Ahab's Wife: Or, The Star-Gazer: A Novel [Paperback]

Sena Jeter Naslund (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2000

From the opening line--"Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last"--you will know that you are in the hands of a masterful storyteller and in the company of a fascinating woman hero. Inspired by a brief passage in Melville's Moby-Dick, where Captain Ahab speaks passionately of his young wife on Nantucket, Una Spenser's moving tale "is very much Naslund's own and can be enjoyed independently of its source." (Newsday)

The daughter of a tyrannical father, Una leaves the violent Kentucky frontier for the peace of a New England lighthouse island, where she simultaneously falls in love with two young men. Disguised as a boy, she earns a berth on a whaling ship where she encounters the power of nature, death, and madness, and gets her first glimpse of Captain Ahab. As Naslund portrays Una's love for the tragically driven Ahab, she magnificently renders a real, living marriage and offers a new perspective on the American experience. Immediately immersed in this world, the reader experiences a brilliantly written, vibrant, uplifting novel--a bright book of life.

Ahab's Wife was a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, chosen by Time magazine as one of the top five novels of 1999, selected by Book Sense as one of the top five books of the year, chosen by the New York Times as a Notable Book of 1999, and chosen as a Best Book by Publishers Weekly.

Ahab's Wife is being reprinted in Australia and England, translated into German, Hebrew, Spanish and Portuguese.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

It has been said that one can see farther only by standing on the shoulders of giants. Ahab's Wife, Sena Naslund's epic work of historical fiction, honors that aphorism, using Herman Melville's Moby-Dick as looking glass into early-19th-century America. Through the eye of an outsider, a woman, she suggests that New England life was broader and richer than Melville's manly world of men, ships, and whales. This ambitious novel pays tribute to Melville, creating heroines from his lesser characters, and to America's literary heritage in general.

Una, named for the heroine of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, flees to the New England coast from Kentucky to escape her father's puritanism and to pursue a more exalted life. She gets whaling out of her system early: going to sea at 16 disguised as a boy, Una has her ship sunk by her own monstrous whale, and survives a harrowing shipwreck:

I was so horrified by the whale's deliberate charge that I could not move. Then my own name flew up from below like a spear: "Una!" Giles' voice broke my trance, and I scrambled down the rigging. No sooner did my foot touch the deck than there was such a lurch that I fell to my face. I heard and felt the boards break below the waterline, the copper sheathing nothing but decorative foil. The whole ship shuddered. A death throe.

The ship dies, but Una returns to land to pursue the life of the mind. The novel's opening line--"Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last"--also diminishes Melville's hero in the broader scheme of things. Naslund exposes the reader to the unsung, real-life heroes of Melville's world, including Margaret Fuller and her Boston salon, and Nantucket astronomer Maria Mitchell. There is a chance meeting with a veiled Nathaniel Hawthorne in the woods, and throughout the novel the story brims with references to the giants of literature: Shakespeare, Goethe, Coleridge, Keats, and Wordsworth. Although her novel runs long at nearly 700 pages, Naslund has created an imaginative, entertaining, and very impressive work. --Ted Leventhal --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

"Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last," says Una Spenser, the eponymous narrator, in the first sentence of this deliciously old-fashioned bildungsroman, adventure story and romance. Naslund's inspiration, based on one reference in Moby-Dick, may not satisfy aficonados of Melville's dense, richly symbolic masterpiece, but it should please most other readers with its suspenseful, affecting, historically accurate and seductive narrative. At age 12, Una escapes her religiously obsessed father in rural Kentucky to live with relatives in a lighthouse off New Bedford, Mass. When she is 16Adisguised as a boyAshe runs off to sea aboard a whaler, which sinks after being rammed by its quarry. Una and two young men who love her are the only survivors of a group set adrift in an open boat, but the dark secret of their cannibalism will leave its mark. Rescued, Una is wed to one of the young men by the captain of the Pequod, handsome, commanding Ahab, who has not as yet met the white whale that will be his destiny. These eventsArecounted in stately prose nicely dotted with literary allusionsAtake the reader only through the first quarter of the book. Una's later marriage to AhabAa passionate and intellectually satisfying relationshipAthe loss of her mother and her newborn son in one night, and her life as a rich woman in Nantucket are further developments in a plot teeming with arresting events and provocative ideas. Una is an enchanting protagonist: intellectually curious, sensitive, imaginative and kind. But Naslund also endows her with restlessness, rash impetuosity and a refreshing skepticism about traditional religion, qualities that humanize what verges on an idealized personality, and that motivate Una's search for spiritual sustenance. Unitarianism and Universalism are two of the religions she investigates; other "dark issues of our time" include slavery, and the position of women. Social and cultural details texture the lengthy, episodic, discursive narrative. Una's search for identity brings her friendship with such real life figures as writer Margaret Fuller and astronomer Maria Mitchell, and with such colorful fictional characters as an escaped slave and a dwarf bounty hunter. Even Halley's Comet makes an appearance. Provocatively, Naslund (The Disobedience of Water) suggests a new source of Ahab's demented rage to kill the whale who has "unmasted" him. Some elements of the novel jar, especially Naslund's tendency to pay rhapsodic tributes to Una's questing spirit; a surfeit of noble, large-souled and amazingly generous characters; and the symmetrical neatness of the plot. In the last third of the book, readers may become weary of Una's spiritual reflections and the minutiae of her daily routine. But these are small faults in a splendid novel that amply fulfills its ambitious purpose offering a sweeping, yet intimate picture of a remarkable woman who both typifies and transcends her times. Illustrations by Christopher Wormell. 150,000 first printing; $150,000 ad/promo; 20-city author tour; BOMC main selection; Simon & Schuster audio. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 688 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (October 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688177859
• ISBN-13: 978-0688177850
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (325 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,231,532 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sena Jeter Naslund is the author of the novels Four Spirits and Abundance, A Novel of Marie Antoinette and a short story collection, The Disobedience of Water. A native of Birmingham, Alabama, she is a winner of the Harper Lee Award; Distinguished Teaching Professor and Writer in Residence at the University of Louisville; director of the Spalding University brief-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing program; former poet laureate of Kentucky; and editor of The Louisville Review and the Fleur-de-Lis Press.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

130 of 139 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A read good to the last word January 19, 2000

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

I'm confused. Has the mark of good fiction now become brevity? I didn't find a single word in this glorious book wasted. If anything, I was sorry that the book ended when it did, as I would have willingly continued to follow Una's adventures. What an amazing character! Women in the nineteenth century lived fascinating lives, but since "social" history did not come into vogue until the 20th century, we are only now beginning to know about the lives of women. Novelists, drawing on the knowledge that we do have, are filling in the gaps to create fully fleshed-out characters such as Una.

If you're looking for a quick read, best look elsewhere. If you love rich language, love strong female characters, love tales of the sea, then read this book. Ms. Naslund is to be congratulated for creating a truly memorable character and for allowing such a character to experience a full banquet of life experiences.

Brava!

107 of 119 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars What a yarn, what a novel! What a writer! March 22, 2001

By Joanna Daneman #1 HALL OF FAMETOP 10 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Author Naslund takes up the tale of the young wife Ahab mentions but briefly in Moby Dick. It takes place during and after the loss of the Pequod during its fatal hunt for the great White Whale and is the first-person memoir of Una Spenser.

This book is so literary, so well crafted for its subject that I can't believe it was written in 1999 and not in the late 1800's. Only a few anachronisms betray the modern date for Ahab's Wife. (A mention of kiwi fruit for one, they were not cultivated outside of China nor known as Kiwi until the early 1900's)

Una Spenser (named for Spenser's character in the Faerie Queene) is a courageous yet imaginative heroine. She struggles against God, against slavery, against traditional women's' roles in pre-Civil War America, runs away to sea, and meets Captain Ahab after a harrowing experience aboard ship.

The scope of this book is grand and it is written a bit in style that pays homage to Melville, grasping some of Melville's poetry and symbology of Nature and also the sexual ambiguity. But Naslund also stitches in a bit of Virginia Woolf and To The Lighthouse. Sections of Melville's work are patched in to form a smooth story of Ahab's soul mate, his female side, Una, whom he loved and abandoned for his destiny with Moby Dick.

