Dayswork

A Novel

De: Chris Bachelder, Jennifer Habel

Narrado por: Janet Metzger

A startlingly original, incantatory novel about marriage, mortality, and making art.

In the endless days of the pandemic, a woman spends her time sorting fact from fiction in the life and work of Herman Melville. As she delves into Melville's impulsive purchase of a Massachusetts farmhouse, his fevered revision of Moby-Dick there, his intense friendship with neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his troubled and troubling marriage to Elizabeth Shaw, she becomes increasingly obsessed by what his devotion to his art reveals about cost, worth, and debt. Her preoccupation both deepens and expands, and her days' work extends outward to an orbiting cast of Melvillean questers and fanatics, as well as to biographers and writers—among them Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell—whose lives resonate with Melville's. As she pulls these distant figures close, her quarantine quest ultimately becomes a midlife reckoning with her own marriage and ambition.

Absorbing, charming, and intimate, Dayswork considers the blurry lines between life and literature, the slippage between what happens and what gets recorded, and the ways we locate ourselves in the lives of others. In wry, epigrammatic prose, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel have crafted an exquisite and daring novel.

©2023 Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel (P)2023 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

A Marvel

I listened to it twice because I was sure there were wonderful things I missed the first time through, and sure enough. This lovely, moving, and, at times, laugh-out-loud humourous meditation on marriage, time, truth, and loss is stunningly beautiful, even incantatory. Not for everyone, I imagine, but for those who (a) can appreciate the unusual and who (b) do possess a love of literature, this one may be for you. Can't say enough good things.

Quite different

I love the book Moby Dick and enjoyed learning a lot about Melville, in this strange but somewhat satisfying book. I would have liked it to delve further into the narrator's marriage, to deepen it and tie parallels, perhaps, with the authors and their work. I think it misses the opportunity to be good literature and remains a strange notebook-spilling of interesting and fascinating material with a few reminders it was researched during our time, a pandemic.

Into the whale’s belly

This is a fabulous, lively, and inventive book. The reading makes the story more personal and like long meetings over coffee. The passion is evident but gentle not the exultation of pure fandom. Jennifer Havel interweaves her marriage and her passion for Melville almost like Latin American magic realism with two men each alive to the narrator but without competition or jealousy. I had thought I knew Melville — now I really know him.

The story within the story, the unspooling details

no chapter breaks are read in the audio, or signifying pauses which would have been helpful.