Monday, January 14, 2013

2013 read #8: A Kayak Full of Ghosts: Eskimo Tales, gathered and retold by Lawrence Millman.

A Kayak Full of Ghosts: Eskimo Tales, gathered and retold by Lawrence Millman
191 pages
Published 1987
Read January 14
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I love folklore and fairy tales, but I never read enough of them. During the course of this reading project, I expect to visit just about every book in my library's folklore section. I picked this one first because it was small and the stories brief; I'm reading four other books at the moment, two or three of them fairly dense, and a brief interlude of grim whimsy (grimsy?) is just the restorative I need. If anything, the tales here are just a little bit too insubstantial, the read just a bit unsatisfying. But many of them are delightfully fucked up, and that's all I ask.

One of my favorites was "The Birth of Fog," told by a man named Nattiq during a seal hunt in modern Nunavut. I won't transcribe the entire story (though it barely fills a page), so strain your eyes to read it here: http://i.imgur.com/Go7ct.jpg

I also love this droll affair: http://i.imgur.com/U4AyM.jpg

Not sure what else there is to say about this one. It feels like cheating to even add it to my tally, it's such a slight volume. Half of those 191 pages are filled with no more than a paragraph or two. I finished the whole thing in maybe an hour of reading. But it's done and it's on the list now, damn it.

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