The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett [Reading as a Writer]

  

I’ve often heard the writing advice of Show don’t Tell, but Alice LaPlante in The Making of a Story says Show and Tell and The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett shows us an example.

 

The Vanishing Half is the story of the Vignes twins who run away from home at the age of sixteen. Though identical twins, their adult lives are guided by differences. Everything’s different: their families, their communities, their racial identities.

 

How can African American twins have different racial identities you ask? That forms the plot arc of the story and the privileges that come with it or the price they need to pay guides the underlying themes.

 

The Vanishing Half is a family drama in the backdrop of racial injustice. It is mostly a story of differences with its plot covering another facet of African American living I was unaware of. For that, it was an entertaining read.

 

Alice LaPlante in her book The Making of a Story talks about the importance of narration. She defines telling as summary or narration, which includes:

• history or background information
• explanations or definitions
• specific thoughts and emotions of various characters
• analysis and commentary on what is happening in the story
• fiddling with the clock by transporting the reader backward or forward in time 

 

The advice of show don’t tell is often offered to novice writers because a good narration requires skill. LaPlante says that a good narration needs to be: 

‘…so strong and evocative, the voice so compelling, that we wouldn’t mind being told many more things…’

 

LaPlante goes ahead to state:

‘The precise mix of scene and narration that a writer chooses to use is one of the most defining elements of his or her particular “voice,” or style.’

 

The Vanishing Half stands out for this precise mix giving its narrator an interesting style. Every so often, the narrator of The Vanishing Half will fiddle with the clock, transport the reader forward in time and give a snapshot of how that thread in the story will play out sometime in the future. Here’s an example.

‘“I bet you’re not thinkin about Mallard now,” Farrah said one night as the twins skittered, laughing and tired, onto the backseat.

Desiree laughed. “Never,” she said.

She was good at pretending to be brave. She would never admit to Farrah that she was homesick and worried always about money. Soon Farrah would tire of the twins sprawling out on her floor, taking up time in her bathroom, eating her food, always being around, an unwanted guest doubled. Then what? Where would they be? Maybe they were just silly country girls in over their heads. Maybe Desiree was foolish to ever believe she could be more than that. Maybe they should just go back home.’

Here we get a peep into thoughts, Farrah’s and one of the twins’. We see their dislikes, fears and doubts, in the voice of an omniscient narrator.

 

Here’s another example.

‘They called her Tar Baby.

Midnight. Darky. Mudpie. Said, Smile, we can’t see you. Said, You so dark you blend into the chalkboard. Said, Bet you could show up naked to a funeral. Bet lightning bugs follow you in the daytime. Bet when you swim it look like oil. They made up lots of jokes, and once, well into her forties, she would recite a litany of them at a dinner party in San Francisco. Bet cockroaches call you cousin. Bet you can’t find your own shadow.’

The details in this narration/telling are so vivid the reader can see half scenes play out in this dramatised telling.

 

The following is another example of the narrator’s unique style of narration. Here Brit Bennet starts a chapter by placing us at a specific time and place in the future. In this example, she also uses this style to switch the perspective and show the reader the story from another character’s point of view.

‘If you went to the Park’s Korean Barbecue on Normandie and Eighth, during the fall of 1982, you’d probably find Jude Winston wiping down one of the high tables, staring out the foggy window. Sometimes before her shift started, she sat in a back booth reading.’

 

The book has an interesting plot, is told by an omniscient narrator, is spread across decades in a structure split by time and perspectives, and offers an enjoyable read.

 

Book Title: The Vanishing Half

Author: Brit Bennett

Publisher: Riverhead Books, 2020

 

NOTICE: 

© 2021 by Donna Abraham Tijo

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi [Reading as a Writer]

 

I recently completed a course on the Writers Village University on Urban Legends. I’d only ever looked at urban legends as falling within the genres of magical realism, fantasy or science fiction. To look at them as literary fiction, was a learning.

 

And, when I realized Before the Coffee Gets Cold is an urban legend that deals with the theme of love between lovers, a married couple, two sisters, and a mother and child I was eager to read the book. 

 

The premise of the book hooks the reader instantly, there is magic and there is realism. There is no new fantasy world this takes place in or new futuristic jargon to learn in this book. There are only the following five rules of time travel, as in the book:

 

“The first rule — the only people one may meet while back in the past are those who have visited the café.

