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Tabloid journalists try to unravel the mysterious healing powers of the Kenyan cone shell. A hunter from Montana finds his estranged wife of 20 years mystically soothing the bereaved. A Spanish girl finds love while fishing in Harpswell, Maine, while eons away in Boise, a state champion volleyballer runs off with the carnival. Doerr travels around the globe in this collection of eight unrelated stories to offer glimpses into the lives of people with odd powers --- side show freaks, avid fishermen, and country people living by the philosophies of the wild, a few foolish enough to try to tame it.
Winner of the Black Warrior Review Literary Prize, Doerr seems most at home when his characters are wading through international rivers seeking that grand, prize-winning catch --- whether the catch is a fish or true love. Love is found, lost, and found again while Doerr's simpletons and scholars seek other natural treasures in the woods and waters from Great Falls to the Lamu Archipelago. The book takes its name from the opening story of the shell collector, a retired Canadian nature professor and writer whose life becomes the search for rare shells shortly after cataracts blind him as a boy. His studies span the tropics, finding him at 65 touring the Archipelago with two New York journalists named Jim, detailing the story of Nancy, an American Buddhist who is suddenly cured of malaria by a bite from the deadly lagoon cone shell in the collector's kibanda. A brief love affair with the healed, yet married, woman helps spread the word internationally that the shell collector can tap into the untold power of the sea, placing him in the uncomfortable position of attempting to heal others, including a village girl and, eventually, his own son.
Doerr dazzles in "The Hunter's Wife," one of the most powerful of the eight, narrating for Dumas, a Montana hunter, chronicling the love and marriage to magician's assistant Mary Roberts. Just 16 at the time of her meeting with 30-year-old Dumas, Mary discovers her ability to communicate with the dead --- see, experience a dying animal's (or human's) pleasant, anguished or fleeting final thoughts --- a talent she will use after leaving Dumas for wealthy stardom as a "seer." Doerr is at his most penetrating when giving the ambivalent hunter a taste of his own fresh killing. Just before deserting him, Mary grabs Dumas's arm and the foreleg of a doe the hunter has just killed:
"Oh, he whispered. He could feel the world --- the grains of snow, the stripped branches of trees --- falling away…The buck was raising its head, meeting his eyes. All the world washed in amber…No he murmured. No. He rubbed his wrist where her fingers had been and shook his head as if shaking off a blow. He ran."
Another shining star is "For a Long Time This Was Griselda's Story," the tale of a high school girl jock who falls in love with a metal eater in a carnival and leaves Boise for an exotic life with him on the road as his sexy assistant. Griselda's chunky sister Rosemary is left to care for their mother and earn an honest living, while also yearning for a life outside of the Midwest. Griselda and Rosemary have a showdown years later when the metal eater's show returns to the girls' hometown.
"Mkondo" is the tale of historian Ward Beach and his obsession with Naima, a unique beauty he meets on an archaeological dig in West Africa. He chases Naima so far and for so long that they both wind up losing themselves, yet are reborn in a surprise ending as romantic and chaotic as the currents of the Nile.
While Doerr's solemn philosophies and grim truths are rescued from pious modernity in each tale by the brightness and infinity of unlikely romance, this humorless collection is seriously marred by its longest story, "The Caretaker," a tirade --- told in more repulsive and brutal detail than a CNN report --- of Liberian civil war, that is hardly readable. "The Caretaker" is so visually violent and out of place with the underlying and perfectly developed themes of the other stories that it anchors the book. Most stories in the collection were previously published in respected literary journals, from The Atlantic Monthly to Doubletake, yet there is no publication history listed for "The Caretaker," other than here. It is a thorn in the side of an otherwise delightful and thought-provoking debut.
--- Reviewed by Brandon M. Stickney
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