Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer, by Matthew Gavin Frank
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Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer, by Matthew Gavin Frank
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Memory, mythology, and obsession collide in this “slyly charming” (New York Times Book Review) account of the giant squid.
In 1874, Moses Harvey―eccentric Newfoundland reverend and amateur naturalist―was the first person to photograph the near-mythic giant squid, draping it over his shower curtain rod to display its magnitude. In Preparing the Ghost, what begins as Harvey’s story becomes spectacularly “slippery and many-armed” (NewYorker.com) as Matthew Gavin Frank winds his narrative tentacles around history, creative nonfiction, science, memoir, and meditations about the interrelated nature of them all. In his full-hearted, lyrical style, Frank weaves in playful forays about his trip to Harvey’s Newfoundland home, his own childhood and family history, and a catalog of peculiar facts that recall Melville ’s story of obsession with another deep-sea dwelling leviathan. “Totally original and haunting” (Flavorwire), Preparing the Ghost is a delightfully unpredictable inquiry into the big, beautiful human impulse to obsess. 15 drawings Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer, by Matthew Gavin Frank- Amazon Sales Rank: #966710 in Books
- Brand: Frank, Matthew Gavin
- Published on: 2015-06-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.30" h x .90" w x 4.60" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Review “Slyly charming. . . . stunning writing and perversely wonderful research. . . . Alluring. It’s hard to imagine a better book about not entirely understanding giant squids.” (Jon Mooallem - New York Times Book Review)“In a book as coiled, strange and tentacular as its subject, Matthew Gavin Frank considers the squid. . . . An act of love and erudition.” (Annalissa Quinn, NPR)“One of the handsomest, most elusive creatures on earth and its first photographer get their close-up in Matthew Gavin Frank’s marvelous Preparing the Ghost.” (Elissa Schappell - Vanity Fair)“Totally original and haunting in the way you’d expect a book about a real life Presbyterian clergyman and amateur naturalist from the late-19th century―and his relationship with a giant squid―to be.” (Jason Diamond - Flavorwire)“A great essay takes us into the author’s polymathic mind and out to the wondrous world, teaching us something we didn’t know we wanted to know.” (Patrick Madden, author of Quotidiana)“Reads like a cross between Walt Whitman and a fever dream. Who would think squid and ice cream go together? I remained riveted to the very last word.” (Sy Montgomery, author of The Good Good Pig)“Matthew Gavin Frank reinvents the art of research in extraordinarily imaginative ways. His meditation on the briefly known and the forever unknowable courts lore (both family and creaturely), invites the fantastical, heeds fact, and turns the human drive to notate and list into a gesture of lyrical beauty.” (Lia Purpura, author of On Looking and Rough Likeness)“Inventive, original, and endlessly interesting, Preparing the Ghost is a gorgeous exploration of myth, history, language, and imagination. . . . A journey through passion, obsession, fear, and adventure, and the hunger to behold what lurks within the depths of the sea.” (Catherine Chung, author of Forgotten Country)“The most original book I have read in years.” (Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and Dora: A Headcase)“A mysterious but seductive mix of history, creative non-fiction, memoir, and poetry. . . . keeps the reader riveted with the lure of the unknown and dark, sultry prose.” (Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise)“What a marvelous essay. . . . Take it all in. Revel in its majesty.” (Lee Martin, author of Such a Life)“A multi-tentacled and entirely captivating saga of profound mystery and relentless pursuit.” (Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire)“A mash-up of a meditation on the nature of myth, the magnetic distance between preservation and perseverance, and the “sympathetic cravings” that undergird pain. In Frank’s heart-thumping taxonomy, monstrous behemoths square nicely with butterflies and ice cream. Don’t ask me how: read this book!” (Mary Cappello, author of Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor who Extracted Them)“Part history, part lyric poem, part detective novel―Matthew Gavin Frank’s Preparing the Ghost is just as intriguing and hard to classify as its subject. I never thought I’d care so much about the elusive giant squid, but thanks to this book, I can’t help but see its shadow everywhere.” (Brenda Miller, author of Season of the Body and Listening Against the Stone)
