Elisabeth Tova Bailey

This was simply one of the most beautiful reading experiences I've ever had. I'm reminded of discovering M. F. K. Fisher's food writing, or Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, or certain passages from Thoreau's Walden which I read for the first time as an impressionable teenager and have never forgotten. The set-up is this: the author, bed-ridden with a relapse of a (then) unidentified debilitating virus, and without even the energy to sit up or the concentration for reading, is show more presented with a woodland snail by a friend. Over the course of a year, she watches this tiny creature live its life in a large terrarium at eye level beside her bed with fascination and awe. During an extended slow recovery, she researched the subject of mollusks (malocology), as well as the surprising wealth of art and literature praising the slimy little wonders, and wrote this miraculous book. Food for the soul. show less

Survival often depends on a specific focus: a relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility. Or something more ephemeral: the way the sun passes through the hard, seemingly impenetrable glass of a window and warms the blanket, or how the wind, invisible but for its wake, is so loud one can hear it through the insulated walls of a house.

In this short, contemplative memoir, Elisabeth Tova Bailey describes her experience convalescing after being struck by an autoimmune show more disease. Bedridden, unable to stand or walk, her days were spent largely inside her head. A tiny snail, which came into her room on a potted plant, became both a companion and a source of intellectual stimulation. Fascinated by the snail's daily routine, Bailey read up on the anatomy and physiology of the snail and passed insight along to her readers on everything from the composition of the snail's shell and mucus to mating rituals.

The science is interesting enough, but the real point of this memoir is how the snail sustains Bailey by giving her a reason to face every day. She experiments with the snail's food and habitat, worries when the snail is out of sight, and marvels at the miracle of life represented by a clutch of eggs. Her observations often lead to conclusions about human society. Some of these felt contrived, others were more meaningful, but on the whole I was impressed by the inner strength required to persevere through a lengthy and debilitating illness. show less

A beautiful miniature, in several senses. Elisabeth Tova Bailey packs a great deal into a scant two hundred pages here. "The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating" takes place almost entirely in her sickroom, and the its plot kicks off when one of her caregivers picks a bunch of wild violets on which a snail has hitched a ride. From that rather unexciting premise, the author builds the experience of sharing space with a common woodland snail into a tiny, yet intellectually adventurous, literary show more universe, managing to connect it with ideas about time, illness, design, companionship, survival, evolution beauty and much, much more. This book often reminded me of Emily Dickinson's brief, incisive poems: as in Dickinson's works, in which the briefest encounter with a bee or a flower provides an opportunity for an exploration of something much larger and more profound, Bailey manages to extract an enormous amount of meaning from her companionship with a common mollusk.

It is quite obvious that the author did extensive, meticulous research on the world and nature of snails as she was writing this book. I have to admit that I thought I'd learn so much about these these funny little animals, and much of what I learned was delightfully interesting. But because the author is a literary type and not a scientist, "The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating" reminded me of Richard Holmes's "Age of Wonder", book that explores how several scientists of the romantic period sought to employ their own preferences and circumstances to influence the direction that modern science would take. The fact that the author includes a wide range of quotations from non-scientific or now-outdated sources — ranging from Japanese poets to eighteenth-century naturalists — seems to suggest that the author's journey with her guest is as much a personal journey as a scientific one. The author, bedridden for months at a time, had little more to do than to watch her snail move around its terrarium: she develops both an emotional attachment to it and and takes advantage of her alarmingly weakened condition to watch her gastropod friend extremely closely. It's the author's experience of living with a snail that is, in the end, most important here. Her body in complete collapse, her life slows to — and I hope you'll forgive me here — a snail's pace, making her and her woodland friend natural allies and companions. Her recovery and the snail's own evolutionary success also seem intimately related: "The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating" is, in a sense, a book about survival in the face of almost impossible odds. The author draws much of her emotional strength from watching how a tiny animal devises so many different ways to feed, hide, move, and, ultimately, breed. Life, as Jeff Goldblum taught us, finds a way.

"The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating" is also noteworthy because it earns a place in the canon of what we might call illness or convalescence literature. Considering that may of us live with pain or illness, there's a surprising shortage of books that deal with bodily dysfunction as a major theme, though I don't want to slight first-class works like Elizabeth McCracken's "The Giant's House." But "The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating" is very much a book about what it feels like to be profoundly ill and isolated, and while I've got my own physical issues, reading about the author's extreme fatigue — she often lacks the energy even to turn herself over in bed — certainly made me appreciate what I am able to do. The author, to her immense credit, has managed to turn the extreme limitations imposed on her illness into an opportunity for a thoughtful and well-crafted meditation on her — and her snail friend's — struggle for survival, and on much more besides. Recommended. show less

This is a lovely (and scary) little book about a woman who contracts some sort of viral or bacterial infection that decimates her health, leaving her unable to care for herself or even to sit up in bed. One day, one of her friends brings her a snail that she finds outside and the author's obsession with the life of this snail begins. She observes it and gets to know it, watches it give birth to new snails, and releases it. Her health improves slowly, but with relapses.

I found this brief show more book meditative and calming. I loved really delving in to the life of this one snail. There is lots of info about snails, some info about the woman's health journey, and lots of meditation on what we can learn from the life of a snail.

Highly recommended when you want something to set a slower pace. show less