protagonist went off the tangent! The author threw everything into the pot including cannibalism, homosexuality, rape and incest!
There are some beautiful lyrical passages and the bit on whaling and sailors’ golden earrings was interesting.
Other than that, the author tried too hard to impress!! The book is overrated and indulgent!
Self-absorbed, improbable and contrived, Una was not a believable character in her days.
I had high hope nominating this book for a book club read, NOT a chance!

This is the story of Ahab's wife, Captain Ahab from Moby Dick. This book follows Una from when she is a child living with her aunt, uncle and cousin at a lighthouse, to her leaving and stowing away as a cabin boy on a ship, then through her three marriages.

It was ok. Way too long. There were so many different sections, things that happened... Some I was more interested in than others. My favourite part of the book was probably Una's four years at the lighthouse with her family. Other than that, my mind wandered a lot of the time (though there were bouts of interest), and when I wasn't reading, I wasn't being pulled back to read. The only reason I kept coming back to it was to finish it, and move on. Maybe I would have liked it more if I remembered Moby Dick from high school? I don't recall liking Moby Dick, though, so I'm not sure that would have helped. The interview with the author at the end of the book was interesting.

Awful book--- the author is trying way too hard to be a haughty, serious writer. The sentence structure is ridiculous - the characters flat and the end result is a scattered jumble of words put together in an attempt to impress rather than tell a story.

This is filled with overly verbose, superfluous hyberpole that meanders endlessly through each and every paragraph.

It ends up like the worst writing assignment gone bad-- the author has no filter, no ability to focus. Instead, the reader is subjected to endless nonsense that isn't even grounded in a grain of reality.

The most positive aspect of this book is that it forces you to appreciate well-written stories that hang together and engage the reader.

Just falls flat & one of the worst books ever!

Don't waste your time!

** 4 1/2 - 5 stars ** Sena Jeter Naslund has written an epic spiritual journey of Una Spenser, wife of famed Moby Dick hunter, Captain Ahab. With depth of feeling, Jeter Naslund creates characters that practically jump into the present from a time past rich with historical significance. The reader begins to understand the isolation and solace of living in a lighthouse or the lonliness and the sometime desperation of surviving the wilderness of winter in Kentucky. The reader wonders at the perils of life at sea and the bravery of women daring enough to question the bounds of their gender set forth by the society in which they lived. The author forces the reader, at times, to question the probability of certain occurences in the book such as the connection between characters to real life figures like Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglas and Henry James but she surely makes up for it in the prose she choses to use to describe the journey of her main character, Una. What is left is a sense of awe for the writing skills of Sena Jeter Naslund who writes so poetically and nobly of satisfying characters and their quest to find their cosmic place.

This book is traveling from Canada to Brazil, following to Sweden and then back to Canada. There are not enough words to describe such wonderful book, one of the best books I read recently. The author has a lyrical way of writing and we are strongly immersed into the story.

One must take off her fear like clothing;
One must travel at night;
This is the seeking after God.
- Maureen Morehead, In a Yellow Room

A Ship Is a Breath of Romance
That Carries Us Miles Away.
And a Book Is a Ship of Fancy
That Could Sail on Any Day.
- traditional Quaker rhyme/verse, often cross-stitched

Ahab's Wife: Or, The Star-Gazer is a wordy yet beautiful tale relating to Moby Dick: The 1851 Herman Melville Classic Novel. Many themes of ships, sea and stars.

Favorite Passages
The Window
The Lighthouse itself became my church, my single tall tree trunk, my faith in stone and earth, and eventually, my conduit to the sky.

The Paddlewheel
"How do you like the Lighthouse?" she asked.
"I wish that it were taller."
She laughed. "Accept the world, Una. It is what it is."
Gradually, the vertical line of Lighthouse widened, so that the Lighthouse seemed not like a mere pencil line but a brush stroke with width as well as height, inching up the sky. For a time, the sunlight on its high glass glared steadily, but as our angle of approach changed, the whole column went gray and lightless. It grew taller and more satisfactory.

A Difficult Farewell
I wondered where the needle was, and she held it out, as though to answer my question, at arm's length, and the sunshine caught its tip like a star.
"This is the light of unbridled Nature," my mother answered.
"Of unveiled Nature," Aunt put in. "But sometimes we're veiled in mists and fogs that last all day."
_______

Aunt said, "It's the shadow of the Lighthouse."
"Do you know what a gnomon is?" Uncle asked.
"It is the stylus of a sundial."
And I saw that a long bar of shadow began at the base of the tower and fell like a slat across the face of the Island, across us, upon the close-in water, into the chaos of the waves.

The Petrel
If the lens was changed, would not everything be changed?

Revelation
"I've found a way," I said, "to wish till things happen. The very atoms I'm made of come apart in a kind of sparkle. A cloud of sparkle propelled by will."
_______

"You are bold, inventive, unconventional, and . . . ambitious."

Collision
To look at Giles's face was to see question and catalog move through his brain - what was most needed, what next in priority, and where was it?

