I decided to take on a year-long experiment of reading only women authors. My energy to read—and especially to be an engaged, opinionated reader—was dwindling. I wanted to find inspiration and understanding in the voices of other women. It was reductive, I knew, to imagine other women were the solution, but at the same time I craved reductive thinking. I just wanted things to be simple, and to work.
It has been nearly 20 years since the night in a newspaper office in Delhi when I came across a copy of a fax V.S. Naipaul had sent in response to a reporter asking for his rules of writing. (“Avoid the abstract; always go for the concrete.”) I found those rules useful. In recent years, I have had a mantra of my own: “Write every day, and walk every day.” A modest goal of 150 words daily and mindful walking for 10 minutes.
In 1991, I was 40 years old, recently divorced, with two children—17 and 12—and running a young executive consulting and coaching company just starting to show promise. I stared out the window above my desk at a double row of tall pine trees, the same species that circled my childhood home across town. They were my focus when I lifted my strained eyes from looking into one of 147 boxes of letters, books, and other documents that made up my father’s literary archives at Dartmouth College, in Hanover. It was a sunny Monday morning, and the collection was being held in a nondescript steel storage building a few miles south of campus.
Friends were surprised I was spending my Monday mornings in a structure we’d all driven by a hundred times and never noticed. With a large overhead door facing a side street for loading and unloading, the warehouse had only a few windows, one of which I could look out of on the woods. The boxes were in storage while the college built its new Rauner Special Collections Library, my father having made this donation to his alma mater several years prior when he and my mother moved into a retirement facility north of town.
“The animals are dying. Soon we will be alone here.”
These two short statements – declarative, understated – open The Last Migration, Australian author Charlotte McConaghy’s debut novel. They work to set both the scene and the tone of the book: the novel is dreamy, elegiac, often heightened to the register of fairytales or myths; and it is set in a near future, where the effects of climate change have meant that the world’s animal life has almost completely died out.
This Rodinesque
chipped-away-at
demiembodiedness.