The second rule — no matter how hard one tries while back in the past, one cannot change the present.

The third rule — in order to return to the past, you have to sit in that seat alone.

The fourth rule — while back in the past, you must stay in the seat and never move from it.

The fifth rule — there is a time limit.”

The rules are realistic and kickoff the magic in the story. 

 

Themes

The book falls away from genre fiction in the theme it highlights, Love.

• The Lovers: In this story, we see a sensitive portrayal of ambitions vs love.  
• Husband and Wife: This story is a gentle reminder of illness and the meaning of love when you no longer remember it.
• The Sisters: This story highlights the difficult relationship that siblings share. Two sisters who have their individual goals yet the desire to remain as a family.
• Mother and Child: The story of a mother during a difficult pregnancy; she desires to meet her unborn child.

 

Structure

This is a novel in stories. Each short story adds to the whole story, yet is complete in itself. 

 

Each story helps us understand the backstories and the desires of the characters important to the café. The protagonist of one story then does not leave stage. He or she plays a minor character or a catalyst in another story. 

 

By the end of the book, we know all the characters we met in the first scene at the café.

 

Plot

Although there is no overarching plot, this book has various smaller plots in each of its stories. Each short story deals with one or more conflicts that further the theme of that specific story. In the first story, we see conflicting desires. 

 

The time travel aspect which is the overarching framework of the book has its own conflicts too. For instance, in the first story the rules of the travel open up to competition — there is another traveler wanting to travel. As each such time travel conflict unravels, we understand the rules of the travel better.

 

The other stories tackle other conflicts of travel, such as: travelling to and from the future, meeting the dead through time travel and changing the past. This book helped me understand the complexities of writing urban legends — making sure you consider a 360-degree view of the legend so it can’t be punctured on realistic grounds. The reader is invariably thinking how can that happen, or what if this happens? Therefore, each rule needs to be thought out for gaps. 

 

This book not only imposes the rules to add conflict, but also for conflict resolution. This builds the story forward without sounding gimmicky.

I leave you with a line from the book summarizing the purpose of the travel.

 

“‘At the end of the day, whether one returns to the past or travels to the future, the present does not change. So it raises the question: just what is the point of that chair?’”

 

“And if the chair can change someone’s heart, it clearly has its purpose.”

 

Book Title: Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Translated to English by: Geoffrey Trousselot

First Publisher: Picador, 2019

NOTICE: 

© 2021 by Donna Abraham Tijo

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides [Reading as a Writer]

 

 

Image: google.com

 

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides is a book about loss, religion and suicides in a neighbourly town in the US. When the youngest of the five Lisbon sisters attempts suicide, the town is shocked. For the parents, it seems a call to restrict the movements of the other girls within the boundaries of religion. The girls are restricted from a social life and the family is unable to come to terms with the loss they’ve faced. Eventually, the school teacher Mr. Lisbon loses his job and with that the family is confined to the house living on all that remains. 

 

The book is a modern classic, and I decided to do the post because I was looking for a book on the first person plural POV with an omniscient perspective and this book fit the bill just right. 

 

The book looks at the story of the Lisbon sisters through the perspective of adolescent boys in the neighbourhood. As the book says, boys with whom the girls had played in the sandbox, fighting over a shovel. The following line from the book introduces the characters, the narrator and their relationship.

 

‘We had stood in line with her for smallpox vaccinations, had held polio sugar cubes under our tongues with her, had taught her to jump rope, to light snakes…’

 

The adolescent perspective pervades the voice and tone of the book. 

‘We were happy when Joe the Retard showed up. He arrived on his mother’s arm, wearing his baggy Bermuda shorts and his blue baseball cap, and as usual he was grinning with the face he shared with every other mongoloid.’

 

‘Now that he had arrived we were able to show the Libon girls all the things we knew about him, how his ears wiggled if you scratched his chin, how he could only say “Heads” when you flipped a coin, never “Tails,” because that was too complicated…’

 

Because of the first person plural POV, the book is able to give an omninscient perspective to the suicides. We hear from the adolescent narrator the incidents that lead up to the climax of the book. The narrator consolidates the anecdotes the neighbours have shared with many of him and his friends to give us the omniscient perspective to the happenings in and around the Lisbon house.

