The Shell Collector - Anthony Doerr

4/5 stars

This was Doerr's first book that I read incidentally, and the only reason I gave it four stars and not five, was because I liked some of the stories slightly lesser than the others. The stories were all longer than short stories usually are – mostly they ran to 25-30 pages. Even so, I was awestruck with his use of language, narrative, and imagery in all the stories - he is a true master of the craft. The way he weaves intricacies of the natural world with the scarred, ravenous, and eternally beating facets of the human heart, the way he brings inanimate objects to life, and the way he showcases emotion and feeling in all its fractured, glorious, imperfect beauty, was to me, mind-blowing to say the least.

But the book also felt like a roller coaster ride – one moment I was ‘meh’ and the next moment, I couldn’t breathe. The title story was strange and beautiful, with some sudden twists I wasn't expecting, and the description of the protagonist's trysts with shells and mollusks and the lagoon and the sea was spellbinding, immersive even, but at times the details overwhelmed me a little. This is in spite of my enduring love of the natural world, so I can see how it might put off readers who don't spend half their life trekking in nature, identifying fungi and beetles, and generally preferring the companionship of the many faces of the natural world to human company :-).

I very much loved The hunter's wife - the way he draws out the complicated nature of human relationships in the backdrop of the magical realism element which carries the story beautifully - also I think he demonstrated the hunter's wife's character arc very skillfully - a not-so-easy task in the limited confines of the short story framework. I similarly found The Caretaker to be at once gorgeous in its narration of the horrors of war, the dichotomy of societies on the same continent, the unlikely beauty of the relationship between a mute girl and a man on the precipice of disappearing into complete cosmic oblivion, the way the human heart finds ways to crawl out of desolate, murky trenches by finding inspiration in the darkest of places, and ultimately the hope of new life. It was an absolute stunner of a story.

But I think the story that really left me absolutely and completely breathless was Mkondo. The story begins with the English definition of Mkondo, noun. Current, flow, rush, passage, run, e.g., of water in a river or poured on the ground, of air through a door or window, i.e., a draft; of the wake of a ship, a track, the run of an animal. The entire story runs on an undercurrent of movement, of being in wild places, where nature is resplendent and exuberant and inviting in its wildness. The protagonist's love of moving constantly through these spaces of natural wonder, of being a part of it rather than a separate entity, of always being ready to take a step further into strange territory is moving (pun intended) and at the same time heartbreaking when it is stifled - not because it is curtailed viciously and willfully, but is more like collateral damage when she falls in love with a ordinary man with an ordinary soul. The story is about personal journeys, finding inspiration, the heady intoxication of love, its enduring nature, and coming full circle. Most of all, it is about one woman’s love of the wild, and one man’s love of a woman. When I finished the story, it left me gasping for air, and I heard myself exclaim 'wow!!' again and again under my struggling breath. I tend to forget many of the books that I read, but I would say that this is the story in this collection that left an indelible mark on me – it has solidified this book's place in my bookshelf, and has left me wanting to read more of Doerr's work, which is always such a satisfaction for a reader, and no doubt the writer as well.

I have always adored Karen Russell’s masterful writing – I delight in her bizarre and magical story ideas and settings, her words are chosen with such care and her sentences so exquisitely constructed, I have for a long time wondered whether anyone could equal her writing, let alone surpass it. But for an ardent Russell fan like me, I can say that The Shell Collector has come very close to making me a Doerr fan as well. A review from The Times says: “I can think of very few authors who can put together a sentence with such ecstasy, whose words sing with music and such sheer rapture at what they embody.” Kind of summarises it in a nutshell. I look forward very much to reading more of his books, especially the Pulitzer prize winning All the Light We Cannot See. In the meanwhile, I sincerely congratulate Doerr on having mastered a very difficult craft – the art of the short story, and I do believe (from this one book that I've read) that he is possibly one of the finest contemporary short story writers our generation has birthed. He has inspired me to begin honing my own craft again, and for that too, I am grateful.