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A Novel
by Iida Turpeinen
Book Reviewed by:In the spirit of Richard Powers and Daniel Mason, a novel spanning three centuries and tied together by the tale of Steller's sea cow—a long-extinct denizen of the northern oceans—at once intimate and sweeping about the tragic clash between man and nature.
In 1741, thirty-two-year-old naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller joins Captain Bering's Great Northern Expedition to scout out a sea route from Asia to America. Plagued with hardships, captain and crew never reach their goal, but they do make a unique discovery, a gentle giant that will be named for the young explorer who described it: Steller's sea cow.
In 1859, the governor of the Russian territory of Alaska sends his men to seek the skeleton of the massive marine mammal rumored to have vanished a hundred years before, while his sister curates the settlement's peculiar natural science collection. Two years later, a revered Helsinki professor hires a talented illustrator—a woman!—to make precise drawings of a set of bones sent from afar. The ill-fated beast will help introduce to a skeptical public the concept of human-caused extinction.
Finally, in 1952, the Museum of Zoology assigns its most talented restorer the task of refurbishing the antique skeleton, a testimony to the sea cow's fate that will fire the imaginations of future generations.
Beasts of the Sea is a breathtaking literary achievement and an adventure that crosses continents and centuries. Told through the stories of the men and women touched by the long-ago discovery of a curious and placid creature, it is a tale of grand human ambition, the quest for knowledge, and the urge to resurrect what humankind has, in its ignorance, destroyed.
60°10'16"N, 24°55'52"E
Natural History Museum
Helsinki
To begin with, you have to walk past the African elephant and step in through the door at the back. Hanging on the walls are the flayed bodies of fish, frogs and birds. The room can feel ghostly, but visitors wander through the space, attentive and carefree, walking from one display case to the next, examining bones and info labels, and their attention is eventually drawn to it.
First, visitors see the horses, the bears, the seals and snakes, beast upon beast, their brittle bones carefully, imperceptibly attached to one another to form the contours of recognisable creatures familiar from books and zoos, and then they are confronted with this animal and its altogether different remains.
The other skeletons displayed in the room are white and neat; nothing about them reminds us of the bloody, messy work that unveiling the bones from within a living body requires. But this one's surface is rough and worn, ...
In her brutal and beautiful debut novel, Iida Turpeinen perfectly blends historical fact and fiction, taking readers on a bleak trek through time to observe the devastating effect human beings have had on the world almost from the moment of their arrival. Her chosen time machine? The bones of a long-extinct sea mammal known as Stellar's Sea Cow. Its strange, sad journey becomes a metaphor for the barbaric way humanity has for generations used and abused the natural world, wiping out entire species in a misguided belief that no matter how much they took there would always be more. Turpeinen forces the reader to acknowledge extinction as more than scientific terminology. She wrestles throughout with humanity's inability to see itself as anything but the most superior lifeform on earth. It's that arrogance that fuels both the selfishness with which we treat the world and our refusal to acknowledge the damage that we do. To these characters, the desires of now are always more important than the needs of the future...continued
Full Review
(971 words)
(Reviewed by Sara Fiore).
Essie Fox, author of The Fascination
Mesmerizing. Near to mythic. This profound and moving novel of lost histories and lives held me captured in its spell. Sarah Brooks, author of The Cautious Traveler's Guide to the Wastelands
A gorgeous, thought-provoking book about the consequences of the human exploration of the natural world. Its narrative moves through lives and times, with sailors, hunters, naturalists, and artists all playing their part.In Beasts of the Sea, the reality of extinction is first discovered by the French anatomist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier when he is tasked with analyzing a mammoth tooth sent to him by none other than Thomas Jefferson, who is determined to track down a living mammoth. In a nightmarish sequence he walks through his vast collection of human and animal bones, contemplating why not a single explorer has ever come across a living mammoth or dinosaur. He comes to the startling realization that it is because they no longer exist. Feverishly, he calculates that dozens of species whose remains continue to fascinate the scientific community have disappeared completely and will never return.
Turpeinen writes that as the concept of extinction ...
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Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
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