Book Review: Can all natural history be saved in a sinking New York City?

Eilen Kafour’s lyrical yet charming debut novel, as its title suggests, centers on life after the Flood, in which a young woman known as Nonnie canoes across a submerged New York City. , up the Hudson River to the Berkshire Highlands. As befits the genre of post-apocalyptic American fiction, Kafor presents a grand vision of a world strangely changed. Nonnie sits on the bow of the canoe, watching the water for “snags” like the tops of street lamps and the trees in Central Park, and stirring it. The various settlements and wildlife encounters along the route add suspense.

Like Emily St. John Mandel’s Cultural Moments station elevenThe Seed of Winter’s Way Out by Alison Stein, and The Child in the Womb by Louise Erdrich. Future Home of the Living Godsymbols of hope are carried from a fallen civilization in this book and take root in what comes next. This time, the symbol is natural history itself, as former scientists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York wrote in their diaries. At the beginning of the novel, scientists and their families form a makeshift group on the roof of a museum in a city that has not yet been completely flooded. To protect physical exhibits that may not survive, they take pains to preserve the knowledge those exhibits represent in their logbooks, which are transported in flocks of nonnies during high waters. .

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Like many scientists and survivors, Kafoor enjoys the museum and its treasures. Her vision of an institution stripped away by its desperate caretakers is unsettling and unsettling. Novels are often dark, full of sadness and uncertainty, and concern real things such as infectious diseases and the discovery of antibiotics. Cuffor favors a lively, ruminative approach, with short, reflective chapters about what life is like after the end. (Violence, including threats of sexual assault, mostly occurs off-page.) But that doesn’t imply that; all the water in the world It ignores the beauty and wonder of Nonny’s adventures. The scene from the old exhibit, in which her family leaves the museum in an indigenous canoe, is tense, funny, and resonant.