The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

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

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is a book I didn’t expect to move me as much as it did. I loved the way it slowed everything down, allowing me to experience, if only for a brief moment, time as the author did: lying still, watching a snail live its life at its own deliberate pace. In that respect in reminded me of Moby-Dick. Both books make time and experiences tangible by realaying what a character learns: Ishmael about catching whales, this book's author about her snail.
I found myself fascinated by what I learned along the way: that a snail has more than two thousand teeth on its tongue, that it can sleep through drought or winter by sealing itself off, and that its shell grows in perfect logarithmic spirals.
Reading this felt like show more being granted access to another rhythm of existence. It reminded me that attention is a form of love and that even the smallest life, observed closely, can open vast worlds of wonder. A gentle and luminous book. show less

As someone comforted by the presence of animals and wildness of every biological sort, including a great affection for slugs, and as someone with a chronic illness that leeches much of my energy, a book about a life-saving relationship with a snail 🐌 by a woman literally levelled by a pathogen 🦠 could only be of interest. The fact that my relationship with the small things just out my door has replaced earlier hikes and woodland walks almost entirely because of fatigue makes it all the easier to slip into the author's perspective and see as she sees, love as she loves.

But I don’t think you need to be ill to love this book. It is beautifully written, gently unfolding at the pace of its subject, the woodland snail that lives for a show more year beside the author’s bed. It is a meditation and an exploration, of relationship to doing, of relationship to self and illness and another creature barely aware of your existence. She explores the habits and biology of her snail friend in fascinating short chapters, while pondering the changes that not only her illness but the snail have brought to her life.

A beautiful book. show less

Clear, beautiful, easy to understand nature writing. Gave me a new appreciation of the humble gastropod. A friend brings the bedridden author a pot of violets with a snail under one leaf and the author spends one year studying her miniature companion, observing and reading all she could on her little friend. After the creature is moved to a terrarium with a habitat similar to its woodsy home, the author can watch the snail's habits and life cycle. I learned its anatomy, that it cannot hear, how it can protect itself in several ways, how it eats--with rows of file-like "teeth" called radulae, how it mates and gives birth to its offspring. It is intelligent and has a certain amount of memory. It hibernates in the winter and if conditions show more are unfavorable it can go into a type of dormancy called estivation where it attaches itself to a safe place and seals up its opening with mucus. As she begins to slowly recover, the author finally releases the original snail and the last of its offspring into the wild.

As she wrote to her doctor: "I could never have guessed what would get me through the past year--a woodland snail and its offspring. I honestly don't think I would have made it otherwise. Watching another creature go about its life ... somehow gave me, the watcher, purpose too. If life mattered to the snail and the snail mattered to me, it meant something in my life mattered, so I kept on ..." show less