| Scientific expeditions -- Fiction. |
| Sea stories. |
| Historical fiction. |
| Expeditions, Scientific |
| Scientific voyages |
| Travels |
| Voyages, Scientific |
Available:
Library | Shelf Number | Shelf Location | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library | FIC WILLIAMS | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... New Bedford Francis J. Lawler Branch | FIC WILLIAMS | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Long-listed for the NBCC's John Leonard Prize
The gripping story of a dramatic eighteenth-century voyage of discovery from Naomi J. Williams
In her wildly inventive debut novel, Naomi J. Williams reimagines the historical Lapérouse expedition, a voyage of exploration that left Brest in 1785 with two frigates, more than two hundred men, and overblown Enlightenment ideals and expectations, in a brave attempt to circumnavigate the globe for science and the glory of France.
Deeply grounded in historical fact but refracted through a powerful imagination, Landfalls follows the exploits and heartbreaks not only of the men on the ships but also of the people affected by the voyage-indigenous people and other Europeans the explorers encountered, loved ones left waiting at home, and those who survived and remembered the expedition later. Each chapter is told from a different point of view and is set in a different part of the world, ranging from London to Tenerife, from Alaska to remote South Pacific islands to Siberia, and eventually back to France. Theresult is a beautifully written and absorbing tale of the high seas, scientific exploration, human tragedy, and the world on the cusp of the modern era.
By turns elegiac, profound, and comic, Landfalls reinvents the maritime adventure novel for the twenty-first century.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Williams's debut novel is a historical maritime adventure based on the actual ill-fated 1785-1788 Lapérouse expedition of scientific exploration, when France sent two ships on an around-the-world voyage of discovery. Williams's research is thorough and meticulous, using primary sources such as letters, journals, and reports sent from the expedition-until both ships and their crews vanished without a trace in 1788 in the South Pacific. From those sources Williams weaves a fictional and suspenseful tale of uncertain exploration, telling each part of the story from a different character's perspective and location. In London, the expedition's naval engineer tries to buy British navigation and scientific instruments without tipping off the English to their use. In Chile, the French are greeted warmly by the Spanish, but illicit romance and ideas of imperialism and revolution surface. Alaska sees tragic contact with local natives, and a visit to California reveals the threat of Russian expansion. In Macao, the expedition commander, Captain Jean-Francois Lapérouse, has trouble with the pompous scientists. In the South Pacific, the ships battle islanders, suspicions of murder arise, and the ships and crews disappear. Years later, search parties and blind luck reveal clues to the fate of the Lapérouse expedition, and Williams brilliantly describes the end of the expedition as remembered by a single survivor and several islanders. Williams does a masterly job with her descriptions of the officers, sailors, scientists, and people they meet, explaining a colorful, vibrant bit of maritime history in the age of discovery. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Williams makes an entertainingly erudite debut with a prismatic reimagining of the doomed French attempt to circumnavigate the globe in the 1780s. With their "scientific mission paramount, no reasonable expense to be spared," captains Jean-Francois de Galaup de Laprouse and Paul-Antoine-Marie Fleuriot, Viscount de Langle, set sail in 1785 aboard the Boussole and the Astrolabe. As the "savants" onboardgeologists, physicists, botanistsprepare to study the exotic, Williams' narrative focuses on the human. Especially poignant is her illustration of how native cultures are poorly interpreted by European explorers celebrating the virtues of Enlightenment. From overweening functionaries and pretentious colonialists, captains and savants are soon forced to decipher personalities and politics. First at Concepcin in Chile, where Governor General Ambrosio O'Higgins seeks peace with the Arauca; then Alaska, where they're perceived as "Snow Menin winged war canoes" by bemused Alaska Natives; next Monterey in Alta, California, that visit rendered from the points of view of the governor's wife, mission priests, and others; next Macao, opium and disobedience; followed by Petropavlovsk in far eastern Russia. There, translator Barthlemy de Lesseps leaves to carry expedition reports to Paris across frozen Siberia by way of St. Petersburg. Finally, in the Navigator Islands, the captains face massacre and then shipwreck. Page upon page reveal characters like the scientist Lamanon, "a genius, he has no time for manners," unmourned after being killed by rock-pelting South Sea islanders; and the conscientious Capt. Laprouse, whose cabin is decorated with busts of Rousseau and Capt. Cook. Amid the seesawing boredom and terror of days at sea, William crafts an elegant and entrancing narrative to match her dissection of the landfalls. A moving epilogue concludes the narrative with de Lesseps identifying wreckage discovered on Vanikoro, knowing that "the globe we had tried so hard to complete [had swallowed] us whole." Literary art of the first order, intelligent and evocative in the way of the best of historical fiction. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Tracing the movements of France's ill-fated Lapérouse maritime expedition in the late eighteenth century, Williams' exceptional debut isn't your traditional seafaring yarn and is all the stronger and more penetrating for it. The plot moves confidently between views of the changing landscape from a crisply evoked Georgian London, where a naval engineer travels to procure supplies, and then on to Tenerife, Chile, Alaska, California, Russia, and the South Seas islands and its characters' choices and inner lives. The emphasis is not on fast-paced drama so much as on interactions among the two ship's captains (Lapérouse and Langle), their crews, the numerous scientists on board, and the residents and natives at many stopping points. Williams' status as an acclaimed short story writer is evident in her craftsmanship of each perfectly encapsulated chapter, each recounted from a different viewpoint or viewpoints. The section set at Monterey in 1786, for instance, demonstrates masterful use of perspective, as one revelation after another about the Spanish mission there comes to light. Full of period sensibilities, particularly the Enlightenment-era urge to go forth and explore new domains, the novel is alternately charming, invigorating, and heartbreaking, and always thoughtful and humane. Even readers who don't seek out nautical adventures will find themselves drawn in, especially if they love high-quality literary fiction.