‘It was half an hour before Mrs. Patz’s sister called from Bon Secours with the preliminary report that Lux had suffered a burst appendix. We were surprised to hear the damage was not self-inflicted, though Mrs. Patz said, “It’s the stress. That poor girl’s under so much stress, her appendix just blew up. Same thing happened to my sister.”

 

The same incident from another neighbour’s perspective:

‘Brent Christopher, who had nearly cut off his right hand with a power saw that night (he was installing a new kitchen), saw Lux being wheeled into the emergency room. Though his arm was bandaged and his brain stupefied with painkiller, he remembers the interns lifting Lux onto the cot next to his. “She was breathing out of her mouth, hyperventilating, and holding her stomach. She kept saying, ‘Ouch,’ exactly the way you’d spell it.”’

Through Brent’s retelling we see what happened in the hospital premises thus giving us an omniscient viewpoint. I also especially enjoyed the tone of the retelling, each specific to the character whose perspective we’re hearing, an older Mrs. Patz’s pedantic voice and a younger Brent’s exaggerated, unreliable retelling. 

                                          

The book is also enjoyable because of the writing, the sensorial details make such beautiful imagery that will entertain readers of various age groups. For instance, the contrasting sounds in the following sentence make you sit up and listen.

‘Sound returned only once Lux had gone. Televisions erupted with canned laughter. Fathers splashed, soaking aching backs.’

 

The sense of taste and touch explored in the following are relateable to any reader.

‘Woody Clabault’s sister had the same brand, and once, after we got into his parents’ liquor cabinet, we made him put on the lipstick and kiss each one of us so that we, too, would know what it tasted like.’

 

The contrasting images in this one are beautiful.

‘His hair looked even grayer than usual, but grief hadn’t altered the highness of his voice. He had on overalls, one knee covered by sawdust. “Feel free to use the hose,” he said, and then he looked at the Good Humor truck passing by, the jingle of the bell seemed to trigger a memory, he smiled, or winced—we couldn’t tell which—and returned inside.’

 

The book is full of such imagery and metaphors and is a sensorial pleasure to read. Though, the plot is emotional and sad, the retelling of the story is enjoyable. I leave you here with one last line, that is what the story is about in the author’s writing style.

‘…since Cecilia’s suicide the Lisbons could hardly wait for night to forget themselves in sleep.’

 

Book Title: The Virgin Suicides

Author: Jeffrey Eugenides

First Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 1993

Latest Imprint: Collins Modern Classics, 2021

NOTICE: 

© 2021 by Donna Abraham Tijo

The Resisters by Gish Jen [Reading as a Writer]

    

Image: Google.com

 

The Resisters is a dystopian novel. We enter AutoAmerica. The book’s world also includes ChinRussia. Both countries play complementary roles when they need to learn technological control off each other, but are at competetive ends when it comes to baseball. 

 

AutoAmerica is built on the segregation of the Netted from the Surplus. The Netted are AngelFair and the Surplus can be assumed to be the others. The Netted work, the Surplus are unemployable. The Netted live on land and the Surplus live in a sort of waterworld.

 

The story revolves around Surpluses Gwen, who’s a gifted baseball pitcher, her mother Eleanor, who is leading the resistance against this dystopia and her father, the narrator.

 

Writing a dystopian novel, requires building the world these characters need to fight, and the author has spent a substantial part of the novel in doing so and that is my key takeaway from this book.

 

Setting:

AutoAmerica, AuntNettie, GreetingGram, Sweeting, BioNet, SkyCar fill this world. The author has invented technology with self-explanatory names, inspired from our present, to call the various gadgets and control devices in AutoAmerica which exists sometime in the future. GonadWrap, for instance, is imaginative and can dispense with the need to be explained in scientific terms, although a Science Fiction book would have.  We know from the terms used that this dystopia believes in technological control of humanness. 

 

The book is divided into four parts, nearly two parts of which lay out this setting. Once the action begins, the setting is peppered throughout.

 

Plot:

This is a plot-based book. There is a protagonist, an antagonist and a setting. The plot moves from an inciting incident to a climax, and there’s a resolution. It’s a sports story, and we know there will be a crucial deciding match in the end. This plot is set in a dystopia, thereby, raising questions of the condition of human existence, adding another layer to this story about baseball. This makes the struggle for the protagonist an ideological one, not merely a personal one, the conflict. 

