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“You know, I actually think about that an awful lot, like, what
is our purpose in life? Why am I here? I always think
about some little kid being like, ‘What’d you do with your
life?’ And me being like, ‘Well, I sold a bunch of
floors.’” These are the words of Bjarki Thor Gunnarsson, the
young man who manufactures the widest, purest, most metaphorical
pine floorboards on the planet. At least, that’s what Matthew
Clark believes. Set mostly in rural Maine, Bjarki, Not Bjarki is an
expansive book. It is a standard work of journalism, describing
with nuance and humanity the people and processes that transform
the forest into your floor. It is also a meditation on what it
means to know another person and to connect with them, especially
in an increasingly polarized America. And it is a ghost story about
marriage. It is an inquiry into the limits of language and
certainty, a rumination on North American colonization,
masculinity, gift cards, crab rangoon, bald eagles, and wood, all
of it told in an exciting, energized, and original prose. Bjarki
turns out to be someone quite different from whom the author had
hoped. A new pine floor buckles. A coyote is shot. A diamond is
lost. How do we make sense of the world and of ourselves,
especially when the floor beneath us is so unstable; when nothing
is quite what we had hoped it would be?
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