Songs of a Humpback Whale by Jodi Picoult.
Title: Songs of a Humpback Whale.
Author: Jodi Picoult.
Genre: Fiction, romance, multiple narratives.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1992.
Summary: The novel portrays an emotionally charged marriage that changes course in one explosive moment. For years, Jane Jones has lived in the shadow of her husband, renowned San Diego oceanographer Oliver Jones. But during an escalating argument, Jane turns on him with an alarming volatility. In anger and fear, Jane leaves with their teenage daughter, Rebecca, for a cross-country odyssey charted by letters from her brother Joley, guiding them to his Massachusetts apple farm, where surprising self-discoveries await. Now Oliver, an expert at tracking humpback whales across vast oceans, will search for his wife across a continent, and find a new way to see the world, his family, and himself: through her eyes.
My rating: 8/10
♥ I bribed a stewardess with a hundred dollars to take her on the plane, and it crashed in Des Moines. The next thing I knew I was standing in a farmer's cornfield, watching the wreckage smoke. It still seemed to be moving. The wind sang through the plane's limbs, voices I couldn't place. And behind me was Rebecca, singed but intact, one of five survivors, curled in her father's arms. She has Oliver's yellow hair and freckles. Like him, she's beautiful. Oliver and I looked at each other and I knew right then why fate had made me fall in love with a man like Oliver Jones: some combination of him and of me had created a child who could charm even unyielding earth.
♥ The next day, which was bright and sunny, and every day after that, I did not go into the water. At least not past my chest, which is what I will only do now. My parents assumed it was the hurricane that had scared me, but that wasn't it at all. I didn't want to offer myself so easily to the entity that had almost taken away the only family member I loved.
♥ I inch towards the water, trying not to get wet, but my sneakers get soaked when I hold my wrists into the water. For July it is fairly cool, and it feels good where my skin is burning. If I swam far out, over my head, would I soothe the part of me that hates? The part that hits?
♥ About the circus: They took pictures of us riding that elephant, but you never knew. One where most of your face was hidden became the poster for Ringling Bros. the next year. It came in the mail when you were at school; I had been let out early from kindergarten. Mama showed me and wanted to hang it up on the wall of my bedroom. My pretty boy, she called me. I wouldn't let her hang it up. I couldn't stand seeing your hands around my waist but your face lost in the shadows. In the end she threw it out, or she said she did. She sat me down and said that I had been given my looks by God and that I'd have to get used to it. I told her, flat out, that I didn't understand. They made me ride up front because of how I look, I told her. But don't they know Jane is the beautiful one?
♥ A clamshell of color snaps open and shut several inches from my face flashes lights and the sounds of animals that are dying what has happened I ask you what has happened? sometimes it comes to me times like this when the world had turned black and white sometimes it comes and it will not leave it does not leave no matter how many times I scream or I pray.
I saw people ripped in two flesh split like broken dolls in what used to be an aisle outside the sky had shattered and the world which I had always imagined as soft cotton blue was angry and stained with pain.
Do you see I had witnessed the end of the world I saw heaven and earth trade places I knew where devils came from I was so young at three and a half with the weight of my life on my brow I knew for sure my head would burst.
At the end of it all row nine sailed inches away like a glider in the night and over its rotten edge I watched the fireworks diamond glass explosions and in spite of myself I started to cry.
There is a sound that the mute make when they are murdered I learned this years later on the evening news their vocal cords cannot vibrate so what the listener hears instead is the air quivering pushing in pushing out a wall of silence this is the voice of terror in a vacuum.
♥ I don't have to ask her why she is going home, anymore. I already know the answer. My mother thinks she has failed: not just my father, but me. She can't have Sam; it's her punishment. In the real world, the best of circumstances don't always come to be. In the real world, "forever" may only be a weekend.
♥ The apple, I tell them, came before Adam and Eve in the story of Creation. It had to have been there at least three years because that's how long it takes for a new tree to bear fruit, much less carnal knowledge.
♥ It is easier with my mother; it has to do with the way we both think. I feel I must be following in her footsteps, because every time I turn around she knows exactly where I stand. She doesn't really judge me like my friends' mothers do; she just takes me the way I am. Sometimes she really seems to like that, too. We're more like equals, I suppose. She listens to me, but not because she's my mother. She listens to me because she expects me to listen to her.
♥ This is the mark of a mother; I am able to feel what she feels, to hurt when she hurts. Sometimes I believe that in spite of the traditional birth, Rebecca and I were never disconnected.
♥ This is what I figured out: At the moment we were talking, Rebecca's plane was exploding over the cornfields of Iowa. And it is my hypothesis that the very reason she is still alive today is because you and I were fighting about her. Only souls that are at peace can go to Heaven.
..."We're back to normal, Joley," you told me, and you didn't want to discuss Oliver, or if he apologized, or the fact that he hit you in the first place. You shut me out. You acted just like you did when this kind of thing first happened, when we were kids.
I decided to let sleeping dogs lie. And this is why, Jane: because this time, you had Rebecca to consider. I know that when you were a kid you kept quiet about Daddy because of me, but this wasn't Daddy and this wasn't me. Oliver was different; even the way he hurt you was different. More importantly, Rebecca was different. I kept hoping, silently, that you would want to save her like you hadn't been able to save yourself.