 

Characters:

I enjoyed the character of the antagonist in the book. Although, the dystopian world is the primary antagonist, there is also an enabler. And it was interesting to see how Ondi changes from the beginning of the book, to the middle and then towards the end. It was also interesting to note the changes in Winny and Woody through the book.

 

This is a book where the protagonist remained more or less constant from the beginning till the end. Except for events that serve as catalysts and resultant reactions by the protagonist, we do not see Gwen changing, significantly, making the plot of the book and not the characters stand out.

 

POV

Through the book, we see the actions play out from the lens of Gwen’s father. When Gwen moves to NetU, we hear of the happenings in Gwen’s life through GreetingGrams, PigeonGrams and the bugs her father has installed in her room. Although, how her father achieved it has not been detailed, science that the sci-fi reader in me craves for. But then, on the realistic end I understand the tone of the book leans towards the social aspects of technological control of our lives, thoughts and privacy through big data.

 

I only wish the narrator were not as passive an observer, well listener, of the happenings in Gwen’s and Eleanor’s lives. I was hoping for more thoughts from the narrator since he’s a character in the book as well. Show and tell.

 

I enjoyed the book for the plot. It’s a dystopian world with a simple story in it.

 

Book Title: The Resisters

Author: Gish Jen

First Publisher: Vintage Books, 2020

Number of Pages: 301

NOTICE: 

© 2021 by Donna Abraham Tijo

 

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion [Reading as a Writer]

  

Image: Google.com

 

 

The Year of Magical Thinking is a memoir by Joan Didion. It won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography. In the book, Joan Didion takes the reader through the year following the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne (1932—2003). I picked the book because I reread William Zinsser’s Writing About Your Life recently and wanted to read a shining example to learn from, and who better than Joan Didion.

            

William Zinsser says in Writing About Your Life: 

            If you’re writing a memoir, choose one narrative that tells a coherent story and discard everything else. A memoir doesn’t try to be comprehensive; it’s only a slice of one person’s life or one family’s life. [1]

 

The Year of Magical Thinking is about grief and coming to terms with that grief. It is about the year following the sudden death of Joan Didion’s husband, and it’s about a life she lived with him. This was also the year in which her daughter Quintana Roo Dunne Michael was hospitalized with pneumonia and slipped into a coma. The book interleaves memories which include both John and Quintana and how Joan Didion deals with grief and pain.

 

In writing a memoir, William Zinsser advises:

Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory.[2]

 

Joan Didion begins her book as follows.

Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self-pity.

 

            Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer dating on the Microsoft Word file (“Notes on change.doc”) reads “May 20, 2004, 11:11 p.m.,” but that would have been a case of my opening the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made no changes to that file in May. I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words, in January 2004, a day or two or three after the fact.[3]

 

Joan Didion’s book is a collection of such incidents and memories that bring the year of 2004 alive and give us a peak into the 40 years prior, which she spent with her husband John and the years she spent with Quintana. This beginning sets the tone of the book and we can see the deep anguish and sense of loss the author feels.

 

Yet, the book is not all sad. Lightly written it brings to life the lighter moments any family would have lived, thereby helping the reader associate with the book. 

 

In one instance, she talks of her marriage as such.

            my intention for the ceremony had been to have no entrance, no “procession,” to just stand up there and do it. “Principals emerge,” I remember Nick saying helpfully: Nick got the plan, but the organist who had materialized did not, and suddenly I found myself on my father’s arm, walking up the aisle and weeping behind my dark glasses. When the ceremony was over we drove to the lodge at Pebble Beach. There were little things to eat, champagne, a terrace that opened onto the Pacific, very simple. By way of a honeymoon we spent a few nights in a bungalow at the San Ysidro Ranch in Montecito and then, bored, fled to the Beverly Hills Hotel.

            I had thought about that wedding on the day of Quintana’s wedding. 

            Her wedding was simple too. She wore a long white dress and a veil and expensive shoes but her hair was in a thick braid down her back, as it had been when she was a child.

