Reviews and comments from Nicky Pellegrino's books column in the Herald on Sunday

The Sound Of A Wild Snail Eating

By Elisabeth Tova Bailey

Text, $30

Reviewed by Nicky Pellegrino

Never again will I casually crush a snail to death with the back of my trowel while gardening. Not after reading this book and developing a new and surprising appreciation of these hitherto despised slimy creatures in shells.

Author Elizabeth Tova Bailey accidentally became an expert in all things snail during a debilitating long-term illness that left her bedridden. A friend had potted up some wild violets from the woods nearby and popped in a snail as well thinking she might “enjoy it”. Amazingly she did, becoming fascinated by her intense observation of the snail’s daily life, feeding it on wilted petals and bits of mushroom and finding in it a form of companionship.

Increasingly itrigued, Bailey began filling her vast tracts of empty time by reading centuries worth of literature on gastropods and learning the details of everything from her snail’s sex life to the reasons it needed to be so slimy. The result is a book that’s a blend of natural history and memoir.

Bailey is relatively sparing with information about her illness, conveying just enough for the reader to appreciate how trapped and despairing she felt bed-bound for so long. All the detail belongs to the snail and fascinating it is too.

According to one scholar the design of the snail’s shell can be credited with inspiring everything spiral from drill bits to Europe’s most famous staircases. Snails can lie dormant for years. Their world is soundless. They shoot each other with darts as part of lovemaking.

Along with snippets of snail-related writing, these nuggets form the backbone of this slim volume that deserves to be read at the same gentle pace a gastropod moves.

The Sound Of A Wild Snail Eating is a reminder of how much there is worth noticing about the world if we can only slow down for long enough to do it, and a record of how one woman found a way to sustain her spirit while her body was failing. Beautifully illustrated and thoughtfully written, the book is a rare pleasure.

And so I will have to resign myself to lacey silverbeet and nibbled lettuce leaves from now on as it turns out the snail is far too elegant and extraordinary to be treated like a common garden pest.


Book Watch
Book blogger Graham Beattie reveals his top pick of his past month’s reading.

The name Jo Nesbo was previously unknown to me but I was given two novels by this author to read over the summer holidays, The Snowman and The Leopard, both crime fiction. I was so hugely impressed with the quality of the writing that I sought out other titles by him.

Nesbo is a Norwegian writer who is highly rated and most successful in his own country and indeed in much of Europe. His books have sold over 5 million copies to date.

I read a lot of crime fiction and on the basis of what I’ve read so far I’d rate his as among the finest writing in this genre. He is right up there with the likes of Ian Rankin, Michael Connelly, Sara Paretsky, Henning Mankell, Sue Grafton, Jeffrey Deaver and Simon Kernick.

His narratives are strong, fast moving and totally compelling, his detective, Harry Hole (pronounced Holey), is a marvellous, typically flawed cop, and the tension in his stories never lets up. This man writes exceptional crime fiction.

The Snowman (Vintage, $29.99) opens in November in Oslo as the first snow is falling. Winter has arrived. During the night a young boy wakes up to find his mother gone. There are wet footprints on the stairs. And outside, in the garden, looms a lonely figure looking at the house: a snowman bathed in cold moonlight, its black eyes glaring up at the bedroom windows. Around its neck is his mother's pink scarf. Chilling, don’t read when you are alone at night!

In The Leopard (Harvill Secker, $39.99) two women are found dead, both drowned in their own blood. Harry Hole initially wants nothing to do with this case but his instincts take over when a prominent MP is brutally murdered. The victims appear unconnected until Harry finds a link. There is a serial killer on the loose. Gripping stuff.

Graham Beattie is a former publisher who blogs daily about books at beattiesbookblog.blogspot.com

Booklover
Stephanie Brotchie is an award-winning artist

The book I love most is.............Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. He manages to craft such a wonderful combination of humour and pathos, magical-realism and history in that book - it's one of the funniest books I have ever read, but also one of the most moving.

The book I'm reading right now is......... I have been reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest very slowly for over a year now. It is incredibly brilliant and dense and rich. I sort of treat it like a block of very dark chocolate and only eat a very small piece at a time. I'm dreading finishing it because it's become a part of my daily routine.

The book I'd like to read next is.............. My “to-read” pile is taller than my bedside table, but Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo, Alain de Botton's The Architecture Of Happiness, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Raj Patel's The Value of Nothing are at the top of the pile.

The book that changed me is..............Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince. I read it as a grown up having never read it as a child and thought it was amazing. The scope of the story, the simplicity of the language and the depth of the allegory are so beautifully arranged. I also like the drawings very much. More books for grownups should have pictures.

The book I wish I'd never read is............Atonement by Ian McEwan. I know that’s contentious, but it left me feeling really kind of queasy and anxious. The characters are unforgivably nasty and the world he creates is so claustrophobic and grim - shuddering just thinking about it!

*Stephanie Brotchie will present the critically acclaimed The Hermitude of Angus, Ecstatic - about an odd boy with a murmuring heart as part of the Auckland Fringe. From Tues 8 to Sat 12 March at the Basement. http://www.iticket.co.nz/ (09) 361 1000, $20.

Footnote:


Nicky Pellegrino, a succcesful Auckland-based author of popular fiction, (Her most recent, Recipe for Life was published in 2010 and has been translated into 10 languages,, and her new novel The Villa Girls - Orion - is being published next month), is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above features were first published yesterday, 6 March, 2011.