Is love enough? An Israeli and Palestinian love story (seven months in New York City after 9/11, mostly): Thanks to Jessica Cohen’s beautiful translation of Israeli writer Dorit Rabinyan’s All the Rivers, this breathtaking novel is now ours to read. If the passionate prose soars in English, what does it sound like in the deep and resonant intonations of Hebrew?

I ask because this is a novel of passion about an all-consuming love affair between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man converging at a time and place that’s a perfect storm: New York City in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

In fact, everything about this novel feels immediate. From the moment Liat, 29, met Hilmi, 27, at a Greenwich Village café she “felt an immediate intimacy” as though she’d known him for “a thousand years.” He felt that connection too; within three hours he was tenderly calling her Bazi, “sweet pea.” And she immediately grasped he’d be a once-in-a-lifetime love that couldn’t possibly last. An impossible love, a forbidden love, so fraught with complications, fears, and realities it threatened her identity, heritage, family at its core.

This magnetic “push and pull” romantic drama is marked by deeply conflicting emotions and the urgency of time. Liat is a visiting Fulbright scholar getting her master’s in Hebrew translation at Tel Aviv University, due home in seven months to fulfill teaching commitments. Her scholarly pursuits fit her conservatism, and highlight the importance of translation as a career. Rabinyan and Cohen’s gorgeous literary collaboration case in point.

Hilmi is the opposite. With his hair a “sea of frizzy charcoal curls,” in contrast to her tight ponytail, his image befits his artistry and idealism. He’s been in the city for four years on an artist’s visa, teaching Arabic and working on a “dreaming-boy” project: a series of forty autobiographical drawings consuming his Brooklyn bedroom walls and floating from the ceilings like Chagall’s “floating lovers.” Awesome, vivid, dreamy echoing their love and the prose.

How bitterly ironic Hilmi’s home is just forty miles from Liat’s, yet worlds apart. His large, loving family lives in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel, one of the controversial settlements in the West Bank.

Is it any wonder, then, that the seven months Liat and Hilmi spend together are “mad and beautiful days?” The intensity and ephemerality of a love that “stunned and excited” all the time is conveyed in long, flowing, heartfelt prose. Paragraphs consume pages, structured in brief chapters, as if the author knows she must let the reader keep coming up for air:

“…moments when I can feel he understands me, that he can make his way in and out of my mind’s twists and turns, that I can look at his wise eyes and see the wheels of his mind spinning in perfect harmony with my thoughts. The ease, the satisfaction, the comfort that fills me in those moments. The curiosity and delight of pondering these things together. In those moments when we talk and talk and talk, I feel like I have been a sort of enigma to myself, a difficult riddle to solve, he has come along to know me and to answer all my questions … I feel I am almost becoming him, so close to him and infused with him that I can practically feel what it is like to be him.”

The novel stuns and excites in the way imagery and metaphors intensify emotions and themes. That might account for Rabinyan receiving the 2015 Bernstein Prize for Israeli writers under fifty (the 2014 novel was originally published in English as Borderlife), and that it was also banned from Israeli classrooms. Utterly adult, intimate, so we can see why young adults would also be drawn to it. So many complex questions, so few answers.

Lest the novel’s anxious time period of heightened suspicions does not fully register, it jolts by opening with the FBI knocking on Liat’s door in the Village (she’s apartment sitting for Israeli friends) a mere hours before meeting Hilmi. Someone spotted this olive-skinned, “Middle Eastern looking” woman, contacted the authorities.

If that terrific reality is not stormy enough a backdrop for the couple’s emotional storm, the author ups the ante by wrapping their love in a wicked winter, one of the worst on record (actually 2002 was one of the warmest). The symbolic fierceness of the weather pummels throughout: At first, the freezing weather huddles the lovers as if it’s just the two of them against the world. New York City beckons and they explore its neighborhoods, a treat for all who know and love the city. As their days become numbered and the limits of their relationship are tested, wintertime slides “gloomy and foggy like a film noir,” then so freezing “cold that it shocks your entire being and makes it lose hope.” As the couple’s heated arguments are triggered over politics, the weather ices like people’s prejudices.

The power of art is added to this tumultuous mix. Love has inspired a “golden time” for Hilmi’s creativity. An outpouring that possesses, exhausts, makes him weep.

As the conflict between their homelands erupts – the Iraq War – we feel like weeping too. For this is a novel about many kinds of passionate love, including love of country.