            We sat in the choir at St. John the Divine. Her father walked her to the altar. There at the altar was Susan, her best friend in California since age three. There at the altar was her best friend in New York. There at the altar was her cousin Hannah. There was her cousin Kelley from California, reading a part of the service. There were the children of Gerry’s stepdaughter, reading another part. There were the youngest children, small girls with leis, barefoot. There were watercress sandwiches, champagne, lemonade, peach-colored napkins to match the sorbet that came with the cake, peacocks on the lawn. She kicked off the expensive shoes and unpinned the veil. “Wasn’t that just about perfect,” she said when she called that evening. Her father and I allowed that it was. She and Gerry flew to St. Barth’s. John and I flew to Honolulu.[4]

 

 In the above excerpt, what also shines through is the writing, pleasing to hear with its repetitions and cadences adding to the tone of the piece. The rhythmic sentence structure as if bringing alive the choir at Quintana’s wedding giving much sensorial pleasure to the reader.

            

The book begins with what happened, Quintana’s hospitalization followed by John’s death, then moves onto the details and denial. It follows the path through grief, refers to existing norms and theories around mourning, customs and practices.

 

Joan Didion winds through what she calls a vortex, and theorizes her way to escape one.

I saw immediately in Los Angeles that its potential for triggering this vortex effect could be controlled only by avoiding any venue I might associate with either Quintana or John.[5]

 

In these episodes of slipping into a vortex, we see the author’s vulnerabilities. She has laid bare raw emotions all through the book: when she is in denial, when she tries to sieve through any premonitions she might have missed and when she tries to understand medical terms and procedures.

 

I can’t help but quote here what I read in William Zinsser’s book on writing a memoir.

 

Eileen Simpson represented all the memoir writers who incur what they know will be considerable pain to repossess their past. For Poets in Their Youth, a memoir of her life with her first husband, John Berryman, and his famously self-destructive fellow poets, Simpson had to revisit the collapse of that marriage and of the dazzling world it was built on. To write Orphans, which recalls her upbringing without parents, she did historical research on orphanhood that became so traumatic that she had to abandon the book several times. For Reversals she had to reveal the lifelong shame, carefully hidden as an adult, of having been a dyslexic child, the class dunce, unable to read, in the days before dyslexia was understood.[6]

 

William Zinsser goes on to say:

If you use memoir to look for your own humanity and the humanity of the people who crossed your life, however much pain they caused you, readers will connect with your journey. What they won’t connect with is whining. Dispose of that anger somewhere else. Get your intention clear before you start and tell your story with integrity.[7]

 

And Joan Didion does just that when she recalls in unforgiving rawness Quintana’s fear of a Broken Man in her dreams.

If the Broken Man comes I’ll hang onto the fence and won’t let him take me.

She hung onto the fence. Her father did not.[8]

 

 

In the end, Joan Didion with the metaphor of swimming a tide talks about accepting change.

I think about swimming with him into the cave at Portuguese Bend, about the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point. The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right. We could only have done this a half dozen times at most during the two years we lived there but it is what I remember. Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.[9]

 

 

Book Title: The Year of Magical Thinking

Author: Joan Didion

First Publisher: 4th Estate, 2005

Latest Imprint: Collins Modern Classics, 2021

 

 

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[1] William Zinsser, Writing About Your Life (Da Capo Press, 2004), 111.

[2] William Zinsser, Writing About Your Life (Da Capo Press, 2004), 7.

[3] Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Collins Modern Classics, 2021), 3

[4] Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Collins Modern Classics, 2021), 70—71

[5] Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Collins Modern Classics, 2021), 113

[6] William Zinsser, Writing About Your Life (Da Capo Press, 2004), 168.

 

[7] William Zinsser, Writing About Your Life (Da Capo Press, 2004), 173.

[8] Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Collins Modern Classics, 2021), 219

[9] Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Collins Modern Classics, 2021), 227

 

 

NOTICE: 

© 2021 by Donna Abraham Tijo

Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith [Reading as a Writer]

  

    

 

Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith is a non-fiction book. It voices theories on the evolution of the nervous system of cephalopods. The book is based on research and hypotheses and, well, underwater expeditions and reminded me of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, another hugely popular non-fiction. I decided to analyze the workings of this book to understand what makes non-fiction books on science popular.

 

It’s a lightly written book on a subject that is interesting — minds other than ours. Although, based on research and what clearly comes across as years of work by the author the book summarizes concepts into anecdotes, which offer the reader much insight into fascinating lives we know little about, would like to know more about, but don’t want to be bogged down by scientific terms about. The book seems to target readers of fiction. It isn’t written as a thesis, and is more readable.