I have waited years for you to see that you had to get away. I know you think that because you threw the first punch you are at fault, but I believe in histories, and Oliver was the one who started this a long, long time ago. So this is why Rebecca survived that plane crash: she was spared twelve years ago so that she could save you now.
♥ I cannot remember anything about the crash. I crawl out from another gash in the metal and sit on the edge of the wing. I close my eyes and try to imagine the fire. I try to hear screams, too, but nothing comes. Then there is a wind. It sings through the metal like a giant flute. The corn begins to whisper and when it does I know here all those people are, all the people who have died. They never left here. They are in the earth band wound around the frame of the plane. I stand and run away from the wreck. I press my hands over my ears, trying not to hear their voices, and for the second time, I outdistance Death.
♥ "They get bigger. You'd think natural selection would have found an easier way of reproduction. Childbirth is like trying to get a piano through your nostril."
♥ This is why I became a mother, isn't it? No matter how long you have to wait for her to understand where you come from, no matter how many bouts of appendicitis or stitches you have to suffer through, no matter how many times you feel you are losing her, this makes it all worth it. Over Rebecca's shoulder there are brains of monkeys and eyes of goats. There is a thick brown liver curled inside a glass cylinder. And there is a line of hearts, arranged in order of size: mouse, guinea pig, cat, sheep, Saint Bernard, cow. The human, I think, rests somewhere in the middle.
♥ Maybe this is the way it would be if you had died. Maybe I would be crying, wishing there had been one extra minute. Maybe I would spend my time and money contacting mediums, reading up on the spiritual world, in hopes of finding you so that I'd have the chance to tell you things I hadn't. Maybe I would look twice in the reflection of mirrors and store windows, hoping to see your face again. Maybe I would lie in bed like I am now, with my fists clenched so hard, trying to convince myself you are standing, flesh and blood, before me. But in all likelihood, if you were dead, I wouldn't have any chance at all. I would not get to tell you what I should have been telling you every day: that I love you.
♥ The truth is; when I'm with Sam, I don't think about Oliver. And I like that. It's the first time since we've left California that I've felt really free. On the other hand, I've never really considered what constitutes faithfulness in a marriage. I've never had to. Is it being unfaithful to Oliver is I spend time with a man who makes me forget about him?
♥ I learned a doctrine long ago from an ancient Muslim in Marrakesh: in this world, there's only one person with whom you are meant to connect. This is a God-woven thread. You cannot change it; you cannot fight it. The person is not necessarily your wife or your husband, your long-term lover. It may not even be a good friend. In many cases it is not someone with whom you spend the rest of your life. I would hazard a guess that ninety percent of all people never find the other person. But those lucky few, those very lucky few, are given the chance to grab the brass ring.
♥ As we get farther away from the Massachusetts shoreline, I begin to feel the prickling to which I am accustomed: the heady excitement of the unexpected. Few humans have seen it, the look in the eyes of a beached whale one has redirected towards the black ocean. Few humans understand that relief transcends verbal communication; that gratitude is not limited to our genus and species.
♥ What I would give to be one of them. For a little while, I could trade in my legs for a massive form, a mighty tail. I could run with them along the mountains of the ocean, calling out, understanding. I could sing in the quiet of night with absolute certainty that there would be someone waiting to hear me. I could find her; I could mate for life.
♥ I used to think, before this whole incident, that parental love was supposed to be unconditional. I believed that Rebecca would naturally be tied to me because I had been the one to bring her into the world. I didn't connect this with my own experience. When I could not love my father, I assumed there was something wrong with me. But when they carried Rebecca in here from the stretcher of the ambulance, I came to see things differently. If you want to love a parent you have to understand the incredible investment he or she has in you. If you are a parent, and you want to be loved, you have to deserve it.
♥ Most people don't marry the loves of their lives. You marry for compatibility; for friendship. And Jane, there's a lot to be said for that. It may not be a kind of relationship where you can read each other's minds, but it's comfortable, like a familiar spot on your favorite chair. That's just another kind of love, one that doesn't burn itself out, one that lasts in the real world.
♥ You don't know how lucky you are. There's one person for each of us on this whole planet with whom we can really connect. And you found yours. I know how it feels too, you see, because I have had you.
I have always been your greatest fan, Jane. I can identify you in a room by the motion of the air around you. I knew it would be like this from the night that Daddy first crashed into my room. He flung open the door and saw you already sitting on the bed, holding a pillow up around my ears so that I wouldn't have to listen to the sounds downstairs of Mama crying. He told you to get the hell out of my room. You were no more than eight, all bones, and you hurled yourself at his groin with the force of a tropical storm. Perhaps it was just the region you hit that triggered his reaction, but I don't believe that. I can still see his head striking the sharp corner of the wooden bureau, and his eyes rolling back. You looked at him, whispered, Daddy? "I didn't do that," you said, "you hear?" But even at four, I understood. "You're the only one who could have," I told you, and to this day that holds true.