"The North Water" by Ian McGuire ****

• English author
• Originally published in 2016
• Setting:  Greenland whaling trade, 1850s
• Vocabulary:
• bathos:  the sudden appearance of a silly idea or event in a book, movie discussion, etc., that is serious in tone
• chunter:  to talk in a low inarticulate way
• flensing:  to strip (as a whale) of blubber or skin
• gallimaufry: hodgepodge
• Quotes:
• p.19..."Life will not be puzzled out, or blathered into submission; it must be lived through, survived, in whatever fashion a man can manage."
• p.19..."What does 'free' even mean? Such words are paper-thin, they crumble and tear under the slightest pressure."
• p.51..."Sumner's opiated mind slips its moorings and drifts backwards, sideways, through fluid dreamscapes as fearsome and as thick with unnameable life as the green arctic waters which press and crash only twelve wooden inches from his head."
• p.78..."Affection is a passing thing.  A beast is no different from a person in that regard."
• p.88..."If you are seeking persons of gentleness and refinement, Sumner, the Greenland whaling trade is not the place to look for them."
• p.105..."Words are like toys:  they amuse and educate us for a time, but when we come to manhood we should give them up."
• p.136..."Their world is hard and raw enough, they think, without the added burden of moral convolution."..whalers
• p.141..."Behind every piece of sweet-smelling female loveliness lies a world of stench and doggery....he's a lucky man who can forget that's true or pretend it isn't"......regarding the brutal work of  getting the whalebone for the corsets of fine ladies
• p.156..."Through a stuttering veil of snow he sees at the floe edge a bluish iceberg, immense, chimneyed, wind-gouged, sliding eastwards like an albinistic butte unmoored from the desert floor."
• p.200..."He has walked much too far, he knows it now:  he has strayed from his true purposes, he is lost and bewildered, and his failure is complete."...sums up Sumner's experience.
• Review:  A whaling tale, a tale of civilized men returning to their primal existence.  This is not a nice story.  This is not for the,faint-hearted.  However, if you want to feel a sense of being on the whaling ship, of smelling and tasting and hearing and seeing the brutality of survival, and the brutality of man, than this is the book for you.  Somehow, the author manages to convey primal, brutal details with lyrical prose.  I could not put the book down once I had gotten into it and gratefully inhaled the bits of wisdom spaced throughout its pages.  Very interesting.