Kathryn Harrison - The Seal Wife

Table of Contents

Praise for Kathryn Harrisons THE SEAL WIFE

A simple story of love and obsession... Ms. Harrison narrates these events with uncommon grace, limning the frozen landscape of early-20th-century Alaska with the same easy authority she brings to the delineation of Bigelows turbulent state of mind. She demonstrates, with more assurance... that she is capable of writing historical fiction that possesses all the immediacy and harsh poetry of reportage.... She... demonstrates her ability to evoke the sensual qualities of everyday life, while using language that is considerably sparer than she has used before but equally hypnotic.... Ms. Harrison not only makes us understand the destructive consequences of sexual obsession, but also makes us appreciate its power to shape an individuals sense of self, its ability to inspire and perhaps even to redeem the past.

Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

[Harrison] has a real talent for conjuring far-flung times and placesa patient zeal for assembling odd, telling details that convey the look and feel of a particular era.... Her novels... [display] ample evidence of her subtle intelligence.... The novels awareness of the natural world gives it a sturdier, more philosophical underpinning.... Harrison imbues her solitary silence with a stately air of self-possession.

Maria Russo, The New York Times Book Review

A beautiful novel, elegant and brief, profoundly reverent toward the dignity of its characters and the redemptive possibilities of passion, endurance, and work.

Vince Passaro, O, the Oprah Magazine

Prose as pristine as ice droplets.

Entertainment Weekly

[A] darkly passionate tale of a distant time and dramatic place.

Glamour

From the first page, the reader immediately slips into the narrative. The passion glides easily and the reader rolls along, swept up as if in love. Harrison captures passions cadence in the soulthe slip-sliding into love, the swirling actions guided by nothing logical but still making total sense. Harrisons style is flawless, balancing the measurable with the intangible, her short chapters alternating between science and soul. Her sentences are spare, using a rhythm of writing that lulls the reader into Bigelows compulsive worlds of love and work.

AP Weekly Features

In perfect control of the spare narrative, Harrison writes mesmerizing, cinematically vivid scenes.... Harrisons excellently assimilated research about the early days of weather forecasting and about the conditions in Alaska during WWII add credibility to a novel about the inner landscape of desire.

Publishers Weekly

Painterly in its pearlescent evocation of the Alaskan landscape, steeped in myth and the magic of science, this is a delectably moody, erotic, and provocative cross-cultural love story.

Booklist

[Harrison] will amaze readers with the ostensibly effortless manner in which she describes both the bleak terrain of Alaska and the alien terrain of Bigelows own compulsive thoughts. At the root of this story is the interplay between seclusion and desire. Harrison forcefully develops this primal conflict.

Library Journal

H. S. J.
18901984

HE IS TWENTY-SIX, and for as long as hes lived in the north there has been only the Aleut woman.

Several evenings a week he comes to her door with a duck or a rabbit and she asks him in. Not asks, exactly. She opens the door and steps aside so he can enter.

She lives in a frame house hammered together fast out of boards and tar paper, a house like all the others in Anchorage, except it isnt on First or Fourth or even Ninth Street; instead it is off to the east, marooned on the mud flats. But she has things in it, like anyone else, a table and two chairs, flour and tea on a shelf, a hat hanging from a peg. She wears a dress with buttons and she cooks at a stove, and the two of them eat before, and then after she sits cross-legged in the tub and smokes her pipe.

She smokes, and he watches her smoke. He thinks her mouth may be the most beautiful part of hernot red, not brown or mauve or pink, but a color for which he has no name. Her top lip is finely drawn, almost stern; the bottom one is plump, with a crease in the center. On another face its fullness might be considered a pout, but her black eyes convey none of the disappointment, nor the invitation, of such an expression.

She is the only woman who has allowed him to watch her as intently, as much and as long, as he wants, and the reason for this comes to him one night. She is self-possessed. There is nothing he can take from her by looking.

At the thought, he gets up from the bed and goes to the window, he rests his forehead on its cold pane. She possesses herself. How much more this makes him want her!

Then, one day, its over: she wont open her door to him.

He knocks, he rattles the knob. Please, he says, his mouth against the crack. Open up. Its me.

With his hands cupped around his eyes, he peers through the window and there she is, sitting at the table, staring at the wall.

He knocks on the glass and holds up his rabbit, but she doesnt turn her head. Even after hes walked the entire perimeter of the two-room house, hitting the boards with the heel of his hand, even after that, when he looks in the window, he sees her still sitting there, not moving. He leaves his dead rabbit on the ground and goes back the way he came, trudging past the railroad yard and the new bunkhouse, the sawmill with its chained curs lunging and snapping after his shadow.

What. He thinks the word over and over. There must be some explanation. But what?

Its June, eleven oclock at night and bright as morning. The usually gray water of the inlet is purple, gold where the light touches it, a low skein of cirrus unraveling on the horizon. Beyond the trampled mud of the streets are wildflowers growing everywhere, flowers of all colors, red fireweed, yellow broom, blue aster. He picks them as he walks. Preoccupied, he yanks at them, and some come up roots and all. After smelling their bright heads, he drops them, and by the time he retraces his path their petals have withered.

Has he done something to offend her? In his mind he reviews his last visit with the woman. He brought her a duck, a good-size one, and a bolt of netting to protect her bed. Surely there was nothing wrong in that. He cant stand being bitten by mosquitoes, and he hates for the two of them to have to leave their clothing on. Every hour hes not with her is one spent waiting to see her, the more of her the better. She has the sloping shoulders characteristic of her people; breasts that are small and pointed, like two halves of a yam set side by side; three black lines tattooed on her chin; and smooth, bowed legs.

She, he calls her to himself, because he hasnt presumed to name her, not even privately. Her hair is long and black, a mares tail, and once, when he began to unbraid it, she took it from his hands. By some accident of biology her navel turned out a perfect spiral, and hes fought off her hands to kiss her in that place.

Her body seems young to him, as young as his own, as strong and unmarked. But her eyes make him wonder.

Theres no point in asking her age, because she doesnt understand English, nor any of the pidgin phrases hes taught himself and tried to say.

Or perhaps she does know the meaning of his words but is unwilling to betray her knowledgeherselfto him.