--Johnson, Sarah Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHEN THE EXPLORERS in "Landfalls" confess their purpose - "We were ... ready below with maps outspread and the journals of our predecessors open to the relevant pages, ready on deck and aloft with our keen young eyes and burnished telescopes" - they also describe the parallel joys of history and fiction, those most sympathetic bedfellows. Both demand an engagement with humanity that must skate across time and space to achieve any sort of context, any degree of relevance or reach. The best kind of historical fiction, then, should involve intelligence, experimentation, boldness and curiosity. These traits are all in evidence in Naomi J. Williams's ambitious and meticulous debut, which follows the trail of the Lapérouse expedition, a late-18th-century voyage of discovery that took more than 200 men across two oceans and ended in the disappearance of both of its French frigates, the Boussole and the Astrolabe. The narrative begins in Europe as the ships are outfitted for a journey that's expected to take several years and will round South America, skirt the California coast and island-hop in the South Pacific. The men of the expedition are scientists; their aim is to find anything that hasn't yet been found, whether it's the Northwest Passage or a rare parasite. These mariners are tracked in self-contained chapters ranging from London to Alaska to Macao, seen from the perspectives of Tlingit girls and Spanish missionaries and French naval engineers, their words preserved through letters, reports, journals and other artifacts. Though it enters the world as a novel, I have the impression that "Landfalls" never seems quite comfortable with that billing. Increasingly perturbed by the absence of cohesion, I came to realize that the problem wasn't in the material but in the label. At its heart, Williams's book is a brave pastiche of mostly true stories that overlap and jar, conveying the confusion of history more accurately than most fiction: as a series of competing projects, as a cacophony of voices for which there's rarely a direct translation, as a negotiation over power that's more fluid than we might have believed. Taken on those terms, it's natural that some stories should be more successful than others. The weaker chapters in "Landfalls" suffer additionally from their positioning as part of a larger novelistic arc. But at her best, Williams recalibrates the predicted narrative, turning the telescope or microscope (these intrepid savants use both) toward the unexpected corners of a scene. In a Tlingit child's retelling of one tragic episode, a tribal elder spots the French ships in the harbor and announces the arrival of a great raven - a classic rendering of American Indians' "simplicity" in the face of the unknown. Yet the narrator acknowledges the greater truth: "Although we knew Grandfather could not see and that the canoes were canoes and not a raven, no one can say, Grandfather, you are blind, you are wrong." Williams also dips into the voice of the abused wife of a Spanish official through a letter home that includes the insertions and erasures of her censoring husband. The finest chapter, "The Report," hints at a violent incident by stripping down layers of detail to get at the grief and confusion of a bereaved - though perhaps complicit - officer on the Astrolabe. WILLIAMS'S APPROACH RESONATES most when she brings emotion to the fore, when she lets particularity give rise to universality. Take the elderly woman at a civil records office, where "the room manages to be both airless and cold, the light dim, the long oak table too high, the chairs hard and too low, the registry book a dense, cube-like tome, hard to open, and the handwriting in it crabbed and spidery. I end up standing and leaning over the table to get the proper distance from the page. My right hip aches with the effort." In a similar elevation of physical detail, an officer documents the loss of his shipmates: "The humidity makes writing difficult. The ink grows viscous, the paper sticks to my hand." The research apparent in these stories is both Williams's strength and her crutch. She recognizes the neat historical fact, the image that ignites curiosity or wonder, and, indeed, there are wondrous things aplenty here. She excels at descriptions of landscapes that, alien to the French observers, become alien to us. When she recounts the deployment of a hot-air balloon off the Chilean coast, there's no distance between the onlookers' awe and our own. But these sorts of details can also obscure the characters, and the intricacies of the 18th-century moment can run away with a scene, turning what should be a thrilling account of discovery into little more than a ship's log. What I got was the cloth-covered buttons on a coat, maritime dipping needles, the wife-sharing customs of the Chukchis; what I wanted was genuine human yearning, emotional heat. There's a mystery to life - to any interaction between people of any era - that an accumulation of research can inadvertently scrub clean. Not fully placing her trust in the reader, Williams can spell out trains of thought to the point where the narrative becomes flattened, allowing no dark corner for the reader to inhabit, no gaps to imagine herself into. Simple exchanges can read like stage directions: "Lapérouse groaned. Eleonora turned to the steward. They exchanged some words, her face troubled and stern, his wearing a wry smile. She turned back to her guests." As in most adventurous endeavors, Williams's lapses cannot take away from the courage of her overall vision. Both disjunctive and rigorous, "Landfalls" confirms that history and literature share a fundamental exploratory impulse. "Discover much," the naturalist Joseph Banks advises one of Lapérouse's engineers. "Write everything down. And then, come back. It's very important that some of you come back." As Williams demonstrates in the best of her stories, it's in the coming back that observation develops into interpretation and art can be formed. KATY SIMPSON SMITH is the author of two novels, "The Story of Land and Sea" and the forthcoming "Free Men."