Our blog feature, "From the Stacks," features our booksellers’ favorite older books: those fortuitous used finds, underrated masterpieces, and lesser known treasures. Basically: the books that we’re the most passionate about handselling. This week, we’re featuring Kelsey F.’s pick, Submergence by J. M. Ledgard.
Like most good things in my life,
Submergence by J. M. Ledgard came into my orbit because of
Moby-Dick. A friend knew how much I loved Melville’s epic — its discursiveness, beautiful language, surprising sensuality — and Ledgard’s 2013 novel struck some similar chords, not least because it was also deeply concerned with the incredible unknowability of the ocean.
I knew a little bit about the plot’s general story before going in — centered on a passionate if brief romance between a biomathematician, Danielle Flinders, and a British spy, James More, both on holiday along the Atlantic coast in France — but I wasn’t prepared for how all-consuming, smart, sharp, and shattering
Submergence is. I read it in one gulp, and then I immediately started telling everyone I knew about it.
I wasn’t prepared for how all-consuming, smart, sharp, and shattering Submergence is.
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The story of the (often very sexy) love affair is braided together with Danielle and James’s circumstances a year later: Danielle is preparing to take a deep dive in a submersible into the ocean and James is being held captive by Somali jihadists. The circumstances are dire and isolating, and only get more so as the story goes on, but in their individual isolation, Danielle and James hold on to the memory of their connection and that quick, warm feeling of being understood and seen by another.
Submergence is about so much. It’s about a love affair and whales, yes, but it’s also about the ocean and obsession, love and loss, chaos and order, and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives when we’re faced with a point of no return. Not to put too fine a point on it, but in each of the sections, the characters are doing what they can to keep their head above water (literally, metaphorically), with varied success.
Submergence is about the ocean and obsession, love and loss, chaos and order, and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives when we’re faced with a point of no return.
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Ledgard, an East Africa correspondent for
The Economist, doesn’t come at these topics lightly, but he does write them with incredible empathy and depth. Ledgard isn’t shy about wandering away from the plot and into ruminations on the future of our world and the impossibility of knowing all there is to know about our planet, among other discursions, all of which are wise and deeply felt.
Most of the pages in my very-loved copy of
Submergence are dog-eared; this book is filled with wildly beautiful and evocative passages. There’s one, in particular, that I still think about weekly, years later: “The essence of it is that there is another world in our world, but we have to live in this one until the latter fire heats the deep.”
Submerge yourself in
Submergence; you won’t regret it.