Strandings
Peter Riley
Ratgeber / Natur
Beschreibung
Now the subject of a BBC Radio 4 documentary
'Wild and wonderful ... I doubt anyone will ever match Strandings for its sheer bravura, its wry insight, and its absolute, engulfing, and brilliantly enlivening whaleheadedness'
PHILIP HOARE, ALBERT AND THE WHALE
'Addictive and scandalously fascinating' Caught by the River
When Peter Riley was thirteen, a woman with blue hair and a comet tattoo asked him to help load the jaw of a sperm whale into the back of a Volvo 245. The encounter set Riley on a decades-long quest to make sense of what had happened.
Enter the secretive world of whale scavengers. When a whale washes up on one of Britain's coasts, a fugitive community descends to claim trophies from the carcass. Some are driven by magical beliefs. Some are motivated by profit: there is a black market for everything from ambergris to whaletooth sex toys. But for others, the need goes much deeper.
Join Riley on a tour of a stranded kingdom's weird outer reaches, where nothing is as it seems. Meet witches, pedlars, fetishists, conspiracy theorists and fallen aristocrats. And prepare for a final revelation, as the mystery of the comet woman tangles with the enigmatic symbol of Leviathan itself, beached on Britain's fatal shore.
Rezensionen
A marvellous read. Subversive, jaunty, poignant, deadly serious and relentlessly entertaining
An authentic and troubling adventure for these dark times. Here is the taste, smell, and rush of a committed documentary-novelist unpicking the mysteries of his life and the great world in which he swims. A brave, reckless and engaging performance
<i>Stranding</i>s is a strange book; disarmingly candid and born out of such a personal preoccupation that Riley must have wondered if it could ever resonate with an external reader. And yet it does, and Riley'
An addictive and scandalously fascinating book written from the centre of a storm of obsession. You will finish feeling spun out and tugged into the maelstrom that is Riley'
A strange book ... you can't help being swept along on the tides of Riley's esoteric thinking ... for each of [Riley's] motley crew, whale strandings offer more than just collector'
<p>With wit and a whale-lover'
A funny, personal and poetic dive into the mystical world of whale strandings. A compelling and fascinating read
Enchanting ... these whale strandings are therefore both an echo of a fundamental moment for our own species, and a grim premonition of where we might soon be heading
A tremendously enjoyable book, a gleefully peculiar mixture of grief and gore populated by a shadowy cast of oddballs, the only certainty the dead whales at its heart
<p>A wild and wonderful whale chase, of cetaceans real and surreal and imagined, Peter Riley's beautifully written book adopts the sceptical/obsessive tone of a modern Melville (or perhaps that should be Captain Ahab) as he roams Britain from east to west, north to south, in search of usually dead and often rotting whales and the stories they leave in their wake. There's no box of dusty bones he won't stick his nose in, no dubious character on a beach he won't shake down for stolen whale teeth. Indeed, Riley'
Reading <i>Strandings </i>is to be caught in a magical drift, borne ever deeper, into the atavistic, into the animal selves, still alive, inside us. I was captivated
Just the kind of book we need now: ecologically, politically, comedically potent and with personality worthy of Melville
I devoured this - it's wonderful ... As compellingly eccentric as it is deeply humane, emotionally and politically astute. One test of a memoir is that you actually want to spend time with the narrator, and Riley is so charming, outward looking and rigorously honest it's impossible to consider anyone not. <i>Strandings</i> is a funny and poignant exploration of a fringe I didn't know existed, but written with such engaging personality and prose style I feel as though I'
Erudite, funny and sad - a glorious rollercoaster of a book whose twists and turns take us again and again to the dissolving edges between reality and mirage
Kundenbewertungen
whale books, Brexit books, thames water, microplastics, radio 4, nature writing, rising seas, Moby Dick, climate crisis, psychogeography, whaling books, Herman Melville, narrative non-fiction, mudlarking books, oceanography