Emma Hooper, Esi Edugyan and Kirsty Logan: All About the Jellyfish

What serendipity to come across passages describing Atlantic jellyfish in three novels in a row.

It started last week. My friends and I take turn hosting a monthly literary salon and the theme this time was "grace." I chose to share a chapter from the book I was reading at the time, The Homesick Songs by Emma Hooper. It includes the following passage:

     But Martha was awake and was rowing through white ribbons of night mist, everything quieter than seemed possible. She was listening to the quiet when her oar, her left oar, slowed in the water, like it had suddenly become thicker, heavier. And then her right oar too, so she had to push her full body weight up and back to pull through each stroke, like fingers through wind-tangled hair. She stopped, balancing the oars down into their resting places, and leaned out to look over the edge of the boat, into the now-heavy water. Oh, she said. Oh, oh, oh.
     She blinked, squeezed her eyes shut, and then opened them again and saw the same thing. Things. Hundreds and hundreds, thousands, more than her eyes could count, all around the boat and leading on, out, jellyfish. Glowing and bright like the stars had fallen down into the sea, like she was in the middle a new and important constellation. Orange, green, blue, each one pulsed in time with the others. One big heart, thought Martha. Like one big heart.

A snowy September day; good weather for reading indoors.

The next book I picked up is one loaned to me by my next-door neighbour, Karen. She said, "I won a book, something Black, are you interested in reading it?" YES! Washington Black by Esi Edugyan:

Photo by my friend Dee.

     I leaned over, staring. The sea was smooth as a wooden table, and yet I could see upon its surface an odd translucency. The ship's light caught it, and oh, oh, what a sight drifted there, what alien and wondrous beings! For I observed now a wide, transparent green orb, pulsing, and beside it a yellow one, and then another and another, dozens of glistening suns flaring all about in the dark waters.
     I had seen jellyfish before, in visits with Titch to the beaches near Faith. But never in such numbers, and never so vibrant, so glasslike. The black of the sea was far-reaching, as though no light could penetrate it. And yet here these creatures floated, fragile as a woman's stocking, their bodies all afire. My breath left me. I leaned over the edge of the little rowboat and watched the sea pulse in a furnace of colour.

Wow! I could picture them. And then yesterday, my friend Dee posted on Facebook a photo of an orange jellyfish that she took from a dock in Copenhagen. Wow, again!

Finished with the amazing nineteenth-century adventures of the former slave named Washington Black, last night I picked up something completely different, a Scottish novel that borrows heavily from fairytales. What follows is the opening  paragraph from The Gloaming by Kirsty Logan:

     That last summer, the sea gave us jellyfish. Every morning when the water slid back and revealed the stony beach, there they'd be: dozens of squishy, silvered things with their purple threaded innards. The girls shrieked to see them, especially when Bee prodded them with sticks to make them shudder. Dead or dying, they didn't know. And it didn't matter -- no one was giving them back to the sea, so they'd die in the end, and when evening came the tide would creep back in and steal the corpses. The sea takes everything.

Has anyone else had literary jellyfish encounters lately?

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November 12, 2018 - another jellyfish encounter:

J’ai traversé un champs de méduses électriques, j’ai parcouru le détroit de Malacca flanqué de raies manta géantes, j’ai combattu des pirates somaliens et des filibustiers turcs.

p 51, Maree montante par Charles Quimper

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November 16, 2018 - and another one:

He looked back just once and I saw myself through his eyes. I was his saviour and covered in light, almost weightless, like a jellyfish in a giant fishbowl. Knowing, lonely, perfect.

Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq