Kim Echlin - Elephant Winter

Praise for Elephant Winter

This is fine and brave writing...Saturday Night

Stylistically assured, entirely captivating... Kim Echlins Elephant Winter is an original, emotionally resonant novel... Echlin draws her characters with realistic, unsentimentalized strokes, and in the process evokes their poignant humanness with honesty and grace.

Books in Canada

What is so powerful about Elephant Winter is the reconciliation of life with death, of joy with pain... we are swept briefly into the lives of these characters and exposed to a beauty rarely seen in individuals, both animal and human. Elephant Winter is as refreshing as it is thought-provoking, offering a prescription for balance in a shaken world.

The Readers Showcase

Echlin has managed to convey the beauty and grace of living and dying, with elephants and people, all from a seedy tourist farm in southern Ontario. This is no small achievement... This is wonderful writing.

Edmonton Journal

Echlin has a gift of capturing the essence of a character, of the sweep of her tale, simply and elegantly... Echlins novel is achingly beautiful, at once sad and uplifting. It is a story for the heart, the mind and the soul.

The Evening Telegram

A captivating tale about listening to the language of love and having the faith to fill in the gaps.

Ottawa Citizen

The story is a rich, powerful exploration of intimacy on many levels, through the language of art, music, poetry and the language of silence. It is to be hoped there will be many more novels from this gifted storyteller.

Star Phoenix

Echlins love of learning, literature and high culture makes this not just an emotionally powerful debut but a smart one as well.

NOW Magazine

Echlins wonderful first novel explores the language of intimacy in all relationships and explores the vitality of words.

Why Magazine

A well-written book, full of fine and rich literary description. When the author of Elephant Winter writes a second novel, I want to read it.

Leader Post

Anyone who reads Kim Echlins debut Elephant Winter will savour it for a long time. The story is painful and triumphant in turns, a pleasing, optimistic first novel.

The Daily Press

Elephant Winter is enormously engaging, unusual enough to catch the popular imagination, and well and wisely enough to endure... The end comes too soon.

Quill & Quire

PENGUIN CANADA

ELEPHANT WINTER

KIM ECHLIN has been a documentary filmmaker, editor, and teacher. She has worked and travelled in Europe, China, the Marshall Islands, Africa, and Cambodia, and has completed a doctoral thesis on Ojibway storytelling. She currently writes and teaches in Toronto. Her first novel, Elephant Winter, won the Torgi Talking Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her most recent novel is The Disappeared, a love story set against the backdrop of the Pol Pot era.

ALSO BY KIM ECHLIN

Dagmars Daughter
Inanna: From the Myths of Ancient Sumer
The Disappeared

KIM ECHLIN

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1997

Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1998

Published in this edition, 2009

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright Kim Echlin, 1997

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The acknowledgments on page 203 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

Publishers note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in Canada.

ISBN: 978-0-14-317058-7

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request to the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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for Ross who showed me
the marvels of Lake Kariba
&
for my mother who always says
follow your heart

Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?

That is to say, My God, my God,
why hast thou forsaken me?

The Passion of St. Matthew

ELEPHANT
WINTER

I am called the Elephant-Keeper, which suits me. My name is Sophie Walker. When I am not at the elephant barns, I live in a crowded house near a tacky commercial tourist farm in southern Ontario. I have a daughter and I take care of the elephants.

I used to read about women who live with animals, women who have followed orangutans and gorillas through sodden rain forests and misty mountains. They talk about looking into the eyes of their animals and seeing the face of God. But I cannot merely observe my elephants, because I feed them, fill their water troughs, shovel their dung, take them for walks and train them to safely carry small children. They dip their knees so that I can climb up their sides to ride on their shoulders. Swaying up there, I hang between heaven and earth. In short, I live with the elephants and they have allowed me into their community.

The elephants have taught me their language. Much of it I cannot hear but Ive filled in the spaces with invention, which is how most people listen to language anyway. The longer I am with them the less invention we need. Wittgenstein said that to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life. But Im not imagining the elephants. They are really there.