Stranger than Fiction

Also: Samuel Pepys’s diary at 200, a life of Paul Gauguin, the return of the campus novel, Michael Connelly’s new detective, and more.

Good morning. Before we get to the best in books and arts from across the Web, a few weekend news items reminded me once again that life really is stranger than fiction. You already know that Mount Etna erupted on Monday. Here is a video of hikers fleeing the ash. While a guy was playing disc golf in Myrtle Beach, a small hammerhead shark fell from the sky. A Chinese paraglider got caught in a “cloud suck” that pulled him 27,000 feet into the air. (Reuters reports that some of the video seems to be AI generated, but he likely flew to 27,000 feet since he posted his flight data.) A man in Norway woke up with a 135-meter container ship in his garden. And a performance in a cathedral in Germany to mark the 1,250th anniversary of Westphalia featured plucked chickens in diapers. (Watch a clip here.)

Or perhaps I should say that life is as strange as fiction, because Donald Niedekker’s newly translated novel, Strange and Perfect Account from the Permafrost, is a strange one indeed. Here’s Sam Sacks:

Between 1594 and 1597, the Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz piloted three voyages through the frozen seas of the Arctic Circle in failed attempts to discover a northerly trade route to the Orient. In the last and most disastrous of these expeditions, Barentsz’s ship became trapped in ice and his crew was forced to improvise a lodging on the Russian island of Novaya Zemlya—or Nova Zembla, the New World—to survive the winter. Depleted by scurvy, cold and exhaustion, the captain died at sea during the return voyage a year later.

Donald Niedekker’s evocative fictional reckoning with the expedition, “Strange and Perfect Account From the Permafrost,” is narrated by an imagined member of Barentsz’s crew who would ultimately perish on Novaya Zemlya. The book, translated from the Dutch by Jonathan Reeder, takes as its inspiration for the character an unnamed sailor found in the diary of Gerrit de Veer, one of the real-life surviving shipmates, and invents for him a biography, making the narrator an itinerant poet who joins the crew to document its adventures. He duly records the wonder and terror of spouting whales and huddles of walruses (“an arbitrary patchwork of tails, heads, skin folds, tusks”), of polar-bear attacks and bewildering arctic mirages.

The wrinkle is that the narrator delivers his account 400 years later from the vantage of his grave in Novaya Zemlya, which the warming planet is beginning to thaw. He thus exists outside of time and space, and his omniscient gaze fixes not only on his own life and death but on the fortunes of others in the age of exploration, including the cartographer Petrus Plancius, whose assurance that the Northeast Passage would offer clear sailing planted the seed for Barentsz’s catastrophe. Tragedy has not slowed in the centuries since the narrator’s death: He has witnessed Stalin’s gulags fill Siberia and seen his island used as a Soviet test site for a hydrogen bomb.

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In other news, Diane Scharper reviews Sue Prideaux’s biography of Paul Gauguin: “Sue Prideaux’s latest biography paints a vivid portrait of Paul Gauguin, the towering artist whose bright colors, flat planes, symbolism, and naked, dark-skinned Polynesian women paved the way for modernist art. She covers Gauguin’s life from his infancy and childhood in Peru to his adolescence in France and later as a Merchant Marine to his adulthood . . . Some said Gauguin was a monster, and others said he was a master. Prideaux implies he was both. But she doesn’t condemn or excuse him.”

John Wilson reviews Michael Connelly’s new novel, Nightshade. It is Connelly’s 40th novel, and it features “a new protagonist, an L.A. County police detective named Stilwell, who—just over a year before the action of Nightshade commences—blew the whistle on a colleague, Ahearn, who had manipulated evidence in a homicide case they were both working. The black mark against Ahearn didn’t get him fired, but it put a ceiling on his prospects for promotion. Meanwhile, unfairly, Stilwell is shifted from the county’s homicide desk to Catalina Island, a beautiful place but a far cry from the challenging urban setting in which he had thrived . . . Like two of Connelly's signature protagonists, longtime LAPD detective and freelancer Harry Bosch and the much younger Renée Ballard (also an LAPD homicide detective), Stilwell has an unusually deep and intense empathy for those whose lives have been taken and a relentless drive to track down their killers.”