Shining at the Bottom of the Sea

by Stephen Marche

book data

52 ratings, 3.63 average rating, 19 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		25%
4		34%
3		19%
2		21%
1		0%

edit

published

2007 by Riverhead Hardcover

binding

Hardcover, 256 pages

isbn

1594489416 (isbn13: 9781594489419)

description

A virtuoso performance from an emerging new literary talent who crafts a vividly drawn history of an imaginary country.

In this stylistic tour de for...more

find at: Amazon | Half.com | Barnes & Noble | Abebooks | compare prices…

new topic
discuss this book

There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Be the first to start one »

friend reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

lists with this book

This book is currently not featured on any Listopia lists. Add this book to your favorite list »

other reviews (showing 1-20 of 104)

sort: default (?) | date
filters: all | text-only

11/15/07

Jason Pettus rated it:

Read in November, 2007

(My full review of this book is much longer than the excerpt posted below; find it at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

There is of course a long and proud tradition here in the West of elaborate histories concerning made-up places; take JRR Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" series, as perhaps the most famous example of all. But now imagine that the made-up land in question is designed deliberately to mix with our real world, geography and his...more (My full review of this book is much longer than the excerpt posted below; find it at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

There is of course a long and proud tradition here in the West of elaborate histories concerning made-up places; take JRR Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" series, as perhaps the most famous example of all. But now imagine that the made-up land in question is designed deliberately to mix with our real world, geography and history -- for example, that your particular made-up land is supposed to be a part of the British Commonwealth, just a part that doesn't actually exist in the real world, originally part of the British Empire in the same way that Bermuda, Jamaica and New Zealand became members of the Empire and then Commonwealth too. Imagine an island in the middle of the North Atlantic, one that became crucial in the 1600s for British sailors making their way from the Continent to America, and has been part of British history ever since; a place where the citizens themselves are the same bronze natives like you find in the British Caribbean, but who have cultivated a culture at their island almost exactly like Ireland's craggy fishing coast, complete with Victorian lighthouses and big burly wool sweaters.

Picture that, ladies and gentlemen, and you're starting to correctly picture the latest mindblowing novel by the multi-talented writer Stephen Marche, the made-up literary anthology Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, which purportedly is both a folk history and a survey of arts concerning the exact kind of fictional North Atlantic British colony and later independent nation just mentioned. Known as "Sanjan Island" during its colonial period and "Sanjania" after independence, it is a place that shares many traits of other former UK colonies but that combines these traits in odd and unique ways; a remote island known mostly as a trading and military port for far-flung sailors, but more like Iceland or Greenland in makeup than the British ports of the South Seas, although with still as glorious and complex a history concerning their British overlords as any equatorial paradise.

In fact, turns out that there's a unique detail to Sanjania's history as well, one that makes it stand out among all of the Commonwealth nations...(less)

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

add a comment

12/17/08

Spiros rated it:

bookshelves: remainders

Read in December, 2008

recommends it for: those who are embarrassed to be seen with fantasy novels

Compendia always tend to be hit-or-miss; compendia of literarture from imaginary cultures probably will inevitably miss more than they hit. Some of the earlier pieces in this anthology of Sanjanian literature are engaging; as the Sanjan culture evolves into Sanjania, the stories and criticism become more pallid and didactic, which may well have been the effect Marche was aiming for, but doesn't really do the reader any favors.
Another problem, over and above the quality of the writing, is t...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

12/31/08

Paula rated it:

bookshelves: best-reads-of-2008, novels

Read in February, 2008

Marche has concocted a fictive anthology of the imagined national literature of a pretend island in the North Atlantic, Sanjania, a purported former British colony: a fiction from first to last page, from Foreward and Preface to Biographical Notes and Acknowledgements. At first I was skeptical of the conceit but Marche pulls it off, I think with grace, wit and an impressive ability to shift style and voice to create not just distinctive characters but distinctive authors. This is a book, howeve...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

04/05/08

Marjorie rated it:

Read in May, 2008

recommends it for: lit geeks and the adventurous

Following on Possession, another work of alternate literary history, this time an anthology of literature from an imaginary North Atlantic island country called Sanjania (Sanjan Island before that, Saint John Island sometime when the first Europeans stumbled upon it). Because so few people seem to have taken much interest in this book, I'm going to assume it was written for me: it's at once deeply bookwormish and deeply concerned with the role of place in literature, which is one of my primary...more Following on Possession, another work of alternate literary history, this time an anthology of literature from an imaginary North Atlantic island country called Sanjania (Sanjan Island before that, Saint John Island sometime when the first Europeans stumbled upon it). Because so few people seem to have taken much interest in this book, I'm going to assume it was written for me: it's at once deeply bookwormish and deeply concerned with the role of place in literature, which is one of my primary preoccupations. But I'd love it if someone else would read it! There's so much going on here: an affectionate sendup of the development of literary writing over the last 150 years (complete with an anecdote about having dinner with Derrida), a multi-voiced meditation on home and exile, the ghost of a nation's history filled in here and there by clues in the stories, the preface, the pseudo-biographical notes on the authors, and the section of criticism at the end. I read this book from beginning to end, but I also did a lot of flipping back and forth to make better sense of the story behind the stories.