In fact, this book reminds me of the patchwork quilts mentioned many times in Ahab's Wife. The pieces are stitched together (12 stitches to the inch, Una can sew) in colors that blend to make a pleasing whole. Yet pieces of fabric come from many diverse sources, such as the Melville classic and Woolf as well as others.

This is a brilliant achievement of a novel yet reads like a magnificent yarn. Naslund is not only a master writer but also a master storyteller.... I could not put this book down until I finished every last page and I am going to re-read it immediately. Read more ›

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A collection that pushes and pulls April 27, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

The stories contained in _The Disobedience of Water_ are about emotions, how they control us and shape our lives. The characters Naslund creates are rich with conflicting feelings about faith, love, and friendship. They're at once kind and cruel, moral and amoral, as these waves of emotion build and break. Naslund's courageous honesty will change the way you think about love, life, and art, while her beautiful, Southern style will leave you waiting for more.

45 of 49 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Life is like a box of chocolates February 19, 2002

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

I finally made it through Ahab's Wife because I was determined to finish it. I, and not just Una, was on a journey. I was searching for a point. I found the first 200 pages very gripping but the rest of the book lost my interest because it was not the telling of one story but of many different story threads and themes, that unfortunately, never get sewn together into a beautiful Kentucky quilt. I'm not sorry I read it but Una telling her life story was not enough to captivate me through 600 pages of various side plots that ring hollow with moral righteousness.

The story became far too absurd and yet took itself too seriously to revel in the absurdity. It reminded me a lot of the movie Forest Gump but at least Forest Gump appeared to have some self-awareness of how ridiculous all of the coincidences and star cameos where and by that awareness made them entertaining. The smorgasbord of famous literary figures, artists, renowned abolitionists, scientists, madmen, dwarfs, slaves, suffragists, sea captains and gays drown the story with the ridiculous. The story would have been better served with fewer exoticized characters that were more developed. The most interesting characters die off or fade from the story far too early.

My sister and I used to read a lot of romance novels and joke back and forth about the various carriage accidents, sudden deaths, and tragedies that would befall the poor main characters. This book was filled with so many and such varied calamities that I felt there was a great burden put on the character Una. She was just one woman, but she was forced to represent all woman who might possibly have lived in this time period and to suffer all of their losses and rejoice in all of their successes....

The book had some great moments and some beautifully written lines but in the end I felt like it was simply too many under-realized characters and story lines that rambled on for too long. I would give the first 200 pages of the book 4 stars and the rest of the book just 2 stars. Once you read every word of Ahab's Wife you become numb to how much you enjoyed the first leg of the journey, so my final rating for the entire book is 2 stars. Read more ›

73 of 85 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars a good if not long winded read January 8, 2000

By D. Cheong

Format:Hardcover

Ahab's Wife suffers from being perhaps a little too long. I had to struggle to finish the final quater of the book because it seems to lack a certain dramatic impact, especially when compared to the rest of the book. However, in general, this novel is still a fabulous read. I found it epic in scope and extremely poignant. I loved Naslund's initial premise - placing a woman with 20th century morality and "modern" fears, desires, loathings and hopes in the middle of the 19th century just as the age of industrialisation was dawning. We are witness to not only Una's incredible adventures but also her uncanny ability to rise above the social restrictions of the day and develop a wonderfully liberal, tolerant and free thinking attitude towards life. The novel reads like an ocean going sailing ship, swaying and flowing gacefully across the sea. And the cast of characters are truly eclectic: From intelligence and sexual ambiguity of Una's fellow sailors Giles and Kit to the staunchly seaman like Captain Ahab. Naslund introduces to many memorable people. Naslund also raises some delightfully "modern" issues: Cannibalism, the nature of sexuality, single parenthood, feminism and the state of the man and his psyche in a time when the individual was becoming increasingly aware of his position in the universe.

Although the length is an issue this is still a fine novel which certainly packs a wallop and it surely begs a sequel.

Michael Leonard