After rejecting various “sounds” that represent religion, slavery, money, etc., the narrator finally determines the sound that she hears: During this imaginary trip, the narrator seeks to find “ the sound my country makes” (Wiggin’s italics). This propels the narrator off on a Whitmanesque flight of fancy back across the Atlantic Ocean, across Greenland, across the full breadth of “my country,” to the narrator’s home in Southern California. Her narrator describes a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci she has seen in London that depicts a tiny Mediterranean coastal town from an aerial view. In the opening pages, Wiggins signals that she wants us to think this is serious stuff. One thread follows a few days in the life of a Southern California writer named “Marianne Wiggins.” The alternating thread consists of a work of fiction she has written (a novella really) about the famous photographer of Native Americans Edward Curtis and the woman who became his wife, Clara (whose last name – Phillips – never seems to be used in the book). So naturally, I was anxious to get a first edition (with a beautiful cover photograph by Wiggins’ daughter Lara Porzak) and start reading. Sebald, “whose interleafing of photographs with prose opened my eyes to the possibility of a new way of reading.” As a result, many reviewers have been comparing her book with those by Sebald. In the Acknowledgments for her new novel The Shadow Catcher, which embeds photographs throughout the text, Marianne Wiggins credits W.G.
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