Beasts of the Sea
A Novel
-
-
4.3 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
“Turpeinen matches the heights of Andrea Barrett” in this sweeping and intimate tale about a fateful encounter between man and nature spanning three centuries and linked by a long-extinct denizen of the northern oceans (Publishers Weekly starred review).
In 1741, thirty-two-year-old naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller joins Captain Bering’s Great Northern Expedition to scout out a sea route from Asia to America. Plagued with hardships, captain and crew never reach their goal, but they do make a unique discovery, a gentle giant that will be named for the young explorer who described it: Steller’s sea cow.
In 1859, the governor of the Russian territory of Alaska sends his men to recover the skeleton of the massive marine mammal rumored to have vanished a hundred years before. Two years later, a revered Helsinki professor hires a talented illustrator—a woman!—to make precise drawings of a set of bones sent from afar. The ill-fated beast will help introduce to a skeptical public the concept of human-caused extinction.
Finally, in 1952, the Museum of Zoology assigns its most talented restorer the task of refurbishing the antique skeleton, a testimony to the sea cow’s fate that will fire the imaginations of future generations.
A breathtaking literary achievement and an adventure that crosses continents and centuries, Beasts of the Sea is a tale of grand ambition, the quest for knowledge, and the urge to resurrect what humankind has, in its ignorance, destroyed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Turpeinen's fantastic debut interweaves the fate of an extinct aquatic species with the stories of the people who discovered and destroyed it. In 1741, naturalist George Steller finds a previously undocumented species of sea cow (a relative of the manatee) while sailing with a Russian expedition charting the Arctic coast. After their vessel founders, he and his shipmates take shelter on an uninhabited island, where they butcher the sea cows for food. Steller, fascinated by the huge and peaceful creatures, preserves a 25-foot-long skeleton for future study, but he's forced to leave it behind while making his way back to civilization. Over the next three decades, the species is killed off, leaving knowledge of it scant until Aleutian hunters find a nearly complete skeleton in the mid-19th century. As Finnish zoologist Alexander von Nordmann assembles the bones, he tries to convince his fellow scientists that man, not nature, is causing mass extinction, and bucks convention by hiring a female artist, Hilda Olson, to document the skeleton in perfectly scaled, precisely rendered drawings. A century later, meticulous conservator John Grönvall prepares the skeleton for public display at the Finnish Museum of Zoology. Turpeinen matches the heights of Andrea Barrett with her detailed descriptions of the natural world and intimate character portraits, offering a vast sweep of evolutionary history shot through with impressionistic scenes, whether of Steller watching a sea cow play like a boisterous child or Olson mourning her tubercular father. This tour de force of science and storytelling is not to be missed.