About the Author Matthew Gavin Frank has previously written about everything from wine-making in a tent in Italy to the social hierarchies of a pot farm in California. He teaches creative writing and lives in Marquette, Michigan.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful. More than just a squid... By Stephanie E. Post Delightfully unexpected! Yes, it contains the biography of Moses Harvey, the first man to obtain a photograph of a giant squid, but from that jumping off point the discussion alights on topics ranging from family, death, insects, ice cream, pain, guilt, commerce, obsession, otherness, and mythology. Miraculously, no matter how bizarre the subject matter, Frank connects each element so organically that it seems perfectly natural that the giant squid, butterflies, and death by chocolate ice cream occupy the same space in thought. Preparing the Ghost is an eye-opening, mind-bending whirlwind that you don't want to miss.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Miraculously Intricate, Tentacularly Fragile By MartyA "Now for the R! Up we go! Attach! Descend! Pay out the line! Whoa! Attach! Good! Up you go! Repeat! Attach! Descend! Pay out line. Whoa, girl! Steady now! Attach! Climb! Attach! Over to the right! Pay out line! Attach! Now right and down and swing that loop and around and around! Now in to the left! Attach! Climb! Repeat! O.K.! Easy, keep those lines together! Now, then, out and down for the leg of the R! Pay out line! Whoa! Attach! Ascend! Repeat! Good girl!"That's Charlotte in E. B. White's Charlotte's Web narrating her acrobatic writing process. You can almost see the little gray spider leaping, twirling, jumping. Creating a miracle of language. Something that's intricate and fragile at once. A thing puzzling and wondrous.I've been carrying a book around in my book bag that is just as strange and beautiful as a dewy spiderweb. Matthew Gavin Frank's Preparing the Ghost, a 282-page meditation on the giant squid, Moses Harvey (the first man to photograph it), monomaniacal obsession (think Captain Ahab chasing a Moby-Dick with tentacles), death by chocolate ice cream, a fatal Chicago heat wave, a grandfather's saxophone legacy, and an Insectarium. Listed like this, these topics seem like dots of paint on a pointilist canvas. But, stepping back, and back, and back, the book becomes an impressionist landscape of our deepest passions.Frank does not lay out his story easily. Like Charlotte the spider, he plays out his lines slowly, weaving his threads together. The reader gets passages of prose poetry mixed with lists of arcane fact. The result is a blend of reality and myth that questions the very fabric of narrative:Myth as quite possible.Myth as commodity, as bought and sold, as served with a side of potato salad.Myth, in Portugal, encourages the mosquito to eat leather and turn into a flesh-eating cow.Myth, in India, inspires the tribe to receive all nec- essary sustenance, from the smells of food, partic- ularly the apple, and, when traveling, to carry the apple with them, as they will perish in the absence of its smell.Myth as On Special!, as Ladies Night Discount!Myth as embedded in our mouths.Frank's Ahab quest in the book seems simple: to find out the details of Moses Harvey's discovery and photographing of a specimen of the giant squid in Newfoundland in 1874. His prize, however, remains elusive. Hiding behind locked doors. Trapped in essays written by Moses Harvey himself, where Harvey fashions his own myths of discovery. Ultimately, Frank's subject is even more difficult to capture than the giant squid itself:And we're always preparing the next ghost, still in its larval state. This time, let's give it a tailored sheet, a wedding dress, a bow tie, a nice clean shave . . . We're preparing the next ghost, as we do with any myth, to best scare us, and define our fear. So far, BOO! is the best we've come up with.Frank's book is larva and moth, myth and fact. In his explorations, he discovers truths about himself and his family. Poppa Dave, a whale of a man who, eventually, succumbs to his own tentacular mantra: "There's always room for ice cream." The compulsion to eat, even when sated. The need to pursue impossible pursuits that slip away like the giant squid in an ocean of black ink.Take some time in these last dog days of summer. Pick up Preparing the Ghost, and get trapped in Matthew Gavin Frank's narrative web. It's obsessively fragile and miraculously intricate.I give it four out of four tentacles.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. LOVE THIS BOOK... By Matt I love this book. I had a real hard time putting it down, but had to pace myself so that I could savoir every page. Matthew pings from the past to the present seamlessly with humor, history and made up facts. Just be sure to have ice cream in your freezer before you begin.
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