Timothy, or Notes of an Abject Reptile (Paperback)

by Verlyn Klinkenborg (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In a gorgeous hybrid of naturalist observation, novelistic invention and philosophical meditation, Klinkenborg, a member of the New York Times editorial board and chronicler of the rural life (Making Hay), views the English countryside through the eyes of a tortoise and gives his human readers rich food for thought. For 13 years, Timothy the tortoise lived amid the bounty of 18th-century curate and amateur naturalist Gilbert White's garden. White, author of A Natural History of Selbourne, had inherited the reptile from his aunt, who had kept her (Timothy was a female, "stolen from the [Mediterranean] ruins I was basking on" and brought to "cold, manicured" England) for thrice as long. Timothy, as Klinkenborg imagines her, is melancholic, wise, resigned; her patient narration reveals extraordinary powers of observation and empathy: "the Hampshire sky staggers me now with loveliness. Creeping fogs in the pastures. Gossamer on the stubbles. The parish rings with light. Whole being of the world distilled into a moment." The only plot is the passage of time, and Timothy's scrutiny of life around her: humans are "great soft tottering beasts" who, blinded by their humanness, believe that "the language of the brute creation is no language at all." This "true story," as Klinkenborg describes it, offers studied, beautiful reflections on the present and memory, earth and weather, love and utility, human and beast. This is a wholly unexpected and astonishing book. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post
We are each of us, all of us, shipwrecked and abandoned -- landlocked prisoners inside our own minds. Of all our enterprises, it is the arts, with their attempt to pry open momentary windows into other heads, that most seek to ease this solitude. And of all our arts it is fantastic fiction that, tapping into shadowlands of dream and myth, most clearly strives not only to represent our lives in fullest blossom, thorns and all, but also to place a frame around mankind's place in the universe.

Imaginative force, I tell my student writers, noting that this is what I miss in so much contemporary fiction.

It is difficult to imagine a greater exercise of such force than Timothy, in which Verlyn Klinkenborg imagines himself squarely into the blunt head and watchful mind of an aged tortoise.

Shanghaied from home on the Turkish coast, stuffed first into a bag, later into the hold of a ship, Timothy ended up in the garden of the 18th-century parson and amateur naturalist Gilbert White, whose The Natural History of Selborne chronicled, among much else, the 13 years of their parallel lives. This is Timothy's own chronicle of the years during which the naturalist and his kind -- little suspecting that they, too, might be exotic and peculiar -- were being observed in turn.

Here, the story begins with Timothy's recapture after a brief jaunt out of the garden, gone for a week before being found, before the "great warm . . . stilt-gaited" beasts undo Timothy's whole week's progress with "two-score of their strides":

"Ground breaks away. May wind shivers in my ears. My legs churn the sky on their own. I look down on bean-tops. Down on the blunt ends of sheep-bitten grasses. Over one field, into the next, into the hop-garden beyond. Past thatch and tiles, past maypole, past gilded cock on the church tower. All in my eye, all at once. So far to see."

For 53 years, Timothy passes from sack to ship's hold, from garden to garden, from hibernation to hibernation, puzzling at these odd creatures who, stalked day and night by disorder, stalk it back, making Timothy as subject to their neglect and most trivial intentions as to their malice -- "As vulnerable to their wonder as their loathing." So do we get Timothy's story, charged with a quality of language and an associative imagery more common to poetry. Here, for instance, is Timothy's hibernation:

"My blood creeps along a dark endless track. On quiet feet. Circles round and round as though it had lost its way but always finding its way again. No counting the circuits it makes under the compass-rose of my carapace."

And, here, a sampling of Timothy's observations of those stilt-gaited beasts towering above, in whom instinct is a relic and reason a will-o'-the-wisp:

"But if a cabbage were human, it would aspire to become a lettuce. Pull up roots and go up to town to see what's doing in the artichoke way. Such a restless tribe."

And: "He forgets how discomfiting the incandescence of mammals feels to a reptile. Their abruptness. The velocity of their existence. To live such long lives at such terrible speed. And to get no further than if they had lived more slowly."

