This is a finely honed collection by a new author, still in his
20s, who hails from Idaho. The shell collector of the title is a
blind hermit who has retreated from his life as a professor and
writer to live near an African lagoon and pursue his vocation of
finding and identifying shells. We are first introduced to him at
his sink, scrubbing limpets, before he goes out reluctantly to meet
a pair of overweight tabloid reporters from the US. They've come to
winkle out his amazing story: how he uses 'cone' shells to heal
people from disease. It all started, we learn, 'when a malarial
Seattle-born Buddhist named Nancy was stung by a cone shell' in his
kitchen. Gradually, delicately, Doerr draws out the shell
collector's entire life: the opthalmologist who led him to his
first spit of beach; his first shell find, a mouse cowry,
brown-spotted and tiger-striped at its base; his period of crewing
in the tropics; the existence of a son, Josh, who airmails a letter
every month, and one day, by surprise, splashes into the lagoon. In
this, as in the other stories, Doerr makes vivid use of elements of
the natural world to create a landscape in which everything seems
to be quivering on the brink of movement. With a few deft words, he
draws sharp and evocative word pictures, summoning a fairground
('the smells of fried dough, caramel and cinammon, the
flap-flapping of tents, a carousel plinking out music-box songs')
or the chill of deepest winter ('he showed her a pair of dormant
frogs buried in frozen mud, their blood crystallised until
spring'). This collection of complex and assured stories is sure to
win him many admirers. (Kirkus UK)
?His fingers dug the shell up, he felt the sleek egg of its body, the toothy gap of its aperture. It was the most elegant thing he'd ever held. "That's a mouse cowry," the doctor said. "A lovely find. It has brown spots, and darker stripes at its base, like tiger stripes. You can't see it, can you?" But he could. He'd never seen anything so clearly in his life.?
In this assured, exquisite debut, Anthony Doerr takes readers from the African coast to the suburbs of Ohio, from sideshow pageantry to harsh wilderness survival, conjuring nature in both its beautiful abundance and its crushing power. The blind hero of the title story spends his days roaming the beaches of Kenya, his fingers ploughing through sandy granules of grace and intrigue, his German shepherd at his side. And then there are whale-watchers and fishermen, hunters and mystics, living lives uncompleted or undone, caught, memorably, as they turn toward the reader.
A natural storyteller, Doerr explores the human dilemma in all its manifestations: longing, grief, indecision, heartbreak and slow, slow recuperation. Shimmering with elegance and invention, The Shell Collector is an enchanting and imaginative book by a young writer just setting off on what will surely be a hugely compelling literary odyssey.
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