Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer
-
- $10.99
-
- $10.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Shelf Awareness
Memory, mythology, and obsession collide in this “slyly charming” (New York Times Book Review) account of the giant squid.
In 1874, Moses Harvey—eccentric Newfoundland reverend and amateur naturalist—was the first person to photograph the near-mythic giant squid, draping it over his shower curtain rod to display its magnitude. In Preparing the Ghost, what begins as Harvey’s story becomes spectacularly “slippery and many-armed” (NewYorker.com) as Matthew Gavin Frank winds his narrative tentacles around history, creative nonfiction, science, memoir, and meditations about the interrelated nature of them all. In his full-hearted, lyrical style, Frank weaves in playful forays about his trip to Harvey’s Newfoundland home, his own childhood and family history, and a catalog of peculiar facts that recall Melville ’s story of obsession with another deep-sea dwelling leviathan. “Totally original and haunting” (Flavorwire), Preparing the Ghost is a delightfully unpredictable inquiry into the big, beautiful human impulse to obsess.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this four-part essay, Frank (Pot Farm) chronicles his research into a 19th-century Newfoundland eccentric who photographed a giant squid, though as a creative work it is less interested in the facts of its subject than in the questions it raises. Readers interested in cryptozoology may be disappointed to find information about the creature spread diffusely throughout the larger narrative, but this is fitting for a subject defined by its elusiveness, a creature of quasi-mythic status and "exaggerated melodrama." Frank's inquiry is concerned primarily with the nature of myth and our tendency to "mythologize the actual," in this case a beast made marvelous by the "fusion of its size and its rarity." He sifts through historical interest in the squid to ask questions about the nature of empathy, our means for "sharing our obsessions," and the role of myth as "expression of our greatest semi-imagined fears." Woven into these big questions are little stories, personal anecdotes, family history, and profiles of contemporary and historic players in the narrative of the giant squid. In this blending of the large and small, Frank sees human lives that are "delicious, disturbing, and downright huge," and expresses his personal experience with a seldom encountered subject.