Verlyn Klinkenborg is a member of the editorial board of the New York Times and the author of Making Hay, The Rural Life and The Last Fine Time. With Timothy, he has written an extraordinary book that, like all good art, rescues us from dailyness -- from, as Timothy would say, our terrible speed -- and makes our world again large and wondrous, a book that swings from funny to wise to sad often in a single sentence or phrase and puts profoundly into question humanity's apostasy from the greater world about it.

I once had other expectations, Timothy tells us early on. Then again, well over a hundred pages later and near chronicle's end: "I had other expectations once. They come upon me sometimes as I dig my hybernaculum. In the rust of autumn." One more winter, Timothy feels. One more winter, one more entering and leaving of the ground before joining it forever, here in this strange and beautiful and terrifying, familiar England. So far from home.

So very far from home.

Reviewed by James Sallis
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (January 9, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679737537
• ISBN-13: 978-0679737537
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #211,586 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reptilian Sense and Sensibility, March 12, 2006

By	Debra Morse (Southern California) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile (Hardcover)

What a wry, original, disarming, imaginative, and instructive tale! Author Verlyn Klinkenborg considers the subjective journaling of 18th century English curate Gilbert White regarding a real life tortoise who lived on White's property in Selborne, and from White's biased human observations crafts a rebuttal unlike any other: a bestial philosophic treatise. Timothy is a sentient being who has much to teach us from her example (White in his paternalism erroneously concludes Timothy is male).

Through Timothy's narrative we are shown our own species' arrogance, cruelty, and bumbling tack. "How do I escape from that nimble-tongued, fleet footed race?.... Walk through the holes in their attention". Timothy's discourse on instinct versus reason is worthy of university level discussion. "Tottering, stilt-gaited beasts. A sad plight. Reason too often a will-o'-the-wisp. Instinct a relic within them."

Jane Austen in a carapace. Elegance amongst the asparagus.

As one reviewer notes, this is "one of the best meditations on slowness, patience, and endurance". It will make you re-consider humankinds place in the world. An excellent book club read, it will lead to many long discussions. One can also predict increasing crowds at the reliquary of Timothy's shell at the Natural History Museum in London.

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Unlikely Narrator , March 19, 2006

By	Bart King (Portland, Oregon) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile (Hardcover)

I've enthusiastically read Klinkenborg's columns for the New York Times for years, but I entered into this book with some misgivings. Even the title seemed strangely clunky, and after all, how many writers can really pull off a book told from the viewpoint of a tortoise?

My doubts were swiftly (by tortoise standards) allayed. This is certainly the most eloquent meditation on the natural world that I've ever read. (And coming from a lifetime Sierra Club member, that just might mean something.) Klinkenborg is not just an extraordinarily gifted writer. I believe he is an admirable human (and tortoise) as well.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unique and unforgettable!, April 14, 2006

By	Elisabeth Smith (Oak Park, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile (Hardcover)

I picked up this book because I'd read a review that compared it to GILEAD, one of my favorite novels of the past 10 years. While the stories are wildly different, the comparison is a good one. Both novels are meant to be read slowly, and will evoke deep emotions about life and humanity.

Timothy the tortoise is about as unlikely a narrator as there is. Snatched from his Mediterranean birthplace, he winds up in the garden of Rev. Gilbert White, whose meticulous diaries about his 18th century parish still exist today. Timothy's reflections on the humans around him and on the cycles of life in the village are informed by his slowness, of course, and by his extraordinary longevity (tortoises often live 80 years or more, significantly longer than the humans of White's day). The novel's appreciation of the intricacies of nature, the beauty of the seasons and the value of slowness are meant to be savored, and his reflections on humans and their follies come as sly and often moving little revelations scattered throughout the novel.

There's something to appreciate on every page of this short and lyrically written novel. I enjoyed it while sitting in my garden, like Timothy. It's one of the most memorable and unusual novels I've ever read. You won't be disappointed by taking a chance on this one.