Servants of the Map: Stories
Andrea Barrett
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0393323579
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"Luminous....Each [story] is rich and independent and beautiful and should draw Barrett many new admirers."―Publishers Weekly, starred review
Ranging across two centuries, and from the western Himalaya to an Adirondack village, these wonderfully imagined stories and novellas travel the territories of yearning and awakening, of loss and unexpected discovery. A mapper of the highest mountain peaks realizes his true obsession. A young woman afire with scientific curiosity must come to terms with a romantic fantasy. Brothers and sisters, torn apart at an early age, are beset by dreams of reunion. Throughout, Barrett's most characteristic theme―the happenings in that borderland between science and desire―unfolds in the diverse lives of unforgettable human beings. Although each richly layered tale stands independently, readers of Ship Fever (National Book Award winner) and Barrett's extraordinary novel The Voyage of the Narwhal, will discover subtle links both among these new stories and to characters in the earlier works.
species could not possibly exist, is one of the most striking cases known of the same species living at distant points, without the apparent possibility of their having migrated from one to another … the glacial period affords a simple explanation of these facts. He closes his eyes and sees the cold sweeping south and covering the land with snow and ice, arctic plants and animals migrating into the temperate regions. Then, centuries later, the warmth returning and the arctic forms retreating
not?” Around the left lobe of the kidney came Rose, a platter of chicken in her hand. She seemed simultaneously to smile at him and glare at her sister, who was caught with the paper cup still at her lips. Was that a glare? He couldn’t figure out what was going on between them. “Welcome,” he said. And then, reluctant to lose Biancas undivided attention, “Will you join us?” “I can’t just now,” Rose said. “But Constance wants to know if you’d like to come over to the patio and have something to
seemed terribly loud and someone was shrieking with laughter, a sound like metal beating metal. Chased away, they drifted toward the Japanese fountain tucked in the shrubbery, where Krzysztof had earlier crouched until Constance captured him. “Isn’t this pretty?” he asked, and she agreed. Ferns surrounded one side of the fountain, lacy and strongly scented. She peered down into the basin and said, “We could just sit here for a bit.” “We could,” he agreed. His smile distracted her from the odd
from an ice cave. There are no vistas when one travels the glaciers, more a sense of walking along a deep corridor, framed by perpendicular walls. I have a headache nearly all the time, and my neck aches from always gazing upward. The mornings are quiet, everything frozen in place by the frosts of the night. By afternoon the landscape has come alive, moving and shifting as rocks fall, walls of mud slide down, hidden streams dammed by the ice break free with a shout. No place for men. I travel
everyone’s careful to guard each other’s privacy. Yet Nora, so private in other ways, was the one who most often broke through his caution. She seemed to sense his movements, even when she couldn’t see him; as he finished the last of his exercises she’d rise from her reading chair, tap on the glass, and wave as he stepped into view. Sometimes she’d ask him in for a minute, before they both returned to the duties of the day. She might tell him, then, about a new remedy she was concocting. He