Do you believe in happy endings? Hilmi, the dreamer, does; Liat, the pragmatist does not. Hilmi believes peace will come; Liat, enraged, views his wishful thinking as “binational fantasies.” She’s surprised how alarmingly deep-seated her outlook is, more aligned with the right-wing posture of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

As I was puzzling over Liat and Hilmi’s divergent political ideologies, not even sure if Netanyahu supports a two-state solution, The Washington Post published an excellent, lengthy piece laying out how problematic swapping land for peace has devolved, how enmeshed Israeli society is in the occupied territories.

While this is first and foremost a novel about an intense romance racing against a loud ticking clock, the burning question as to whether peace can ever be achieved in the Middle East hits us in a new light. It’s striking how improbable it seems for love and politics to be separated, no matter how profound that love. As much as we hope love overcomes, equally it feels hopeless.

Of course that’s the heart-tugging question that burns here. Will love be enough?

Lorraine

Enchanted Prose is a blog about beautiful fiction – mostly.  From time to time, a memoir grabs me.  The two previously reviewed here (Under Magnolia and Act One) felt like fiction.  The Ogallala Road does not.  But the author’s sense-of-place is palpable, and the environmental message too real to ignore.

High Plains “Zealot” and Water Conservationist (Western Kansas, present-day):  Statistics don’t feel personal. So if you read in a newspaper a Kansas study concluded that a vast underground reservoir of water spanning eight states – The High Plains Ogallala Aquifer – will run dry in 50 years would it register?  Maybe, in passing.  When Julene Bair tells a similar story, it not only registers, it sinks in.  For her memoir is a wake-up call about the “largest, single water-management issue concern in the U.S.”

The Ogallala Aquifer is among the largest in the world.  It flows under sections of Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Kansas, where Julene Bair grew up on a farm in the far western part of the state.  Her town, Goodland, the biggest east of Denver, is “dying despite irrigation, and, to some extent, because of it.” Seems the only thing “farming hadn’t messed up” might be the sky.

This forewarning is even more convincing when you realize Bair does not see the glass as half empty.  She’s the “family idealist,” who believes in the goodness of people to “do right even if it meant going against their own self-interest.”  She’s also someone who has not taken the easy road.

For a transformative period in her life, after her divorce, she lived with her young son, Jake, in a “rock house” in the Mojave Desert, on what was then Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands.  Single parenting, remotely, in a desert, is an impressive undertaking, even for someone “yearning for wild land.”  There, she “discovered the West of my imagination” and a sacred respect for the life-force of water, the “world’s purest element in its purest form.” So, when Bair says the average American uses “80 to 100 gallons of water a day” but she made do with only 500 gallons a month, she earns our respect.  Bair, unlike many of us, does not take water for granted.  When she describes modern agricultural practices advanced by government farm subsidies as “cowboying weeds into submission and magnificently boosting our yields, [but] they were also leaching into our groundwater and into our bloodstreams,” her call to arms about chemicals sounds like Rachel Carson’s alarms in Silent Spring.

It’s one thing to write about wilderness eloquently, fictionally, but when you’ve lived it and sacrificed for it, well, it takes on a whole other authentic meaning.  And Bair’s lyricism is for uncommon elements, like buffalo grass, blue gamma grass – “low growing grass stitched itself over the ground like a wooly tapestry.”  It’s marvelous that she finds the smell of grasses “intoxicating, restorative,” for it helps to balance her woeful tales of farmland and water exhaustion.

While we might not fully grasp the science of water tables, irrigation and agricultural systems, especially in a remote region of the country we may not know, we certainly can understand that more water is being used up than sustained.  If depleted it would take 5,000 years to replenish!  The Ogallala Aquifer is supposed to be “the hope and promise at the center of the nation,” Bair laments.  And yet, from this source a single farm – Bair’s – pumped 200 million gallons of water in a farming season.  Sounds like a lot, but Bair says not so.  All this irrigation has depleted the water table.  The water may run underground, invisible, but Bair can see the “land was flatter now, and the grass had vanished.  The earth had been human stitched into a patchwork of monotones – squares and circles of bare dirt, corn stubble, and winter wheat.”