 

In the book, Peter Godfrey-Smith talks about various aspects of cephalopod evolution and behavior. He draws multiple conclusions based on his research and supports inferences with references from scientific papers published by various scientists.

 

I’ll mention here the sections the book is split into. Then I’ll talk about the anecdotes, which is the main feature of the book.

 

Structure:

The researcher has structured the book basis the various capabilities of the cephalopods: their mischiefs and crafts, consciousness and the nervous system, and their ability to make color. The book begins with the history of animals and ends with Octopolis, a site fifty feet below the surface off the east coast of Australia, where Peter Godfrey-Smith dives in to watch octopuses.

 

Anecdotes:

The book is a theory of evolution presented with anecdotes to make the reading experience light and enjoyable. Here is one on how octopuses navigate.

Octopuses are also good at navigation. Whenever I see an octopus wander from its den, I follow it if I can, and I’ve been taken on a lot of tours. If I don’t get too close as they roam and explore, the octopuses often pay me no attention at all. The octopuses are usually foraging for food, and this takes them on long rambling paths that eventually return to their dens.[1]

After stating his own experience with navigating with octopuses, Peter Godfrey-Smith goes on to reference Jennifer Mather’s study to validate his conclusion of octopuses being good navigators.

 

In another example, Peter Godfrey-Smith lists the path of evolution till the cephalopod.

I described how the early history of animals, insofar as we know it, led to a fork with one path running forward to chordates, like us, and the other leading to cephalopods, including the octopus. Let’s take stock and compare what arose down the two evolutionary lines.[2]

In the section, Peter narrows down at the eyes of the octopus and throws in the following nugget of information to intersperse the historical detail above with an interesting bit of similarity with the human eye.

Octopuses, like us, seem to have a distinction between short-term and long-term memory. They engage in play with novel objects that aren’t food and have no apparent use. They seem to have something like sleep. Cuttlefish appear to have a form of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, like the sleep in which we dream. (It’s still unclear whether there’s REM-like sleep in octopuses.)[3]

 

In the Making Colors section, Peter details the working of the cephalopod dermis. This section includes various scientific details on how cephalopods render color on their skin. This section is supported by pictures from the sea and diagrams explaining the various layers of cephalopod skin.

 

Towards the end, the book talks about the lifespan of octopuses and cuttlefish. Peter says expressing shock:

Giant cuttlefish, these large and complicated animals, have very short lives: just one or two years. The same is true of octopuses; one or two years is a common lifespan. The largest, the giant Pacific octopus, can make it to about four years at the outside.[4]

Peter explains various theories and delves into multiple hypotheses to analyze these short lifespans of the cephalopods. He talks about the natural process of wearing out, the evolutionary theory of ageing, and the evolution of the cephalopod, which caused it to lose some of its natural defenses leaving it exposed to sharp-toothed predators in its environment.

 

Ending:

Peter Godfrey-Smith ends the book with a chapter on Octopolis, the site in Australia where he began the book with researcher Matthew Lawrence. Of Octopolis, Peter says:

Octopolis is a place where several elements that are usually missing from octopus life, and that are relevant to the evolution of brains and minds, are present. There’s a lot of interaction and social navigation, and a lot of feedback between what is done and what is perceived. The octopuses face an unusually complicated environment, because an important part of that environment is other octopuses. There is constrant manipulation and reshaping of the shell bed. They throw debris around, and the shells and other materials that are thrown often hit other octopuses. This might be a mere den-cleaning behavior, but it’s a behavior that has new consequences in the crowded setting, as these projectiles do seem to affect the behavior of the octopuses who are hit. [5]

 

Peter Godfrey-Smith ends this interesting book hoping that we will appreciate and care for the oceans — our origins. It was a fun book to read and posed as an example for the use of anecdotes, an alternate style to present scientific subjects to an audience of fiction. I can understand the popularity the book has enjoyed.

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[1] Notes

Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds (Collins Modern Classics, 2021), 100.

 

[2] Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds (Collins Modern Classics, 2021), 73.

[3] Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds (Collins Modern Classics, 2021), 73.

[4] Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds (Collins Modern Classics, 2021), 159.

 

[5] Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds (Collins Modern Classics, 2021), 192.