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Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION JON | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
"To read Cove is to take a masterclass in taking out everything but the essentials. This is writing stripped back to the bone, and storytelling that gets under the skin. Powerful, terrifying, brilliantly done."--Jon McGregor, author of Reservoir 13
Out at sea, in a sudden storm, a man is struck by lightning. When he wakes, injured and adrift on a kayak, his memory of who he is and how he came to be here is all but shattered. He will need to rely on his instincts, resilience, and imagination to get safely back to the woman he dimly senses is waiting for his return. This is an extraordinary, visceral portrait of a man locked in a struggle with the forces of nature.
Author Notes
Cynan Jones was born near Aberaeron on the West coast of Wales in 1975. He is the author of five novels: The Long Dry ; Everything I Found on the Beach ; Bird, Blood, Snow ; The Dig ; and Cove . His work has been published in more than twenty countries and his short stories have appeared in publications including Granta and The New Yorker . He has won a Betty Trask Award, a Jerwood Fiction Prize, the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize, and the 2017 BBC National Short Story Award. He has been longlisted for the Kirkus Prize, the Warwick Prize, and the Europese Literatuurprijs, and short-listed for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this genre-bending novel, Jones (The Long Dry) presents a harrowing tale of resilience. An unnamed man kayaks out into a bay one morning to spread his dead father's ashes. When a sudden storm rolls in, he is struck by lightning. He awakes with amnesia and severe injuries. Possessing only a limited amount of supplies and the fleeting memory of a woman and child waiting for him to return, he forms a plan to get back to land. Though brief, the book is immersive in its rich, poetic descriptions of nature ("The lightning is not the strike. It is the local effect of the strike. The air around it explodes.") and cleverly shifts between second and third person. At times the lyricism hurts comprehension with mixed metaphors and awkward similes, but the quick, sharp sentences and use of white space heighten narrative tension. As the protagonist fights the urge to drift away, collides with wildlife, and loses all sense of time, Jones's narrative becomes increasingly momentous. This is a gripping story with a unique style that reflects the remarkable limits of the human spirit. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A man reckons with nature and memory after being struck by lightning at sea.This brief novel, practically a prose poem, by the Welsh novelist Jones (The Long Dry, 2017, etc.) is of a piece with his other fiction, which emphasizes the perils of life uncomfortably close to the elements. Here, an unnamed man sets out in his kayak to perform two tasks: catching fish and scattering his late father's ashes. After the bolt strikes, he's briefly paralyzed from the waist up and unconscious, then adrift far from shore. What ensues is his effort to get back home, as Jones lays out the details of emergency seamanship and the ravages of dehydration and exposure in a kind of slow-motion rhythm. ("You will move only a little and you must not race. Just proceed. That's all it is about.") There are moments of tension, such as a near spotting by a child on a beach, but most often Jones' camera is zoomed in on the man in isolation, where the drama involves attempting to paddle the kayak forward with a frying pan using one functioning arm and dealing with hallucinations of the voices of a child and his father. The man's thoughts scatter, thinking at once of survival and of his pregnant wife back home. ("He wanted to make sure she knew how to reset the pilot light on the boiler.") Jones is a highly talented writer about nature, but here he strives to connect two conflicting rhetorical modesstraightforward survival tale and elegiac riff on loss and mortalityinto one overly confining space. Focusing so much on his hero getting on with the simple business of staying alive gives his other themes short shrift.It'd be cruel to wish Jones punished his castaway further, but his tale cries out for a broader canvas. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In what is more an exercise in empathy than a full-throated novel, Jones (Everything I Found on the Beach, 2016) sets the reader adrift with an unnamed narrator who has just been struck by lightning while fishing in a kayak far from shore. The elements available for survival are minimal, as is the narrator's memory, which only flashes to the fore when the motivation to hold on and live runs perilously low. Dolphins swimming near the wayward boat trigger images of a pregnant wife at home. A far-distant shore on the horizon taunts the effort to calculate the mathematical possibility of survival. The action occurs in tight chunks of text that begin to resemble the kayak's steady rocking in the undulating tide, which seems to simultaneously comfort and threaten. Jones echoes other survival narratives by keeping his narrator's voice internal, but he creates a feeling of desperate solitude with wonderfully sparse language. Lovers of poetry and experimental prose will marvel at this impressionistic lament.--Ruzicka, Michael Copyright 2018 Booklist
Excerpts
Excerpts
He swings the fish from the water, a wild stripe flicking and flashing into the boat, and grabs the line, twisting the hook out, holding the fish down in the footrests. It gasps, thrashes. Drums. Something rapid and primal, ceremonial, in the shallow of the open boat. Flecks of blood and scales loosen, as if turning to rainbows in his hands, as he picks up the fish and breaks its neck, feels the minute rim of teeth inside its jaw on the pad of his forefinger, puts his thumb behind the head and snaps. The jaw splits and the gills splay, like an opening flower. He was sure he would catch fish. He left just a simple note: "Pick salad x." * Briefly, he looks toward the inland cliffs, hoping the peregrine will be there, scanning as he patiently undoes the knot of traces, pares the feathers away from one another until they are free, and feeds them out. The boat is flecked. Glittered. A heat has come to the morning now, convincing and thick. The kayak lilts. Weed floats. He thinks of her hair in water. The same darkened blond color. It's unusual to catch only one. Or it was just a straggler. The edge of the shoal. Something split it from the others. He retrieves a carrier bag from the dry bag in back and stores the fish. Then he bails out the blood-rusted water from the boat. Fish don't have eyelids, remember. In this bright water, it's likely they are deeper out. He's been hearing his father's voice for the past few weeks now. I've got this one, though. That's enough. That's lunch. The bay lay just a little north. It was a short paddle from the flat beach inland of him, with the caravans on the low fields above, but it felt private. His father long ago had told him that they were the only ones who knew about the bay, and that was a good thing between them to believe. You'll set the pan on a small fire and cook the mackerel as you used to do together, in the pats of butter you took from the roadside café. The butter will be liquid by now, and you will have to squeeze it from the wrapper like an ointment. The bones in the cooling pan, fingers sticky with the toffee of burned butter. He was not a talker. But he couldn't imagine sitting in the bay and not talking to his father. There is a strange gurgle and a razorbill appears, shudders off the water, flicks its head and preens. It looks at him, head cocked, turns as it paddles off a few yards. Then it dives again, and is gone. * He takes the plastic container from the front stow. It has warmed in the morning sun, and it seems wrong to him, the warmth. As if the ashes still had heat. Excerpted from Cove by Cynan Jones All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
