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New York Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Mysterious Box Arrives. Inside? The Dead Body of a Child Saint.
LITTLE WORLD, by Josephine Rowe 'Little World' is a swoony, atmospheric, blink-and-you'll-miss-it short novel told through three interwoven stories. The Australian writer Josephine Rowe binds her disparate characters through a shared psychic connection to a very physical entity: the body of a child, incorruptible in death — 'a maybe-saint, a novitiate, a fledgling?' — who becomes a holy figure to those who encounter her. Though the novel is only 100 pages long, there is so much strange potential in its conceit that from the start it feels primed to deliver a massive world instead of a little one. The first section follows an aging man named Orrin across the well-worn grooves of his solitary life in rural Western Australia in the years after World War II. He inherits an antique canoe-timber box containing the corpse of the supposed child saint, from Kaspar, a Norwegian ex-lover whom he worked for in Micronesia 25 years earlier. The box is accompanied by an official letter listing the body's 'saintly characteristics': its 'heady, floral aroma, believed to be the odor of sanctity,' and 'the weeping of pink-tinged tears.' Orrin is not a believer, but he keeps the girl's miraculous body in his kitchen ('Catholic or not. You don't turn away a saint'), passing the time quietly between 'the brief colorless edges of the day,' worrying termites might get inside the wooden box and reflecting upon Kaspar, Orrin's parents and sister. Meanwhile, the saint's own vague memories stir, of her hard, short life, where sweetness was only ever found in the in-between moments, in playing with dogs, in 'the tug of her sister's fingers combing her hair.' These early passages shine with the promise of a delicately entwined story to come. But as soon as it finds its tempo, this first section ends, and the novel picks up with Mathilde, a listless 36-year-old insomniac who discovers Orrin's long-abandoned cottage — and inside it the body of the child saint — on a haphazard road trip to the west coast of Australia in the 1970s. Though she's accompanied on the trip by two well-heeled young lesbians, Mathilde's back story is as lonely as Orrin's and the saint's, lit only with tiny, radiant moments of real joy. Revisiting her past over and over into the night, she is haunted by the son she gave up for adoption as a teenager, as well as by her brief, bright romance with Sally, another unwed mother at the Catholic home where she spent her pregnancy. 'One grief rousts another,' Rowe writes, 'restless siblings turning over in a too-small bed.' After an abrupt, somewhat pat third section, which feels like an epilogue, or an extended universe for the characters we've come to know, the whole novel is done. If the end feels disappointing — and it does — it's because it doesn't quite live up to the vast possibilities Rowe has conjured through her affecting, sensual, otherworldly prose. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Washington Post
01-06-2025
- Climate
- Washington Post
Saturday ended spring, in a way, and was cool and wet
On the last day of May, on the brink and verge of summer, Saturday in the District was breezy and bright, stormy and dark, rainy and dry, and stocked with almost every atmospheric feature that distinguishes not only one day from the next, but one hour of a day from those that come before and after. But for all the diverse meteorological manifestations on display, it probably could not be said that Saturday was hot. If a long hot summer is in the offing, Saturday gave few clues. True, the day was long, as the days of summer are known to be, and the sun did not set until almost 8:30 p.m., but the day was not sultry or steamy or scorching or thermally unpleasant in any way. Saturday was the day before the start of June, which is the first month of meteorological summer. On Saturday, a day which is a kind of seasonal sentinel, a day which holds such symbolic significance, few signs appeared that summer was so close. On Saturday it was only 19 days until the solstice, the start of astronomical summer. Yet the high temperature in the District was 73 degrees, the air seemed light and fresh, and the day seemed far too pleasant even to suggest some of the atmospheric excesses associated with a Washington summer. The 73 degree high was seven degrees below the average high in Washington for the last day of May. When the sun shone, which was far from always, it was authorized by the calendar and astronomy to beam with peak illuminating power, with a radiance reserved for the few weeks on either side of the solstice, when it has reached its highest position above the horizon. But in the early hours of the afternoon, sunshine alternated with thunderstorms. Dark clouds gathered and rain pelted down. Then the rain stopped, and newly fallen droplets of water clung to or were cradled by green leaves, and in the resurgent sunshine, they glittered like gems. If the weather on Saturday changed in the District from hour to hour and even minute to minute, it nevertheless appeared that it might not have varied as much over the miles from one part of the region to another. At Reagan National Airport, where Washington's official readings are made, the strongest wind gust on Saturday was 49 mph. At Dulles International Airport, in Virginia, two dozen miles to the northwest, the peak gust was 46, showing a near uniformity of breeziness. Rainfall figures appeared closely matched as well. Dulles recorded a little more than a quarter of an inch, while National reported a little less. At Dulles, the high was 71 degrees, two less than the high recorded for D.C. It helped support characterizations of Saturday as a day of significant variation over time, substantial universality over distance.
