Shining at the Bottom of the Sea [Hardcover]

Stephen Marche (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2008

In this stylistic tour de force, Stephen Marche creates the entire culture of a place called Sanjania—its national symbols, political movements, folk heroes, a group of writers dubbed "fictioneers," a national airline called Sanjair, and a rich literary history. Sanjania is an island nation whose English-speaking citizens draw upon the English, American, Australian, and Canadian literary traditions. This brilliant story is an anthology, taking the reader from the rough and tumble pamphlets of 1870s Sanjania to the burgeoning Sanjanian nationalistic awareness in the 1930s literary journal, The Real Story, to the extraordinary longing of the writings of the Sanjanian Diaspora. These works develop into a Rashomon-like story, introducing us to illustrious Sanjanian figures such as the repentant prostitute Pigeon Blackhat and the magically talented couple Caesar and Endurance. The result is a vibrant evocation of a country— from the birth pangs of its first settlers and their hardy vernacular to is revolutionary years and all the way to the present—all told in Stephen Marche’s innovative and accomplished writing.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

For this anthology of the literature of Sanjania, a fictitious North Atlantic island, Marche (Raymond and Hannah) creates a Sanjanian dialect and embeds it in an authentically alien atmosphere, as in the two stories that represent 19th century pamphlet literature, "The Destruction of Marlyebone, the Pirate King" and "Pigeon Blackhat." The stories have commonplace plots, but their twisted diction is brilliant: "In that time, no sailor on Sanjan Island did not know of the Beacham house and Pigeon Blackhat, I say it to my shame." As Sanjania goes through an independence movement and postcolonial dictatorship during the 20th century, the writing styles reflect international fashion, from the Hemingway-influenced "clean writing" movement of Blessed Shirley to the supposed magical realism of covetown life in, for instance, "A Wedding in Restitution" (later made into a festsival-sweeping film). In keeping with the academic anthology structure, Marche provides a preface, an index of author biographies and a selection of Sanjanian criticism—all straight-faced, and all perfect. Marche's concept is fascinating, but Sanjanian literature gets noticably worse the further one gets into the 20th century—perhaps Marche's sly comment on declining national hopes, Sanjanian and otherwise. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Marche's avant-garde first novel, Raymond and Hannah (2005), brilliantly recounted the struggles of a long-distance relationship in elegiac prose poetry. Marche raises the ante for experimental fiction even higher with this unique faux anthology of stories written by the leading authors of an imaginary island nation. Floating somewhere in the North Atlantic, cove-ringed Sanjania has weathered British colonialism, thrived on the bounty of sailors and privateers, and nurtured a predilection for pamphlet-bound fiction. In tales about cutthroat pirates, the isle's duplicitous aristocracy, and crime in its capital city, Port Hope, Marche unveils Sanjania's rich and vibrant history. Redeemed bordello madame Pigeon Blackhat looks back on her life of destitution and sinfulness. A sailor's wife endures virtual widowhood awaiting her long-missing husband. Marche's accomplished prose embraces a breathtaking variety of literary styles, from a fractured early Sanjanian dialect to a "recovered" Hemingway letter in the volume's concluding section, "Criticism." The consequent kaleidoscope of details about Sanjania renders it so vividly that you can barely resist consulting an atlas—just in case. Hays, Carl --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Viking Canada (April 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670066176
• ISBN-13: 978-0670066179
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,301,636 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A surprisingly readable "novel", June 27, 2008

By 

Canuck Baritone (Toronto, ON Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shining at the Bottom of the Sea (Hardcover)

I picked up this book solely on the precis on the dust jacket. I was curious - could the author pull off this conceit, or would it simply turn out to be a clever gimmick that went horribly wrong? I must say I was MORE than impressed by this clever yet READABLE "novel". Its very form makes me question what constitutes a novel.

There is no linear plot, per se. Instead, the book is an anthology of short stories which chronicle the history of literature on the fictitious island of Sanjania. And yet, these short (fictional) stories by (fictitious) Sanjanian authors manage to evoke for the reader a believable history of the island while giving him a feel for the life and customs of its people. Extraordinary.

