Orbital

A remarkable, beautiful book. One that blurs the lines of prose and poetry, and fiction and non-fiction. It even thumbs its nose at the assumption that a plot requires a villain or problem that must be overcome. There isn’t even a central character in this.

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If she could stay in orbit for the rest of her life all would be well. It’s only when she goes back that her mother is dead; as in musical chairs when there’s one fewer seat than there are humans who need it, but so long as the music plays the number of seats is immaterial and everyone is still in the game.

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This author is skilled at injecting a passage with tremendous metaphorical detail. She riffs on topics in a psychological way allowing the reader to see them in a new light. So many times, I reread paragraphs just to savor the writing.

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Somehow, Nell thinks, once you’ve been on a spacewalk, looking at space through a window is never the same. It’s like looking through bars at an animal you once ran with. An animal that could have devoured you yet chose instead to let you into the flank-quivering pulse of its exotic wildness.

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The premise of this novel is that there are four individuals in the space station orbiting the Earth again and again, hundreds of times in the course of their 6-month stay. While this group does their science, their exercise, their Houston-appointed daily tasks, they watch a typhoon building in the South Pacific and root on a different crew of astronauts who take off for a visit to the Moon.

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When the moon had started to fade and the sleeping-pill paralysis had begun to ease, the two women and men had opened their eyes and thought: something happens today. Where am I? What is it that happens today? This anticipation, dormant in sleep, then instantly shrill. The moon, the moon – we go to the moon, Jesus-shit, we go to the moon. Their spacesuits and rocket awaited. Nothing would be the same for them again.

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Nothing upsetting happens (beyond the typhoon hitting land) and there is no drama between astronaut or cosmonaut. It’s just one page of wonderfully-crafted prose after the next. It’s a love letter to the Earth, it's a masterpiece, and it’s a pleasure to read.  

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The simultaneous not wanting to be here and always wanting to be here, the heart scraped hollow with craving, which is not emptiness in the least, more the knowledge of how fillable he is. The sights from orbit do this; they make a billowing kite of you, given shape and loftiness by all that you aren’t.

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100% recommended.