This is my symphony

Spill Simmer Falter Wither (Edelweiss)
Sara Baume
Houghton Mifflin
release date: March  8, 2016

I realise that you were not born with a predetermined capacity for wonder, as I’d believed. I realise that you fed it up yourself from tiny pieces of the world. I realise it’s up to me to follow your example and nurture my own wonder, morsel by morsel by morsel.

There are not many books that leave me sobbing great heaves, my heart in my throat. Not many books that touch some deep darkness that not even I know exists. There are not many books that speak of the sweet tenderness that connects us to all creatures great and small.

But Irish writer Sara Baume’s first novel Spill into Falter Wither was just such a book.

Once upon a time there was Robin and Ruby and Ray. But Ray doesn’t remember that time and since then has suffered neglect and despair. Ray never attended school. He never played with other children. His world was the little salmon-colored house in the village and the view he had from upstairs was his only window on the larger world. His father came and went (but mostly went), and Ray grew into some sort of understanding of his difference.

Ray had his books. The wide sweep of the ocean outside of Tawny Bay. Weekly visits to the post-office and grocery. Sometimes church.

Long years passed. Fifty-seven, to be exact. And a year after his father died, Ray brings home One Eye, a terrier mix from a sad excuse of an animal shelter. Like Ray, One Eye is damaged goods. Like Ray, One Eye is skittish, afraid even of tinfoil crinkling. Ray tries to win him over with sardines and chocolate buttons; he cobbles together a dog bed from a child’s easy chair so they can watch out the window together.

And so One Eye and Ray set out to rescue each other.   But can they? Is it possible to rescue another from sorrow and misery that has cut to their very center, leaving their spirit nicked and torn? Is it possible to make whole a heart that never had a chance to grow in the first place?

As if the story itself isn’t enough, Baume’s writing is evocative, her voice resonant. At times the pages read like poetry and it is a powerful and wonderful gift to come across a novel that allowed me to “nurture my own wonder, morsel by morsel by morsel.”