The Distance of the Stars
It is true: our boat is more dull than black. Black, after all, is a color and can have its glory and sheen. All around us in the sea and the sky, there is a black glory we do not share. We are a blemish on it, a spot of rust. When obsidian is hit with a rock, it may split off into sharp and useful flakes, ut hit athwart, it blemishes - a crazed spot, a wound. Athwart was our world smacked.

Ganglion
Oh, mankind, you must learn to tat if you would live content. The thread of yourself must form a knobby loop and takes in a larger, growing shape: where you make your home and who is at your hearth and whatever you do for a livelihood, from whaling to mending roads, from raising roof beams to baking bread. Three cannot tie together, turn their backs on all else. Tuck it all in, toward the center! And then let that loop join hands with other loops till the structure is intricate, multifaceted, predictable but growing as a cathedral. Yes, for that piece of stone lace studded with colored glass is the work of centuries. Don't think you belong only to your own time! To your moment of survival. What you do or don't do is left behind.

Postscript on the Above
Isolato! Do you think yourself a string too short to save? Do you think that you are lank and straight, a linear bit with no connection fore or aft? Fear not your insignificance. Nature has a drawer for you. Yes, nature garners all the string too short to save, and mice visit that drawer. Here's nesting material! Yes, you will be interwoven, be it now or later.

Soaring
Did I promise myself soaring? It has been a long time coming. As the lace fell from my fingertips, as I wove the thread-loaded shuttle into and out of its own creation, a skeleton came walking across the deck.
He came as a shadow. A flicker at the corner of the eye.

Enter: The Gaoler and the Judge
How completely, just beyond a door, beyond a screening wall, may lie an undreamt-of reality in this world!

A Sky Full of Angels
"I shall be happy here," I said. "This home - it overwhelms me."
"No, Una. I think nothing overwhelms ye. The cupula is the crown of the house, and ye in your person are diamond, ruby, emerald, and sapphire in that crown. I would not have ye overwhelmed by mere stationary boards and window glass."

The Office of a Friend
"And how will you arrange the books of your library, Mrs. Captain?"
"Why, alphabetically, by the author's last name," I replied.
He opined that the books should be put in coarse categories, such as literature, history, science, and art, and within the sections be arranged by date of publication. "In each discipline, knowledge evolves," he said, "and this way you will have a picture of the development of ideas. Alphabetizing is arbitrary."
I could not but agree his plan was a more rational one, though mine might be more convenient in some ways. Nonetheless, I acquiesced to his system.

A Winter Tale
"If you were to piece a quilt," I asked, "that looked like Keats, what colors would you use?"
"I think he is beyond real colors."
What an idea! "Heard sounds are sweet; unheard, sweeter," I quoted freely from "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

Journey Toward the Starry Sky, in Present Tense
There is the great journey yet to be taken. Let my mind be a ship that sails from starry point to starry point. In my brain, I feel those cold black spaces containing nothing. I approach a pinprick of light closer and closer till it is a conflagration of such magnitude that I am nothing. And yet with my mind I caliper it with contemplation.
Where is my place before this swirling ball of star mass, edgeless and expansive, without horizon? Where is my place, when I know that this is but one of ten billion? Here the categories crack. Beauty - that gilt frame - burns at its edges and falls to ash. Love? It's no more than a blade of grass. Perhaps there is music here, for in all that swirling perhaps harmony fixes the giants in their turning, marches them always outward in their fiery parade.
Taht I can see their glory, that is my place. That I have these moments to be alive - and surely they are alive in some way. Perhaps it is only being that we share. But something is shared between me on this rooftop and them flung wide and myriad up there. What was the golden motto embroidered on the hem of my baby's silk dress? We are kin to stars.
I reach my hands toward them, spread my fingers and see those diamonds in the black V's between my fanning fingers. To think that I could gather them into my hands, stuff them in my pockets, is folly. But I can reach. It is I myself, alive now, who reach into the night toward stars. Their light is on my hands.
Their light is in my hands. I gasp in the crisp air of earth and know that I am made of what makes stars! Those atoms burning bright - I lower my hands - why, they are here within me. I am as old as they and will continue as long as they, and after our demise, we will all be born again, eons from now. What atoms they have I cannot know. I cannot call their names, but they are not strangers to me. I know them in my being, and they know me.
Little scrap, little morsel, the stars sing to me, we are the same.

'Sconset Morning
I laid myself down, the small tooth of a gear, in all that wheeling universe. And yet I was a part. The inner sea, right-sailed, had wholeness to offer, and this, this vastness - it let me partake of harmony.
Thus, I felt and thought and loved and yearned till daybreak.
And what was the residue from my stay in that dark furnace? The morning after that night, peach inhabited me and intimations of distant joy.

The Neighbor Beyond the Hedge
Sometimes the past returns as present - at least those moments that never leave us do. All happened as I thought it would: my Justice awoke to his day. But before my son opened his eyes, he smiled and came close to laughing. When his eyes did look into mine, I asked, "Why are you happy?"
"I dreamt I got it at last," he said.
"Got what?"
"My father's watch."
And I went and fetched it from the mantel. He took the pocket watch in his hand and kissed its face and rubbed the smooth silver back of it against his small palm. The grooved winding knob on the stem he rotated between his chubby thumb and forefinger. Looking up at me, his face was shine with delight and gratitude.

