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A Spinnaker Sail: Commentary on Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife or, the Star-Gazer |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / COMMENTARY |
| Author: Linda Simon |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/2000 |
| Size: 2,567 Words, 15,389 Characters |
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It is tempting--and, for some writers, irresistible--to imagine retelling a story from a minor character's point of view. What would we discover about loyalty and betrayal, for example, if Ophelia had her say? What insights about love and nature would we hear from Elizabeth, bride of Victor Frankenstein? What view of Jay Gatsby's Long Island would we get from Daisy Buchanan?
Sena Jeter Naslund, founding editor of the Louisville Review and author of three previous works of fiction, gives herself this task by reviving a character so minor that she seems no more than an allusion: the wife of Captain Ahab, the doomed and obsessed protagonist of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Who is this woman Ahab left behind, Naslund asks, and responds with Ahab's Wife or, the Star-Gazer, a grand, sweeping b...
. . .
...ture of the novel fell out of the first sentence," she says, "three husbands, maturation, and learning for my character. Now I only had to write the novel, being ready for every opportunity along the way to practice the 'devious-sailing' that is so important in creating any artful fiction." Ahab's Wife is nothing less than artful and satisfying fiction: a compelling history of a heroic woman.
(806 of 15,389 characters)
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