I’ve always believed fiction can be vital in allowing readers to apprehend and experience other versions of the world. I’m starting to believe it can play a part in encouraging healthier visions of the environment, by depicting our benign proclivities, and imagining that marvellous natural phenomena like the Helm wind can be saved.
I came to it at eighteen. Driven by wanderlust and an unreconstructed romantic view of the Arctic, I had decided to forgo university for a few years to learn dogsledding. But sleds need snow and I arrived in summer, in time to bleed with salmon. Some of the fish we caught were for people, the Chinook salmon and whitefish. The mushing teams ate the chum, which most people in the village called dog salmon. Or just dogs—as when, boating back to the village gory and exhausted, you might hear someone on the bank call out, “Are the dogs running today?”
Now, more than twenty years after I first fished in the north, Are the dogs running today? is no small question. Dog salmon pulse twice a season up the Yukon River: the summer run and the longer-swimming fall run. Fall chum numbers have always fluctuated. Recently they have threatened collapse. In 2020 only 260,000 swam into the Yukon River, down from 1.8 million just three seasons before. In 2021 their numbers dropped further, to 145,000. All fishing ceased. As of the first week of August this year, just over 100,000 fall chum have arrived in the lower Yukon’s waters, a number expected to double at most. In a watershed that drains more than 300,000 square miles, home to dozens of Indigenous communities, fall chum nets have scarcely touched water for five years.
For biologists around the world, the invention of small, portable acoustic, radio, and satellite tracking tags has revolutionized their understanding of where animals go and how they live. But limitations in the technology mean they’ve only studied a fraction of underwater life, says Robert Lennox, a biologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.
My blood is collected, I have a CT scan, and I indignantly pee in a cup, as if something in my urine could possibly have anything in common with vision loss. It all feels like overkill. I’m passed around between nurses and technicians for hours until I finally meet with the doctor. He turns out to be a gentle and sympathetic older man who tells me all these tests are to rule out the bad stuff. I take him at his word. I have no reason not to. Later, I will remember his kindness. I will realize he knew.
Finally, I’m released and told to come back the next day to see a neurologist. I’m more annoyed than alarmed—I don’t want to spend another day in a waiting room. I have roughly fourteen hours of my own precious ignorance left.
The biographer of the current day sets out to know the character of his subject in the most intimate manner, as the great novelists of the 19th century knew theirs. Lashed to facts as biography is, that goal cannot really be achieved. And so the novel remains, and always will remain, the more truth-bearing form.
Kane, author of 2019’s gentle and penetrating “Rules for Visiting,” has taken a real-life incident from Fitzgerald’s pre-novelist life and spun it into something very much like a Penelope Fitzgerald novel, while also clearly being its own distinct entity. It requires some mettle to take the life of a beloved author and render that life as a work of imaginative fiction.
Few museums embody a country’s history, values, and role in the world as much as the Louvre does for France. After a long stint as a royal palace that housed monarchs’ private art collections, the Louvre opened its gates to the people during the French Revolution. Since then, the museum has played a crucial part in France’s global ambitions of grandeur. Leaders from Napoleon Bonaparte to President Emmanuel Macron have relied on it to bolster the country’s soft power abroad.
A new book takes readers through the museum’s countless staircases and hallways to present its complex past and current challenges. Adventures in the Louvre, by former New York Times Paris bureau chief Elaine Sciolino, is enriched by hours of interviews with top museum officials, including director Laurence des Cars. Sciolino aims to help visitors find their bearings in an enormous, often overwhelming space.