For the mathematician Sarah Hart, a close reading of “Moby-Dick” reveals not merely (per D.H. Lawrence) “one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world” and “the greatest book of the sea ever written,” but also a work awash in mathematical metaphors.
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“When he’s reaching for an allusion or a metaphor, he’ll often pick a mathematical one,” she said. “‘Moby-Dick’ has loads of lovely juicy mathematics in it.”
The bomb is always ticking, and then when its specific presence is revealed, it continues to provide tension up to the last page. There can be a looseness to Ishiguro’s novels, whether structurally or in terms of long dialogue that too closely mirrors actual speech. Klara and the Sun, however, is elegant and haunting and taut. It is best read as a keen, suspenseful inquiry into the uniqueness of the human heart. Is there a soul, something, anything that’s beyond the reach of technology as it marches toward a destruction of everything we know? Through the novel’s drama, Ishiguro offers us an answer. It’s a profound one.
As with Shirley Jackson’s work or Sarah Waters’s masterpiece Affinity, in Stonex’s hands the unspoken, unexamined, unseen world we can call the supernatural, a world fed by repression and lies, becomes terrifyingly tangible. It brushes against us as we sleep, more real than home, more dangerous than the gun in the drawer.
This is a joyous and profound meditation on birdsong and what it means to us, a book that brings to life an essential part of the natural world that most of us take so much for granted that we scarcely notice it.
Duplicitous surfaces
glint with spreading purposes
malevolent grins
course, wind and bite at shins.