the trouble with whales

Así nacen as baleas
by Anxos Sumai
Galaxia 2007

English edition, translated by Carys Evans-Corrales:
That’s how whales are born, Small Stations Press, Sept. 2017

This short novel presents a triptych, with the outer parts set in a recognisably 21st century present and narrated by the nameless female protagonist, and the core in 1984, around her third birthday, with a detached narrator referring to her as “a Nena”, the girl.

The girl is grown up now and has an obsessive interest in the whales that serve as the leitmotiv, which she has managed to channel into a budding career as a marine biologist. Just now, however, her family has summoned her away from her field research in Baja California, Mexico, to attend to the family business built by her mother, which has created considerable wealth, with considerable strings attached.

The apparent conflict between her ambition as a scientist and the family expectations for her to take care of the business appears to be her big problem initially, but the look back into her childhood reveals a whole cupboard full of (whale-sized) skeletons and stray emotional baggage. In comparison, the present human resources problem appears eminently solvable. After all, working out who should run a thriving chain of hardware stores, that’s not the worst imaginable problem a family can have.

In the present, our marine biologist struggles in her dealings with the various females from her bed-ridden, possibly malade imaginaire, mother through to the girlfriend she left behind with the whales of the Pacific. Men tend to be mysteriously absent, such as her sea-faring father who never returned since she was born, and her brother whose room is preserved as a shrine and who only appears in the central 1984 narrative, or barely visible, like her uncle.

There is poetry in the way objects, animals and plants play important roles when the human communications fail in the claustrophobic environment of the family home where most of the novel is set. In spite of all the trauma involved, it manages, as the whale mascot with its 400-kg heart suggests, to remain very warm-hearted and optimistic.