Another area of western Kansas beautifully described – it brings a “tenderness in me because it was in danger” – is the Smoky Valley, a “paradise of unfarmed hills sloping down into cottonwood groves along the river.”  Bair got close to it as the home of a rancher named Ward, a serious boyfriend for much of the memoir.  Their relationship didn’t endure because he’s a “settler” and she’s a “seeker.”  They met when Bair had returned to her Kansas farm from Laramie, Wyoming, where she’d been living for eight years with her son, Jake.  An “exploring spirit,” on this day she was inspecting the “sandy beds of dry creeks.”  Water issues have troubled her for quite some time.

While Bair writes candidly about the “deliciousness of desire” in mid-life after so many years of single motherhood, it’s her romance with the “kind of low-key vista that could thrill only a native Kansan whose eye had not been jaded by mountains or the sensational” that’s most delicious.

Of course, this is a memoir, so it’s peopled with Bair’s “atypical family” (older members are liberals; younger ones tattooed).  Looming largest is her father, who farmed her grandparents’ land.  Bair watched the progression from “intense labor that broke men’s and women’s backs to intense pillage and poison that broke the earth’s.”  But her father, a rock as hard as her rock house, her “underlayment,” never gave the land up.  That’s his rallying cry: “Hang on to your land!”  The motto hangs over the author’s head and her brother, Bruce’s, who takes over the farm after their indomitable father dies.  While the heart-wrenching decision of “what to do with the farm” causes much angst, interestingly, the author’s mother concedes whatever decision her son makes, giving us insight into the “stoicism” of Kansans.

For Bair, it’s important to distinguish what losing the land means.  Her father cherished it for the real estate value; Bair’s is an emotional connection.  She’s convinced, and convincing, that “our sense of beauty is a survival instinct.”

During Julene Bair’s early desert years, she coped with great loneliness by writing in “countless spiral notebooks that she filled by kerosene lantern light.” Presumably she kept this pattern up, which enabled her to reflect vividly on those and later years, reliving her passions, hopes, regrets, and concerns.

Together, The Ogallala Road is a blend of heavyheartedness and optimism.  Bair is buoyed by “wilderness on my skin” – a “plains palette” that makes her feel “on top of the world.”  On the other hand, the once 30 million farms in the country have dwindled to less than 2 million.  Since most are now large-scale (farmers had to “get big or get out”), they’re still causing plenty of damage to our water: “farming accounts for 70% of contamination of rivers and streams.”  All this data sobering when put forth personally.

The author seeks to contribute to a cause she cares passionately about.  Her evocative prose – if widely read – is a step in that direction.

Lorraine

Remembering the Old when the New sweeps us away (unnamed Midwestern university and Silicon Valley, California; present-day): The Hebrew Teacher is a literary gem, with universal appeal.

Brilliantly told by Israeli-American Maya Arad, Stanford University scholar and writer-in-residence at the Taube Center for Jewish Studies. The Hebrew Teacher is the only one of Arad’s nearly a dozen novels written in Hebrew English readers now have access to. A literary win since she’s considered, “The finest living author writing in Hebrew” outside Israel. You’ll see why.

The wonderfully accessible prose translated by multiple-award winning “Hebrew literary translator” Jessica Cohen deserves a shout out too for the “art and craft” of her work. Cohen also translated All the Rivers by Dorit Rabinyan, memorable seven years later (see: https://enchantedprose.com/all-the-rivers/). 

“The whole point of great literature is connecting one human mind and heart with another,” wrote Eileen Pollack, creative writing professor emerita from the University of Michigan in Poets & Writer’s Jan/Feb 2024 “Inspiration” issue. You’ll feel those connections to Arad’s three older Israeli narrators now living in America who tell the three stories – novellas – that unite important themes and form the novel:

• Ilana, in her late-sixties. “The Hebrew Teacher” whose story earns the novel’s title.

• Miriam, in her early eighties, visiting America, California, for the first time in “The Visit (Scenes).” To see the son she hasn’t seen in twenty-years, his twenty-year younger wife of seven years, and her only grandchild, a loner toddler boy.

• Efrat, old enough to have a thirteen-year-old daughter and discover a deeply troubling online world where, “Everything happens on phones” in “Make New Friends.”

Each story presents conflicts and struggles between Old versus New worlds on a wide range of complex issues. Each nostalgic and melancholy, seeking acceptance when possible.