Epilogue
Each day and forever, by the ticking of the mantel clock and by the dark wheeling of the cosmos, we have given time a home.

This is basically Moby Dick fan fiction, with much of fan fiction's highest pleasures and one of it's most common problems. There are only a few paragraphs in Melville's Moby Dick mentioning Captain Ahab's unnamed young wife, a "sweet, resigned girl" he married at fifty, spent only one night in bed with, and by whom he had a son. Naslund takes that nail paring worth of information and from it fashions a flesh and blood woman, Una Spenser of Kentucky.

And therein lies my major issue: Una. Some might feel Una has too modern a sensibility, about religion, about whaling. But I thought it was appropriate (and Una's struggle with belief spoke to me). Melville himself is often irreverent about religion. (See, for instance, Ismael's thoughts and remarks about Queequeg) and rather sarcastic and ironic in tone about whaling, even suggesting at one point it's akin to cannibalism. My problem with Una is that she's "Mary Sue," a term coined regarding fan fiction to refer to an original character who is an idealized projection of the author, usually improbably adored by all and with superpowers. I'm afraid Una comes far too close to that for comfort. So many characters fall for her, and famous historical figures are associated with her. Una is a bosom friend of Margaret Fuller. Nathaniel Hawthorne considers Una remarkable among women after talking with her for a few minutes. Her cousin works for Frederick Douglas and Una recognizes Henry James' genius after talking with him briefly as a child. Another problem with Una is how she and Ahab see each other as another self. It doesn't fit though. Una is too sane. Even when the author has her break a terrible taboo, she has Una do it in a way that distances her from the crime, and I never really felt what should have been a traumatic incident disturbed or damaged her in a way I found credible. Una's neither a mirror to Ahab in his monomania nor does she strike me as a "sweet, resigned girl" as Ahab's wife is described by Peleg in Moby Dick.

Yet, I did love a lot about this book. I read Moby Dick just before I read Ahab's Wife, and if you can make yourself read what is admittedly at times a tedious (but rich) book first, I think you'd find it rewarding to do so before reading this one. The books share common characters such as Ahab, Starbuck, Flask, Pip, Daggoo, Tashtego, Captains Peleg and Bildad, Mrs Hussey, Ismael; places like The Spouter-Inn and Try Pots Tavern, phrases, images and parallel incidents like the one with the lightning rod, and in the last third of the book the last voyage of the Pequod is told through letters and news from the returning ships she encountered. Even though I think it can stand alone, I think you'll enjoy this book more if you can recognize the wealth of allusions. Like Moby Dick or, the Whale there's an alternate title, The Stargazer, there's a similar number of chapters in similar typeset (157 to Moby Dick's 135) This book is also first person, from Una's point of view, but with some chapters from other points of views like Ahab's, and, like Moby Dick, even snatches in stage play format, giving a flavor of the eccentric source. However, I found Ahab's Wife more enjoyable than Moby Dick and better crafted in a structural sense. Yes, I know that's blasphemous, and I'm not arguing this book is a profound deathless classic like Moby Dick, which was so very original. But at least there aren't endless digressions and infodump with a host of chapters devoted to the sperm whale's tail, skull, skin, penis, etc. Instead we have a smart, courageous heroine and more action and adventure than one might expect.

And I quite like Naslund's lyrical prose style. Not purple I think--not when put next to Melville's prose which I thought it complimented. I'd certainly be interested in reading more of Naslund after this, and am curious if her style will change to match different material. For me this works as a very enjoyable, erudite work of historical and literary fiction and coming of age story, rich in its play of ideas, and by the end of Ahab's Wife I better understood and appreciated Moby Dick because of reading it.

This is an historical novel about the wife of Ahab of Moby Dick fame.

The book is in need of a good editor and a serious trimming. It seemed as if the author was trying to pack in as much of her research as possible, with many asides to name drop 19th century New England intellectuals that don't really advance the story (my character is a smart woman admired by Emerson!). There are many minor character stories that always seem to end in tragedy. There also seem to be a few chapters where the author is just experimenting with writing style. There was one chapter where the main character obsesses over the letter 's'. This is chapter 128 on page 560. A word of advice to Ms. Naslund, when you get to page 560, it's really time to cut out the crap and start wrapping it up.

Naslund has talent and there were parts of this book I enjoyed (mostly at the beginning) and, there are some lyrical passages. However, this book had many problems for me, some of which had to do with believability and inserting modern sensibilities into an earlier time period. I do not think women who lived in sin with a man were accepted into polite society at that time and yet that happens several times in the book. Also, the main character chooses to travel while pregnant from Nantucket to her mother in Kentucky, eventually planning to return to Nantucket with the baby. Pregnancy was a much riskier business then and infant mortality quite high. I do not think any sane woman would take that risk without good reason and perhaps would have asked her mother to come to her.

In short, I would have enjoyed this book much more with tighter storytelling and a bit less horror and tragedy, and a little more adherence to the historical period.