Walking the Wall

I thoroughly enjoyed this book by Sena Jeter Naslund. I read Moby Dick last year and was quite surprised to have been completely taken with it–it was a book I had never read assuming it would be a book I would have to slog through simply for the sake of saying I’d read it. I’d read chunks of it here and there for certain classes, but never cover to cover. I loved it. Yes, there were long scenes of whaling that drug on, but Melville’s grasp of language was so rich that I never felt like I was slogging through anything. So when I heard of "Ahab’s Wife or, The Star-Gazer," I knew I’d get around to reading it eventually. The first line is such a complete winner, "Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last." In Moby Dick, Una is relegated to a few small, though telling, passages–in Ahab’s Wife, while Ahab is more than a few passages, he is really only a part of the much larger story of Una. In Moby Dick, Starbuck points to Ahab’s young wife and child as proof  of his humanities; Ahab mentions summer days of happiness and in the end, looking in Starbuck’s eyes he sees his wife and child–but then Moby Dick is sighted and the rest is history.  Those simple passages ask the question–what kind of young woman could provide Ahab with humanity and give him glimpses of summer and blue skies even in the midst of his madness? This book tries to answer that question, and for the most part succeeds brilliantly. I do feel the end part of the book strays a little too pat into an almost utopia–but I think part of the book’s point is that life can be bloody hard, and it was for Una, but we can pull peace and hope from out of the pieces and not descend into madness.

I think the title of the book is very well done–"Ahab’s Wife or, The Star-Gazer," not relegated to simply being Ahab’s Wife, she is defined by looking up and finding hope. Standing on the roof and watching the stars she is asked, "And what do you think, Una, of these heartless immensities?" She replies, "That we are a part of them, and they are a part of us."