Books like Elephant Winter

This is not a real review, perhaps, but my way to try and distil the amalgam of thoughts that assailed me after reading this novel, ... twenty years ago. I've never forgotten the feeling nor the image of that little elephant on the savannah. I was moved by the beauty and simplicity of the prose: there is an elegance here that is larger than life, a great rumbling resonance echoes in the mind, much as elephants displace one's sense of reality by their very size. Everything is connected in such an elemental way: the mother dying of cancer; the captivity of this "all too solid flesh" which inhibits the freedom of spirit in both human and elephant; the death and birth cycle(s) of both human and elephant; the transmigration of thoughts between human and elephant.But ... the resonance that so engaged me was as elusive as it was palpable: a paradox; a delightful tangential disturbance of the soul. We are connected in ways which are beyond all power of description. It is for this very reason, I suspect, that Echlin gives the elephants themselves a voice. In great detail, she reproduces their language, their rhythms; records both sound and meaning on the printed page, of the echoes she has heard ... elephant infra-sound she terms it.There is also ironic pleasure in holding Echlin's book in one's hands: the book is half-size, a tiny gift in the hand. The dust jacket is subtle: on a khaki background (a wonderful connection to the savannahs in which elephants roam) a picture of an elephant is super-imposed. The elephant is moving toward the reader in a misty haze of blues and greys: is the elephant charging? ... or merely walking toward the reader? Is this a confrontation, or an offering?From the first words, Batter My Heart, the title of the first chapter, one encounters the meaning of the novel. It will be both a confrontation and an offering. Echlin intends to open your heart. She weaves elusive magic intricately, subtly. There isn't even a hint of seduction, until, to take a breath, the reader looks up and realizes that 200 pages have drifted through one's consciousness; that one has been communing silently, all the hours of a long, sunny afternoon. One closes the book and re-enters a void, which for a few short hours, had been filled, wholly, completely with a sense of being connected to all things. Wordsworth comes to mind, in a flash of sunlight: ... And I have feltA presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.A motion and a spirit that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thoughtAnd rolls through all things ... (Tintern Abbey, 1798)Two hundred years later, Echlin picks up Wordsworth's song and refreshes our memory about the inter-connected beauty of all things. (As the noises have gotten louder in the intervening two centuries, we have drowned out the wisdom of our elemental selves.) I hope I never forget how I feel in this moment, and at the same time, hope that the ache in my heart will stop soon.From the novel:When I was in Africa, I went out with a ranger in a Land-Rover to look at the bones of an elephant killed by poachers two days earlier. Lions and vultures had already stripped the skeleton clean and as we approached we saw a small group of elephants scatter them, then spread dust over them with their trunks. After several hours, the group moved off leaving a small elephant about four or five years old, behind. The driver, no longer afraid, reached to his keys to turn on his engine, but I begged him to stay a little longer. And so we sat and watched. The small elephant mimicked her elders, smelling the bones, pushing them, trying to spread dust over them. The driver said softly, "Go back little one, there are lions."It is eerie to see a small animal alone in the open in Africa. There are so many threats. I kept checking the bushes and the trees for hyenas and lions. I asked the ranger why the usually protective herd would let the little one stay alone, and he said, "They have to eat and drink. They don't have any choice.""Why?""That little one won't go. She did this yesterday too. They came back for her at night. Perhaps tonight she'll give it up.""But why does she keep staying?""The bones are her mother's.""I wonder if I'll want to stay with my mother's bones when she's dead," I said."The ranger, a young man who had spent his life in the bush silently watching, answered drily, "I wonder, would you risk your life to do it."