“The Hebrew Teacher,” the shortest at eighty-three pages, packs a gut-punch. Framing tough questions and differing perspectives, some carrying into the other two stories. Alluding to, suggesting, and exploring: literary, linguistic, cultural, social/sociological, philosophical, ethical/moral, mental health/identity, motherhood/parenting, and technological issues. It’s the story that lets readers sense that each word has been thoughtfully considered as to how much to say, imply, leave open for the reader to interpret and contemplate.

The first story also raises hot-button political controversies. Subtly, cryptically, reading between-the-lines, tip-toeing, trying to hold back from what becomes obvious, serious, offensive, and intensely upsetting to the teacher who built the university’s Hebrew language program from scratch, elevating it to the Jewish Studies program before it became integrated with the Middle Eastern Studies program. The story that defies acceptance, hitting the core of who Ilana is.

Note: Just as Ilana tells us she’s not a political person, neither is this review and blog. The essence of Ilana’s story is an ideological political divide when the university she’s devoted her American life to hires a hot-shot, thirty-year old, Yoad Bergman-Harari, appointing him Hebrew Professor, so it’s imperative to discuss political viewpoints.

Despite Yoad’s outright rudeness, condescension, and lack of respect towards Ilana (and her other colleagues), she tries to rationalize his behavior, going out of her way to welcome him and extend kindness. Until he makes it abundantly clear he’s fervently anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian to the extent that there’s no room for discussion, compromise since he views the conflict as black versus white. No vision for a two-state solution. He goads her, not only with his one-sided, fervent politics but his manners towards someone twice his age. Someone “who was Hebrew at this college.”

The generational divide between Young and Old – attitudes towards ageism, new ideas, customs, values versus traditional ones are at play. How to be valued by youth? How to protect what you’ve created? How to remember what happened, what survived, what millions strive to keep? Contrary to Yoad, there’s nothing black-or-white about these existential questions.

Ilana, a caring, sensitive soul, cannot believe Yoad was selected for a position titled Hebrew Professor when he’s not at all interested in anything Jewish. He doesn’t teach Hebrew or Jewish literature, only uses Hebrew documents as sources for the work he’s immersed in on Martin Heidegger, the German-Jewish philosopher who was a Nazi. One of Yoad’s comments, “I’m a Comparative Literature professor, not a summer camp counselor in the Catskills” belie anti-Semitism, or the perception of it.

He also raises other non-political questions on the nature of Jewish Literature, Comparative Literature, and teaching Hebrew over Yiddish (his preference). Hebrew and Yiddish are different Jewish languages. Yiddish conversational and tied to the historical European diaspora; Hebrew seen as biblical is the historic main language of the Jewish people. Ilana points out that learning Modern Hebrew is an avenue for understanding and peace.

You’ll appreciate the brilliance of the opening line when the story comes full circle. Reflecting far more than learning a language, it’s introduced in quick brushstrokes over decades of evolving and shifting attitudes towards Israel. Beginning in 1948 when it fought for statehood (same year Ilana was born) to the early seventies when, “Everyone wanted to know a few words” of Hebrew “before they visited Israel,” to today.

“It wasn’t a very good time for Hebrew” she writes. Four lines later she wonders if instead she should say, “It was not a very good time for Hebrew.” Forty-five years in America, The Hebrew Teacher “still could not write a simple sentence in English.”

Written soon after the 2014 Israel-Gaza War named Operative Protective Edge (see enlightening interview “Academia and Israeli Expats”), when support for Israel had changed. The writing feels prescient.

Ilana defends Midwestern academia as equal to East and West Coast schools (where Yoad comes from). Noteworthy too since Arad teaches at a prestigious California university and set the next two novellas there. Stanford is among the major US universities where students have waged their own war protesting the Israeli-Hamas War.

“A Visit (Scenes),” the 2^nd novella, uses a clever writing technique dividing the 100+ page story into scenes or vignettes, creating a sense of dislocation, alienation, a dropping in. Anyone whose children don’t live near them, in this case a far distance, knows the angst of not being a close part of their children’s and grandchild’s life, while developing a positive relationship with your DIL.

The “scenes” are relatable and sad when the grandmother is awkwardly, achingly, repeatedly unwelcomed. Anyone who’s been a victim of MIL jokes knows they’re not funny. Most poignant is the lengthy estrangement between mother and son. What has she done so wrong he can’t spend a moment with her? What about gratitude for her love? The story also examines the plight of working mothers – the aloneness – and how hard it is to raise, nurture, and protect your children at every stage, starting with the preschool years.

