If wanderlust has got you itching for a change of literary scenery, consider Sabina Murray’s new collection, “Tales of the New World.” These wayfaring stories hitch a ride with people who launch out past the boundaries of their maps. Some of them are legendary, others are relatively unknown, but in one way or another, they all ask, “Why cannot man just travel?”
The collection opens with a fantastic feminist novella called “Fish.” It’s the sort of wry, atmospheric story that fans of this writer’s writer have come to expect since Murray won the PEN/Faulkner Award for her first collection, “The Caprices” (2002), about the Pacific campaign in World War II. Once again, the Filipina American author is looking back into history for inspiration. The heroine of “Fish” is Mary Kingsley, the intrepid explorer who wrote about Africa for eager English readers. We meet her around 1890, caring for her sickly mother in a house whose windows have been bricked over to keep out the light. “London,” Murray writes, “runs on an army of spinsters administering to everyone’s needs: silent, solicitous, free of charge, and bitter.” When her parents both finally die, poor Mary is free, but she knows “a life spent alone with books and dark rooms and imagination has made her quite singular.”
(Black Cat) - “Tales of the New World: Stories” by Sabina Murray.
Murray’s portrait of this awkward, droll woman is deeply endearing; you can’t help rooting for her. Refusing to hang around where she’ll quickly be enlisted to care for more sick relatives (there seems to be an infinite supply), Mary decides to take a trip to the Canary Islands. “She will because she has nothing to lose,” Murray writes. “For one brief second she’s euphoric — literally dizzied — by this: her intoxicating life of value to no one. Worthless translates quite narrowly as freedom.” And that freedom awakens her ambition, “an embarrassing thing for any woman, but particularly for her.”
What follows is the story of an extraordinary autodidact traveling, often on foot, through Africa as a trader, nurse or biologist — any occupation that might allow her to venture into places few other Europeans had ever seen. “Why shouldn’t she be foolish?” she thinks. “She’s spent her time thus far being useful to others. Why not expire in the jungle?” These adventures — all true — teeter between comic and terrifying. She faces down ferocious animals, hostile natives and even toxic disapproval from people back home who make her first book, “Travels in West Africa” (1897), a bestseller. When an incredulous gentleman laments that she keeps company with cannibals, Mary shoots back, “Girl’s got to have some fun.”
But of course, it’s no fun to be condescended to, to be “trotted out, a novelty, for entertainment.” Mary feels self-conscious about rumors of her unfeminine behavior, her inelegant manners, her “eccentric beliefs” in the equality of Africans. And this is where the story sports the sort of magical touch Aimee Bender might drop in: One of the novella’s most surprising and effective elements is the flock of fairies that buzz around Mary’s room, delivering a litany of nagging, mocking criticisms. It’s a brilliantly surreal representation of a strong woman’s internalized anxieties.
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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