Mr. Marche easily changes stylistic hats - and the breadth of his writing style is truly astonishing. While it may be true that not ALL of the stories are first rate (perhaps intentional?) there are quite a number which have a freshness that I found quite appealing.

I cannot think of another book which has so pleasantly surprised me in recent memory. A truly delightful book.

3.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful approach, not quite as fascinating as I'd hoped, June 6, 2010

By 

A. D. MacFarlane (England, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shining at the Bottom of the Sea (Hardcover)

Shining at the Bottom of the Sea is an anthology of short fiction from an imaginary North Atlantic island, Sanjania, spanning much of the island's history and examining various aspects of its culture and development.

The island once had indigenous occupants, who survived long enough to produce petroglyphs but died out before more modern settlers arrived (conveniently sidestepping issues of colonialism, in a way that felt a little too neat). Its first of the latter were shipwreck survivors of a slaver vessel, contributing to the islanders' often non-white skin tone. ('Black' and 'amber' are used to describe two different characters' skin, while a racist British woman talks of the island being full of 'darkies'. This choice I rather liked; the islanders' race is not commented on too often, it's just a fact of life, yet Marche could just have easily made everyone white as default.) The British later claimed the island as a colony; in the mid 20th Century it won independence, suffered a dictatorial first government then settled down into a more tolerant political climate.

This history is part of the stories; they're organised into sections called 'The Pamphlets and Early Fictioneers', 'Upheavels and Independence' and 'Exile and Return', followed by a section of fake lit-crit that adds interesting layers to some of the stories preceding it. The way some of the stories refer to the history is sometimes skilfully handled, sometimes not. "An Old Man Mourns for His Blind Daughter" allegorises the post-independence government, while one of the lit-crit articles points to a Biblical quote hidden in one paragraph. I tend to find most allegorical work uninteresting on the surface and unsubtle in its main objective, and this story fit that complaint-set perfectly; to have this followed by an article explaining how oh-so-clever this story really is felt faintly ridiculous, not to mention self-congratulatory.

Others about the political crises surrounding independence are not highly imaginative. "Ultimate Testament" is the final will of a political prisoner, who owns only his rags, his beaten body and his "love of country, good as mint". I did, however, like "To Be Read At The Hour of Independence", which struck me as borderline cynical when compared to the prelude's assertion that it "captures the euphoria at the dawn of self-rule": the world before independence contains "mud, and bones on the bottom of the sea, and out-of-date fashions and dry riverbeds and the flightless Sanjan swallow", while the representative of the future can only offer "a murky outline, an impossibility ... mud, marriage, the conversation and trade ... More ships arrive, more plague, and more bones litter the sea bottom, and more shipwreck survivors tie their lives to the stable flotsam of this island". There's a recognition of continuity that's quite honest and open-eyed, and not at all euphoric to me. The stories also examine the reactions of exiles and expats abroad, most of them in a similarly un-complex manner.

Far more successful are the stories that examine or refer to cove culture. See, the island's shore is full of little coves where people settled and lived very insular lives, leading to a wide range of dialects and customs. This stuff fascinated me. Several stories employ the linguistic quirks of the coves, especially "Professor Saintfrancis and the Diamants at the End of the World", a mystery piece full of quirky compound words like 'tonguerag' (gossip) and 'soupmist' (mystery/confusion) and various other alterations to standard English that crop up, to a lesser extent, in many other stories; "Men" prefers the approach of dropping a lot of letters, handled pretty decently as these things go.

Elsewhere are details of cove culture. "Pigeon Blackhat" is a fairly unsurprising story of a girl from a cove village who flees her small-horizoned life for the big city, eventually succumbs to debt and turns to prostitution. "Under the Skin" mentions (but sadly doesn't spend more than a paragraph or two describing) the tattoos of the sailors. "The End of the Beach" is a woman recalling what the titular part of the beach meant to her, back in her cove village, as she's now living in Paris. "The Master's Dog" is another of the more boring stories, about a manservant who returns home to find that his girlfriend married his best friend, while his employer argues with her un-interested husband - but at one point the manservant narrates, "In Port Hope, when strangers asked him for his cove of origin, a unique pleasure had always warmed his heart when he could name Jacks, an interior town. His countrymen, almost absolutely coastal by nature, were amazed that he had never learned to swim, and possessed no strong feelings about the construction or maintenance of vessels." It's a shame the rest of the story is not as interesting as this cultural glimpse.

