THE SEAL WIFE

Harrison's strange and haunting novel, based in remote turn-of-the century Alaska, places the greatest challenges on a narrator. It offers only the slenderest of story lines, the obsessive love of a young meteorologist named Bigelow for an Aleut woman who will not speak to him, and, other than their lovemaking, hardly recognizes his presence at all. At the same time that he pursues this passion, Bigelow is preoccupied by a parallel consuming desire that tests him just as severely--to build a weather kite that will fly higher than any kite before. Fred Stella's reading, precise, earnest, and wise, makes us attend carefully to Harrison's lyrical writing and to her exploration of a man's fevered psyche. M.O. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine [Published: OCT/ NOV 02]