The fictions themselves are mostly very short and they vary a lot. Some of them don't hold much interest (for me, anyway) beyond the way they fit into the larger narrative--okay, this is your Sherlock Holmes ripoff, got it--but others are quite lovely. If Marche has a point to make with this project, it's not obvious; he undercuts his own authorship every which way, giving himself both good and bad reviews, filling the book with short fiction and then saying that the country's main literary culture is really found in theater. Whoever reviewed this book for Publishers Weekly thought that the Sanjanian literature went drastically down in quality as the twentieth century proceeded, and that this might be Marche's comment on twentieth-century literary trends. But two of those late pieces, "Histories of Aenea by Various Things" and "A Wedding in Restitution," were my personal favorites--and "To Be Read at the Hour of Independence" is a breathtaking commemoration/anticipation of a historical event that, of course, never happened.

Overall I can't resist giving this book five stars, even if it has limited appeal and even if I don't know what the heck the author was trying to do, just because I don't know when I've seen a world so convincingly invented in less than 300 pages. (Two five-star reviews of literary novels in a row: I think this is a first since I joined this website.)(less)

Like this review? yes

add a comment

03/21/08

Jennifer rated it:

Read in March, 2008

recommended to Jennifer by: 2008 Tournament of Books

Shining at the Bottom of the Sea definitely gets points for originality. Marche actually invents an island called Sanjania, and creates not only a history , but a literary history as well. Basically, this book is a collection of short stories that reflect Sanjania's history. The stories start out with unique dialect that portrays the early 1900's, and slowly gets "cleaner" over the years, especially after the "Clean Movement" approach to writing that united the dialects of di...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

08/17/07

Moses rated it:

bookshelves: readandenjoyed

Read in August, 2007

recommends it for: Megan, in particular

Upon my second reading, Shining at the Bottom of the Sea proved to be just as enchanting as it was at first. This is a staggeringly inventive collection of fictional short stories, pretending to be a scholarly collection of the best short stories from Sanjania, a small independent island in the North Atlantic. If I knew a little less about the world, reading this book would compel me to buy a ticket to Sanjania on the next plane. Knowing as I do that this is a work of fiction is strangely disapp...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

07/16/08

jcg rated it:

I couldn't finish this book. I tried reading the Foreword, but found it wordy and convoluted. So I skipped that and went to the Preface, which I found wordy and convoluted and full of pointless detail - it was just a recitation of invented facts, dry as dust, there was nothing to make me care about the place or the people. So I tried reading a couple of the stories which I found wordy and convoluted. No doubt that the book has some inventive language, but couldn't some of that inventiveness be p...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

05/14/09

Nathan marked it as to-read (review of isbn 1594483159)

bookshelves: 000---, fiction, fictional-anthology, library, to-read

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB12400142...

Like this review? yes

add a comment

09/03/07

Eoin rated it:

recommends it for: elaborate liars

Unrepeatably perfect. I'm a sucker for elaborate lies, but Marche succeeds on the order of Carey's Kelly Gang without even the folklore backgrounding. The man wrote a beautiful, wideranging anthology of an imaginary culture, complete with criticism. Tlon? Funeary Violin? The only way this could have been done better, is if the book didn't weren't listed as "Experimental Fiction" in the Library of Congress. Astonishing. I am astonished.

Like this review? yes

1 comment

06/15/09

Jessica rated it:

Read in June, 2009

I really wanted to like it.

Like this review? yes

add a comment

03/10/08

Rick Angell rated it:

Read in February, 2008

Fabulously creative. The author, via an "anthology" of the literary history of the fiction of the fictional authors of the fictional country he creates, gives you a window into a North Atlantic island culture he imagines in beautiful detail. Plus, each of the stories is written in a unique, interesting voice. The comparison to David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is obvious and neither work suffers by its association with the other.

Like this review? yes

add a comment

05/11/09

Melissa is currently reading it

bookshelves: currently-reading

Due to a frustrating printing error found in all copies at both Brooklyn and New York Public Libraries, I'm going to be 70 pages away from the end of this one until I can track a copy down in a bookstore somewhere that will let me hole up and finish it in an afternoon.

Like this review? yes

add a comment

08/21/07

Jenn rated it:

Read in August, 2007

The author has invented and peopled a mythical but absolutely plausible island, Sanjania, and this book "collects" pamphlets and writings from various Sanjanian authors. The individual pieces are mostly very sweet, and I was fascinated by the invented patois and slang. It's a really big concept, and executed beautifully.

Like this review? yes

add a comment

04/01/08

Colin rated it:

Read in June, 2008

Wasn't so into it -- the first few stories grabbed my but they seemed to grow progressively more implausible as individual pieces of lit as they went on. . .

nifty idea, though

Like this review? yes

add a comment

11/12/07

Heather rated it:

Read in November, 2007

Didn't finish this. Interesting idea (an anthology of stories purporting to be by different authors from an invented country) but execution was pretentious and often quite boring.

Like this review? yes

add a comment