"A Wedding in Restitution" is the best for this kind of thing, as it describes the ceremonies surrounding a cove wedding. It also contains the biggest elements of the fantastic, with the miracles surrounding the two lovers' christenings and wedding: Caesar upended a bottle of brandy and it poured continuously, while Endurance's skin was covered in a star-map, miracles that led to forced childhood labour until at adolescence the miracles ended, only to recur briefly on the wedding day; in the hasty preparations for the wedding, a fish the size of a boat is believed to sacrifice itself for the wedding feast, leaping into the fisherman's boat and letting itself be brought to harbour. The wedding is hastily prepared for, because each village lacks its own priest; instead, a priest circumnavigates the island, doing his work from cove to cove. And, after the wedding, it is a cove custom to put the couple in a boat and float them out to sea, with luck determining whether they'll return and get to actually enjoy their married life. I enjoyed all of this a lot. Sadly, the story focuses on the village's actions, not Caesar and Endurance themselves; the glimpses we get of Endurance's character, as the only female sailor in the cove, are great, and I wish the story spent more time with her.

This story is also an example of how the Criticism section at the back comes into play, as two reviews of the film adaptation of the story - one Sanjanian and one from New York - provide quite differing opinions. The former points out that certain customs are not unique to this one cove, the constant employment of its fishermen is unrealistic, and so on. The Criticism section also provides information about some of the "authors" and the island's history. In places, as mentioned above, it falls flat on its own attempted cleverness, but elsewhere it's good fun.

The development of literature on Sanjania is sometimes interesting in itself. As with the circumnavigating priest, early literature in the form of pamphlets was brought on circumnavigating ships. Reading is highly appreciated on Sanjania; according to the foreword, "Bookstalls are as common as fruit stands, the theatres around Saint Magdalene's Square dwarf the City Hall, and on Sanjair flights the stewards push small carts of books down the aisle after the beverages and pretzels." The preface later derides tourists who find this exotic while knowing nothing of Sanjanian literature's history. One literary movement aimed to iron out the differences in cove tongues by arriving at a lingua franca - disappointingly, this is just plain Queen's English, not something especially Sanjanian, and the example given of this style is not an exciting piece - while later authors rebelled against this.

Taken as individual works divorced of their various contexts, the stories vary widely in quality. Their median would probably not fall in a very favourable position. A lot of them are mundane, interesting for glimpses of imagined culture but still stories about cheating husbands, mourning, divorce, and so on. The prelude talks of "An Interlude at the Opera" being full of "atmosphere and luxurious setting", making me wonder if Marche included the wrong draft in his final submission. I read something about a mysterious women who married into a cove village and, a while after her husband died, was returned to the city by Imperial orders, with the story coyly refusing to provide an explanation. Curious, but not atmospheric or luxurious. Of course, there are gems: I really liked "A Wedding in Restitution", for instance, and the opening story "The Destruction of Marlyebone, the Private King", that's semi-folkloric; another favourite, "Two Stories About the Abandon Tree", is a micro-piece about the lightning-struck death of a tree important to a cove village, contrasting an objective newspaper article about the events with the author's reaction.

"Green leaves unfurled their living flags, green leaves without a country. When past seasons passed, when buds struggled on the bone branches, or withered on the stem, everyone in Marginal Cove brought a substitute ornament. The Abandon Tree at the mouth of the sea uttered a different word each day to the men in vessels piercing the impossible ocean. What the women understood is not for our ears."

Delicious.

While my opinion of individual stories differed, as a whole it's an ingenious approach to depicting a fictional culture. I enjoyed reading it, but at the end felt that it could have been even better - with much, much more focus on the cove cultures, as where this island is not the fodder for stories indistinguishable from British or American literary work is where the novel really shines. It fails to provide quite the level of difference I want from a novel that's about an imaginary place. Still, the technique appealed to my tastes.