Shining at the Bottom of the Sea

by Stephen Marche

Overview

A virtuoso performance from a literary talent who crafts a vividly drawn history of an imaginary country. In this stylistic tour de force, Stephen Marche creates the entire culture of a place called Sanjania—its national symbols, political movements, folk heroes, a group of writers dubbed "fictioneers," a national airline called Sanjair, and a rich literary history.
 
This richly detailed story takes you to an island nation whose English-speaking citizens draw upon the English, American, Australian, and Canadian literary traditions. Marche has compiled this brilliant anthology, guiding the reader from the rough-and-tumble pamphlets of 1870s Sanjania to the extraordinary longing of the writings of the Sanjanian Diaspora. These works develop into a Rashomon-like story, introducing us to illustrious Sanjanian figures such as the repentant prostitute Pigeon Blackhat and the magically talented couple Caesar and Endurance. The result is a vibrant evocation of a country—from the birth pangs of its first settlers and their hardy vernacular to its revolutionary years and all the way to the present.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781440635021
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/05/2008
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	677 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Stephen Marche has published short fiction in Descant, The New Quarterly, and Event, and his story “Garrison Creek,” originally published in The Malahat Review, was shortlisted for the 2002 O. Henry Prize. He is the author of The Hunger of the Wolf, Love and the Mess We're In, How Shakespeare Changed Everything, Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, and more. He serves as a columnist for Esquire magazine. 

Table of Contents

Foreword   Leonard King     11
Preface   Stephen Marche     15
The Pamphlets and Early Fictioneers
The Destruction of Marlyebone, the Private King     37
Pigeon Blackhat     40
Professor Saintfrancis and the Diamants of the End of the World     72
Von Lettow-Vorbeck, Africa's White Lion     82
An Interlude at the Opera     88
Upheavals and Independence
Sufferance Pow     97
Two Stories About the Abandon Tree     111
The Master's Dog     113
The Christbird     128
Ultimate Testament     133
To Be Read at the Hour of Independence     136
An Old Man Mourns for His Blind Daughter     139
Flotsam and Jetsam     144
Exile and Return
Men     155
Under the Skin     159
Histories of Aenea by Various Things     166
A Wedding in Restitution     178
The Man Friday's Review of Robinson Crusoe     198
The End of the Beach     202
Criticism
Letter to John Dos Passos     213
On the Motif of the Shipwreck as History     214
Why It Is Imperative to Pay Close Attention to Detail     219
ComparativeBiographies of Elizabeth and Ira Rushton     221
A Note on a Code in Morley Straights     227
Language in Charity Gurton's Men and Other Stories     231
Two Reviews of A Wedding in Restitution     235
An Interview with Octavia Kitteredge-Mann     239
Biographical Notes     245
Acknowledgements     253

Editorial Reviews

This literary anthology from Marche's imaginary island—complete with editor's introduction, biographical notes, criticism and more than a dozen short stories in many different styles—may be the most exciting mash-up of literary genres since David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas…The author's first novel, Raymond and Hannah, recounted a long-distance love affair, conducted mostly by e-mail, between an atheist graduate student and an assimilated Canadian Jew who travels to Jerusalem to "grow Jewishly." That work was elegant and sporadically moving, but in Shining at the Bottom of the Sea Marche has found a more fitting form for his abiding concerns: diaspora and its discontents, and the efforts of far-flung people to bridge the gaps of time and space by way of the written word.
—The New York Times

Christopher R. Beha

Rarely is a novel as refreshingly different as Shining at the Bottom of the Sea...In a triumph of postmodernism, Marche has created a novel that can—and will—be read an incalculable number of ways.

Chicago Tribune

Unlike...any other book. [A] real tour de force, ingenious and hilarious, a tour of the island of one writer's fertile mind.

San Francisco Chronicle

Untrammeled, unfettered, unprecedented, unselfconscious, and friggin' unbelievable, this book busts the novel open. (Daniel Handler, author of Adverbs)

Daniel Handler

Reads like one of Borges's three page ficciones, spun out to book length.

New York Times Book Review

The conceptual ingenuity of this volume-an anthology that purports to document the literary progression and legacy of an imaginary island-offers flashes of metafictional illumination amid what often reads like an elaborate in-joke. While promoted as the second novel by Marche (Raymond and Hannah, 2005), this reads more like a collection of short (some very short) stories by a variety of writers spanning more than a century in the history of the island of Sanjania. The forword by the esteemed (and fictional) Leonard King, identified as a frequent Nobel nominee, proclaims that "Sanjanians are perhaps the most literary people on earth," while the preface by the (nonfictional) Stephen Marche traces the literary history of a country as it moves from dialects (every cove apparently has its own patois) toward the "clean school" of writing, which attempted to transcend such regional differences, and from colonialism to independence. It begins with early "pamphlet" fiction, with such familiar readymades as a prostitute's fall and redemption, a Sherlockian sleuth and an African adventure. The wordplay dialect in these stories falls somewhere between Joyce and Jabberwocky. As the preface and a concluding section of criticism suggest, as Sanjania struggled to shake off Britain's colonial yoke and assert its independence, some of its fiction conveyed its message through code, as stories of oppression and resistance took the form of metaphors, and writers moved from the more colorful idiosyncrasies of cove language toward a more standard English. The 20th century finds some of the country's leading literary lights in self-imposed exile, with the more modern stories from the Sanjanian diaspora capableof standing on their own outside this fictional construct. Yet "A Wedding in Restitution," one of the last and longest stories, suggests an earlier island innocence in its fable-like tone. The biographical notes on the fictional writers provide yet another layer of context, further distancing the author from his creation (though there's a note on Marche as well). If your bookshelf only has room for one anthology of Sanjanian fiction, this is it.

Kirkus Reviews