Loneliness and relationships are deepened in the last story. “Make New Friends” also means how to keep them, applying to young and old. A story about belonging and competitiveness at school and at work that echoes the mental harm blamed on a digital world that doesn’t filter out cruelty, along with the cut-throat high-tech world.

Friends can outgrow each other. Contrary to this wise novel touching hearts and minds that won’t lose its importance.

Lorraine

Forces that bind and break apart friendship, sisterhood, nationhood (Haiti, Dominican Republic, Paris, Ohio, Arizona, Florida; 1941-2003): Can an early childhood friendship survive the “broader wars of color and class”? On a Caribbean island nation with its own history of fighting color and socio-economic class divides.

Village Weavers is steeped in pathos. In what once was. Between two best friends and a country.

Much of the happiness seen happens during the 1941 to 1943 years when Sisi and Gertie instantly bonded. Seven-year-old girls who met in first-grade at a private Catholic school, Haiti’s predominant religion. Along with the joy of Sisi’s family: a grandmother who teaches her godly spirits; the warm, generous heart of her mother, a seamstress on par with French designers; and her ten-year-older protective sister, Margie, the sister of one’s dreams.

This gorgeously written story takes a long view on the relationship between two different friends from two different families in the context of Haitian society. A friendship that lets us see and feel what it means to be an outsider versus an insider, and why, sometimes, beauty comes from the outside, not the inside. Sisi is the outsider, Gertie the insider. Sisi represents the overwhelming majority of poor Haitians, Gertie a tiny fraction of the “elites.” Both will later become homesick, but it’s Gertie whose loneliness hits rock-bottom. After decades of separation, she reaches out to Sisi in 2022, the first chapter, when she’s living in Miami, the second chapter. Can she win back their friendship late in life? The fictional question.

Would the novel be as emotional searing, steeped in Haitian revolutionary history, culture, and feminism had it not been written by Haitian-born Myriam J. A. Chancy? Who shows us why Caribbean Literature is surging.

A scholar of Afro-Caribbean, Postcolonial, and Women’s studies. The endowed Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College in Claremont California, whose exhaustive body of award-winning work includes “Best Book of the Year” votes for What Storm, What Thunder. Also published by Tin House, on the aftermath of one of Haiti’s cataclysmic earthquakes in 2010. (Not the 2021 earthquake Chancy notes was soon followed by the assassination of its president. Not the first time, either).

Deeply layered from a “seen world and “unseen.” Everything written, said and unsaid, has meaning. An intricate novel about differences, divides, secrets, and separations from multiple perspectives. Let’s count the ways:

As a story on Black freedom, we learn Haiti was the first Caribbean republic governed by Black people. A country that freed itself from the shackles of enslavement, separating from colonialism (French) to gain its independence at the dawn of the 1800s. Reference to the Negritude movement, which originated in Paris and spread to Haiti, embraced Black pride and dignity. Described elsewhere as rooted in literature, it also had cultural and political impact.

The image below on the left reflects racism, on the right an attempt to set the historical record straight: 

Haiti’s separation history was also with its neighbor, the Dominican Republic. Both share one island, Hispaniola, politically divided up. Among Gertie’s many separations, after her family sends her away to live with her shrewd absentee mother in a small rural village near Haiti’s seacoast, Léogâne, cutting her off from Sisi living in Port-Au-Prince, the capital, they send her to the Dominican Republic to attend a private boarding high school. She’ll live on that side of the island until she immigrates to Florida. Sisi will later leave Haiti too, first to Paris, then the Midwest and Southwest. Their leavings reflect Chancy’s, who immigrated to Canada and then the US, as well as hundreds of thousands who’ve also migrated, and those desperate to flee the unimaginable disintegration of a place.

As a personal story on Black identity, it’s Sisi and her family (her father unknown) who believe in Haiti’s spirit world: “clair – untouched by the sun.” (Not Gertie’s.) The Introduction features Iwa, “the spirit of the river gods.” The Simbi are the “misté – the “mysteries.” Water spirits are, “Of the sea before us and those of the rivers that course through the mountains behind us.” They come with a warning to “test the waters, make sure they are of pure heart.” Over the novel’s six decades, Sisi learns “not to fall for the wrong people” and the true meaning of benevolence: “We are sources of water for each other.”

As a story on Haiti’s culture, Sisi’s family also practices Haitian Vodou, a religion that “lives within us,” she says.

