Balene

Le balene mi hanno sempre affascinato. Allora prendiamoci un break da guerra e brutte notizie e seguiamo questo curioso viaggio di una madre e un figlio per le vie delle balene. Il libro di cui si parla è Soundings: Journeys in the Company of Whales (Virago), di Doreen Cunningham.

Cunningham adroitly sidesteps much of the male-dominated narratives about whales and whaling, and clearly takes inspiration more from Inuit mythology than from Herman Melville. She and her son make for an unconventionally heroic pair, travelling by
plane, train, bus and boat, and incurring disapproving looks and small humiliations in their quest to spot grey whales. Initially it seems that nothing fits, including lifejackets, and at times the landscape seems irredeemably hostile (even cacti appear to give them the finger). Whale mothers and their calves, meanwhile, surface and dive alongside the pair, and Cunningham movingly describes their bonds of cooperation, which find pointed echoes and contrasts in her travelling companions and personal relationships. Her sensuous descriptions of grey whales and humpbacks provide some of the book’s richest passages; she looks at the whales and then looks at her son, looking at whales, which look back. Edward Posnett, The Guardian