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Journey to the End of the Whale

Journey to the End of the Whale

by JohnDavidMorley (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2005

    $3.27
Synopsis

'I was not yet grown up but I had already grasped the significance of the whale stone...It had shaped my past, it had shrouded my dead, it would form my future, it was memory and prophesy, affirmation and warning alike. An ambition was born in me to allow no one but myself to become the hero of my own life.' For Daniel Serraz, born on a ferry in the Straits of Malacca, orphaned two years later when his parents are lost at sea, the world beneath the waves holds an irresistible fascination. Raised in Geneva by his hydrophobic grandmother, his boyish imagination stirred by the local pet-shop's aquaria, Daniel free-floats with life's currents into a career in insurance and marriage to Japanese interpreter Kozue. But ominous truths are re-surfacing, bound up with the legend of his whale-hunter great-grandfather and his parents' disappearance off the Indonesian coast.When calamity scars his marriage and devastates his health, at the risk of his own survival, Daniel pursues his sea-borne destiny to the far-flung island of Lefo, where whales are still hunted by century-old methods and native superstition tells of a mythical makhluk istimewa, an 'extraordinary creature' still inhabiting the surrounding seas. ..Beautiful, moving, awe-inspiring and wise, this is a tale of courage and personal doom, of a man's journey of self-discovery to the edge of the world, to the brink of himself, to the truth of his origins, to the end of the whale.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 256
 Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Published: 08 Sep 2005
ISBN 10: 0297848488
ISBN 13: 9780297848486
Book Overview: Journey to the End of the Whale by a writer who is 'one of those rare writers who manages truly to enter the heart of a foreign territory' (Anne Tyler)

Media Reviews
It is impossible to do justice in this space to the rich spiritual-thematic explorations which Morley produces from this extended visit... from these and many more images and experiences emerges a poignant kind of personal spirituality which leads David to a new understanding of his own humanity. The writing, too, is superb... There is beauty in strange places in Morley's haunting scheme. SUNDAY TELEGRAPH hard to resist at least a tingle of awe when a 100-ton whale surfaces so near the village that the warm spume of its blow drifts up on to land in droplets that can be felt by the people on the shore. -- ADAM MARS JONES OBSERVER Morley writes intensely beautiful prose, compelling in short bursts, and delivers a haunting elegy for an already vanished culture that will more than reward. DAILY MAIL ...as much a travel book as a novel. Morley's evocation of place is passionate and absorbing - the exotic locations are realised as vividly as the characters - and the story has a heady tang of ancient myth and old-fashioned adventure. -- KATE SAUNDERS THE TIMES the descriptions of hunting the whale are eerily gripping, and the book really takes off in these sections. And engrossing... read, Journey to the End of the Whale passes the time amiably. IRISH EXAMINER there is true beauty here too, in passages which are dream-like and philosophical by turns... The Melvillean climax comes when the long dearth of prey is dramatically reversed by a sperm whale breaching close to shore. To anyone lucky enough to have witnessed this spectacle - one of nature's most grandiloquent and theatrical acts - Morley's cool, spare words are vividly evocative... So, too, this fine novel stands in the sun, caught in its own momentary promise of cetacean freedom. -- Philip Hoare INDEPENDENT I could have happily have read a whole novel about these two lives crumbling under the pointiliste minutiae of ordinary tragedy. GUARDIAN the elaborate metaphor of the whale is a success and there is much sophisticated socioeconomic detail about Lefo and its way of life. TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT Morley's fine novel is not primarily a story of derring-do. On the contrary, it is an elaborate and skilfully constructed pilgrimage... to the depths of the ocean, where whales communicate over vast distances and traverse a huge three-dimensional world. SUNDAY TIMES
Author Bio
John David Morley is the critically acclaimed author of Pictures from the Water Trade - an Englishman in Japan, and The Feast of Fools ('the glittering prose is enchanting' - The Times)