Week i

Wreck of the Whale Ship Essex: The Complete Illustrated Edition - Owen Chase (William Coffin, Jr?)
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex - Nathaniel Philbrick
The Buddha in the Attic - Julie Otsuka

  There she blows! A week ago The Whale by Philip Hoare breached off my larboard, spouting it's magic, misty whale breath, hypnotizing me with its broad, waxy back, flashing its fluke in my face and splashing spume onto my ship's deck. As soon as it dove, disappearing beneath its footprint, I hove to and called out for a gam with my sister ship the USS Rumble. "Full and by the mizzen top sail off the lanyard point to on the poop deck, aye Cap'in?" Captain Richard knew exactly what I meant, and graciously loaned me Wreck of the Whale Ship Essex and In the Heart of the Sea.
  
  I ate them up like a finback eats krill. Don't ask me how a finback eats krill...something about baleen. As you can probably tell, I know nothing about whales or sailing, so "the complete illustrated" part of Wreck of the Whale Ship Essex - charts and photos mostly - really helped me appreciate what I was reading. Also included in Wreck are excerpts from Moby-Dick and other books about maritime disasters. In the Heart doesn't just retell the Essex story, it sails it, hunts it, stoves it, starves it, tries it, finds it, loses it. Captain Pollard: "My God, Mr Chase, what happened?" Chase: "We have been stove by a whale."

   
  The Buddha in the Attic is the second Julie Otsuka book I've read this year - When the Emperor was Divine is the other. Both books follow Japanese Americans into the WW2 prison camps [where did 'internment' come from?]. Emperor follows a family - mother, father, daughter, and son - from pre-war California life into prison and back out again. Buddha follows thousands of young Japanese women arranged to be married to Japanese men already living in the U.S.; Buddha follows them, written voices and voiced thoughts, across the Pacific, into the marriage bed, into the fields and shops and homes to work, into motherhood, into war-time, stopping short of the prison-camp experience. The final chapter of Buddha records the voices and experiences of white neighbors immediately after the Japanese are taken away.

  Otsuka's writing is so accessible, so open, so human...there is no escape. The effect is a kind of relentless clarity. Relentless connection to the story and characters. Both Emperor and Buddha are short books, for which I am grateful. I'm not sure I could handle a 400 page Otsuka manuscript; I'd be a puddle of emotions by the end of it. These are stunningly beautiful books.

----

  Just a quick thought - Jesus said that the only sign he would give would be the sign of Jonah, three days in the belly of the whale, three days in the tomb before rising again. Is the sign of Jonah, in some sense, the sign of the whale? "One calm, windless morning when the sea was flat as glass and the sky a brilliant shade of blue, the smooth black flank of a whale suddenly rose up out of the water and then disappeared and for a moment we forgot to breathe. It was like looking into the eye of the Buddha" (Otsuka pg13; Otsuka uses italics for speech or quotes). Is the sign of the whale, in some sense, the sign of the sea?

 The Bible has such a rich imagery of the sea - the formless waters before creation, the great flood, the crossing of the Red Sea, Jesus calming the waves with a word. Waves and waters can represent threat, chaos, tumult: "the roar of the seas" (Psalm 65), "the waters have lifted up" (Psalm 93), "the torrent washes over me" (Psalm 69). There are some Biblical allusions to the near eastern myth of a storm god (Marduk, Baal) battling and vanquishing a sea goddess or sea monster (Tiamat, Rahab) - like in Psalm 89, "You rule the raging of the sea; when its waves rise you still them. You crushed Rahab like a carcass".

  The sea is also a sign of God's greatness, God's power to separate the waters above from the waters below, God's wisdom and mercy to "set a boundary that they [the seas] might not pass, so that they might not again cover the earth" (Psalm 104), God's world-encompassing salvation, "the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea" (Habbakuk 2:14). God is so great that "Leviathan You [God] formed to sport in it."

  When Jesus claimed the sign of Jonah, three days in the belly of the great fish, was he also claiming order out of chaos? A return to the watery womb of creation? Union of male (storm, lightning) and female (sea, waves)? The mystery and majesty of the whale? The world-covering flood?