I recently made a new friend who is a bird artist. When he told me what he does for a living, I thought immediately of Howard Norman’s The Bird Artist, a book I loved when I read it twenty-five years ago (around the time I started teaching at Bowdoin). This spring break, my friend and I spent a couple of long days driving along the Maine coast, standing in icy winds and looking out to sea at Harlequin Ducks, Long-tailed Ducks, Surf Scoters and Snowy Owls. I also re-read The Bird Artist. Norman’s book is set in 1912 in Witless Bay, Newfoundland. It’s about Fabian Vas, a young man who tells us in the first paragraph that he has murdered somebody. It’s a love story, with at least one suicide, and features whiskey drinking, adultery and bank robbery. And yet it still manages to be a quiet book. I love it that the imaginary world of a novel is a place that you can revisit. When you do, it is in one sense just as you left it: the same words are there on the same pages. It is also different, because you are different. The last time I read The Bird Artist, I had only the haziest idea what Newfoundland looked like. I had no idea what a Thick-billed Murre looked like. This time around, I drew upon memories of long drives on bad Newfoundland roads, memories of thousands of Murres, Gannets and Razorbills nesting on the rocky cliffs there.
Definitely putting this on my reading list!