Staff Picks: Family, Fleece, and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos
Michael Paterniti. Photo: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey.
Earlier this month, I visited family on Cliff Island, off the coast of Portland, Maine. It’s a lovely place, with pebbled beaches and raspberry bushes. And it’s small. Very, small. The whole island is about two miles from end to end; the total population, according to the most recent U.S. census, is sixty-one. There are no cars or restaurants or hotels. People get around on foot or bike, or with the occasional golf cart. But what Cliff Island does have is a library—and a great one. Run out of an old house and open for only a few hours a day, the contains a large and eclectic selection of books, many of which have been collected over the years by the island’s residents or else donated by tourists passing through. On my aunt’s recommendation, I picked up , a delightfully strange and sensitive essay collection by the journalist Michael Paterniti. Paterniti’s writing defies traditional categorization. Is it journalism? Is it poetry? At times it reads like both. At times it reads like something else entirely. In “,” for instance, Paterniti embodies the voice of Hiromitsu Shinkawa, a Japanese man who was stranded on a piece of flotsam for three days following the 2011 tsunami. This is a so-called true story, but the empathetic imagination Paterniti brings to bear on it is all his own, drawing upon nearly unbelievable levels of detail—like the purple fleece the man wore, and the notes he scrawled in desperation on various pieces of garbage with a marker he fished from the sea—to conjure the fear and hope and loneliness of the situation. Near the close of the story, just before the man is saved, even the prose itself seems to reflect his condition, becoming somewhat ecstatic and dreamlike, as though Paterniti were right beside him on that plank of wood, lost in a hunger-induced hallucination. In the end, the reader is grateful for these liberties. They leave us with a feeling of expansiveness—a sense that, within the world of the book, anything is possible.