Others view Haitian Vodou as “devil worship.” You could say the devil has worked its cruelty on Haiti, a country that descended into political murders, occupation (after the 1915 presidential assassination US President Woodrow Wilson sent troops to quell the instability, lasting until 1934, depicted disturbingly), terror, lawlessness. Evil also worked a wedge tearing apart a friendship that had fit like “puzzle pieces.” Years later, Gertie wonders, “Can the spirits bring her to a better world?” 

Language is culturally significant. Sisi’s family speaks Haitian Creole or Kreyól. Nearly everyone in Haiti speaks the language Haitians made their own, French influenced but mostly West African. It isolated Haiti since few outsiders knew it. Whereas the Dominican Republic gained its independence forty years after Haiti separating from Spanish colonialism, speaking a common language spoken outside the island. The “upper-echelons” speak French, like Gertie’s family. French is also an official language in Haiti and the language taught in school, so Sisi and her family also speak French. One of the eye-openers is how the different languages set the two countries on divergent paths. The Dominican Republic’s economy is growing, whereas Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world. Shocking, since at one time we’re told it was one of the wealthiest Caribbean nations.

Culturally, you’ll also read about street vendors when they were lively, colorful, and gossipy. With today’s gang violence and humanitarian crisis, could anyone feel safe to have any fun? The resourcefulness of Haiti’s Rara bands reminds us, though, of Haiti’s energetic spirit. Gertie hears their music when she’s sequestered near the sea.

As a story on racism, Gertie’s skin color is darker than her light-skinned family. They let their prejudice separate them from their youngest sister, as if she wasn’t one their own. Chancy also wants us to see the beauty in black skin colors, poetically describing the variety of skin tones. “Sun-kissed,” for starters.

As a story on sisterhood, Margie counsels Sisi, “Your fortune is yourself.” A special friendship can feel like sisterhood too. In stark contrast to all four of Gertie’s superficial and repugnant sisters.

As a story on memory, the “present is the past.” The past residing within us. Past and present alternate throughout and within chapters.

As a story on the meaning of home, Gertie was miserably lonely inside her mansion-sized, “gingerbread house” with its pretty pastel colors. Sisi’s home has no running water or electricity, but it has real class. At one sad point Sisi realizes, “Home is not a destination” anymore. “Earthquake” forces left their marks and scars.

As a story on feminism, Chancy’s feminist advocacy shines, also showing: “We don’t need men to give us women value.”

Lorraine

What a nearly extinct, mysterious, watery underworld wild animal teaches us (A year in search of otters in Scotland’s West Highlands; Devon, Cornwall, the Lake District, England; and West Wales): The biggest takeaway from this gorgeously written, hybrid memoir’s obsessive quest to discover the hidden world of otters is how it enriches a life, when you’re so fully immersed in the mysteries of the natural world.

You may be thinking otters? Who cares? A member of the Weasel family? Miriam Darlington’s “icon of nature conservation” will, then, take you by surprise as there’s much to learn from these creatures.

Otter Country is the kind of book that defies classification. A memoir woven into an unfamiliar animal tale mixing wildlife biology, ecology, geology, geography, chemistry (water pollution), conservation, restoration, and environmental sciences.

It’s also philosophical and meditative. A self-help book for living in the moment – as long as you’re willing to leave your comfort zone, like Darlington does time and again. Making her escapes into worlds so different than ours. You’ll feel her wanderlust to places you may want to add to your travel bucket list. Places to slow down, listen, sit in silence, daydream.

What’s amazing to a US reader is that even though the North American species of otter – one of thirteen Mustelid types – is seeing its population increasing, how many of us have ever noticed, heard, or thought about otters?

Why aren’t Americans thinking about otters, cherishing them like Darlington depicts the UK does? Otters have captivated the British for decades, leading to their protected status in the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981.

A remarkable, adorable, heartfelt characteristic of otters is their motherhood journey, in which her pup clings to her underbelly for as long as eighteen months. Signifying how much is needed to learn to survive their “knife edge” existence.

Otter Country is also about the meaning of a place. “Where a place has been home, has caressed our senses in a familiar embrace, carried us with its contours, nurtured us in a mutual and unspoken understanding, how do we deal with its loss?”

Literature and poetry integrated and cited often, add another dimension to the inclusive nature of what you’re reading, learning, sensing, feeling.

Prose-wise, perhaps if Darlington’s nature writing wasn’t as fetching the book wouldn’t be as inviting. What is it about people passionate about wild animals, wild landscapes, wildlife that translates into spirited writing? 

Passion is the key word. Darlington’s lyrical, poetic prose reveals her passion as an award-winning poet and creative writing lecturer at the research-oriented University of Plymouth, England. She lives on the stunning, tempestuous southwestern coast of Devon, England, and has also written an acclaimed nonfiction book on owls adapted into a BBC Radio Book of the Week series.

Otters tell the story of the health of an“entire aquatic ecosystem” from a UK mindset on changing waterways as a “Living Landscape.” In describing a farm two naturalist friends turned into a conservation Trust (one of many referred to), Darlington says that, “it isn’t about people. It’s not about any of us. It’s about what we invest and leave, and what is to come.”

The author describes herself as “fixated” on otters since childhood. An early influence was her grandfather, a famous biologist and geneticist, dubbed “the man who ‘invented’ the chromosome.” His collection of science books fueled her passion for science and literature, along with her mother’s love of poetry. Factors that fed into “the longest love affair of my life”: a British children’s classic, The Ring of Bright Water, about otters and the man who’s credited with saving them from extinction, Maxwell Gladwell.

Written in 1960, it’s Maxwell’s otter book that lets us see the underpinnings of why Otter Country is a must-read for appreciating the vital force of humans bonding with animals.

Maxwell’s isn’t the only author’s otter story discussed, but it looms large and it’s where Darlington’s UK “True North” journey started in Scotland’s northwestern coast, where the long Skye Bridge makes a dramatic sight crossing that connects to an ancient island, the largest of the Hebrides islands.

Maxwell feels larger than life but his raising of otters as pets with tragic deaths raises questions. Darlington visits the stone cottage he lived in that he gave a mystical name to – Camusfearna. She also pays a visit to Jimmy Watt, one of Maxwell’s “otter-keepers,” who lost two fingers from one of these so-called “pets.”

Otters are water creatures. While sea otters are found in sea locks and oceans, most of Darlington’s tales are to remote water areas the Eurasian otter is known to inhabit – rivers, streams, pools, marshes, the “roots, peat and bog” of wetlands – with the occasional spotting of their “musky” dens or holts.

An immensely adaptable animal, “otter’s skills and beauty have been translated into some of the most captivating film, prose, and poetry ever written about a wild creature,” Darlington writes. You’ll be introduced to a good number of literary and visual art mediums.

Armed with intense curiosity, a wealth of knowledge, and preparedness for raw, unpredictable weather conditions, to the extent she can, Darlington explains that the first step is to know what you’re looking for: evidence otters have left their marks, such as droppings or “spraints” on walking paths, and acute listening for an otter’s sounds or calls like “huff” and “yikker.” 

Chapter 1, “Spirit Level,” sets the tone for the otherworldly landscapes and places most of us will never traipse through. Certainly, not with the fervor and daring of the author! On one adventure, for instance, she realizes she’s entered “some of the wildest, most impassable woods I have ever seen.” Mind you she’s venturing alone, wild camping, “sleuthing,” especially at nighttime when there’s the greatest likelihood she’ll spot a rather clever, rapidly-moving, camouflaged predator hiding and disappearing in a flash.

What Darlington doesn’t know she asks, phones, meets, researches: British authors of otter books, like-minded naturalists and preservationist friends, otter experts, and intrepid souls she encounters on her numerous escapades. Welcomed everywhere, showing us how well humans connect through common passions.

Although otters are no longer hunted down for their thick, “double-layered,” valuable fur, land development has torn down their private hideaways; industries have polluted their waters, such as Cornish coal and tin mining; and the larger ocean predators. None, though, as frequently lethal as being hit by a car when dashing across a road.

Darlington’s patience is also inspiring. Willing to “spend a good amount of time finding nothing: then and only then, perhaps an ambiguous sign will turn up.”

A British artist whose passion for painting Cornwall landscapes, Kurt Jackson, reflects Darlington’s overall passion and wide-ranging account.

Maxwell’s fairy-tale invented name for his isolated homeplace is Celtic. “Celtic people, whose spirited life was rooted in stories of transformation, drew their mythology instinctively from the land and its creatures.”

A poetic way of describing Darlington’s quest for “transference” and imagination.

Lorraine