The Dark Side of Nostalgia for Wild, Untouched Places

It’s September 1938, and a dead whale washes up on the seaside of a remote island off the coastline of Wales. So starts this haunting narrative about our waning connection with the land, the isolation and entrapment of rural places (specially for girls), human nostalgia, and how it feels to live in a time and position on the cusp of radical improve.

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Manod, 18 years outdated, lives in Rose Cottage with her father, her sister and the shadow of her useless mom. She spends her times embroidering tales of human beings and whales, gather­ing seabird eggs from amid the rocks with her sister, and dreaming of how and when she will go away this modest fishing local community behind (as all its younger men and women do).

Not extensive just after the whale washes up on shore (an omen and indication of some form, according to the islanders), a boat comes carrying two ethnographers from the mainland. They appear in research of the “old ways” with the hope of capturing premodern relations with the all-natural world, and they commit their times recording folks music and tales, cataloging Manod’s embroideries and photographing the islanders. For them, Manod and the people stand for anything they want: a raw and wild embeddedness and authenticity. For Manod, they symbolize almost everything she desires: an schooling, modernism, lifestyle beyond the island.

Checking out this gap in her debut novel, Elizabeth O’Connor brilliantly exposes the faults in nostalgia and renders ethnography’s troubling background of fabricated documentation, extractionist associations and links with fascism. However she also tenderly portrays what the ethnographers came in look for of: life deeply interlaced with nature, a burgeoning landscape with an abundance of species (birds, animals, moss, lichen, sheep, sea creatures), and a way of lifestyle in which the human and nonhuman are nonetheless in­­­extricably entwined by means of livelihood, tale and fantasy.

These minimalist webpages shimmer with haunting legends and tunes in which a fairy finds her seal pores and skin and dis­appearsinto the sea, a woman is swallowed by a sea snake and gets a wintertime storm, skeletons turn out to be grey doves, and daughters develop into whales. I located myself both yearning for Manod’s escape from the island and hoping she could hardly ever leave. What a testament to the capaciousness, generosity and psychological assortment of legitimate art.

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