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

Writer Elisabeth Tova Bailey was felled by a mysterious illness, leaving her unable even to get out of bed. When a friend finds a forest snail and sets it up in a terrarium near her bedside, she suddenly has an activity to occupy her hungry senses as she becomes familiar with her new mollusk companion and its habits and quirks over the course of what must have been a very lonely year. This gentle read was a heartwarming palate-cleanser, and as a fan of natural history I loved learning more show more about these moist, charming creatures. 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

When Bailey was struck by a mysterious illness that left her incapable of doing anything but lying in her bed, a friend of hers put a snail in a flowerpot next to her bed. Bailey had nothing to do but observe the snail: her life had slowed down so much that the activities of the snail were engaging and fascinating. As she recovered, the snail became an anchor for her, something interesting to care about and learn about. This book relays a lot of what she learned about snails, who it turns show more out are fascinating creatures. So the book is about snails, but more than that, it's about what happens when we take the time to slow down and observe the small wonders of the world around us, and how that can be healing for the soul. show less