8/21/2023 0 Comments Erebus book![]() Her courage in establishing an intimacy with the reader by revealing so much about herself endears us at once to her and to her task. One of the things about writers is that they never get over anything, that’s why they are writers, obsessed until they can find a way to do justice to tragic events that other people find it easy to compartmentalize, forget, even shred so thoroughly that the occurrence might never have happened. Bluntly, Summer draws us into this personal story, insisting that we, too, should be witnesses to all the lost possibilities in both those lives and to the author’s need to understand deaths that have haunted her for years, despite her family’s advice “to get over it.” It begins in 2013 with the words: “Planes crash / Despite statistics / we’re not / dummies,” introducing us to the unique voice that propels this book - the voice of a dear friend trying to make sense not only of this unexpected crash, but also of her close friendship with Kay Marion Barnick, who was on the flight with her mother, a flyer named Marion Ruth Barnick. An event that had no precedent in that part of the world (Air New Zealand had an impeccable record) and that became etched into the memories of Australians and New Zealanders as permanently as the assassination of John F. In this case, 257 people perished on flight TE901 while on a scenic excursion to Antarctica from Auckland the trip was sponsored by Air New Zealand and was estimated to take about 11 hours at a cost of around thousand dollars in today’s currency. But it is really a deep and rich meditation on what a plane crash means to those left behind and how they can deal with the shock and grief that inevitably follow, emotions which have become so public and thus all too familiar to everyone one of us in these last few years. On the surface the volume is about a plane crash into Mount Erebus, the “southernmost volcano on Earth and second highest in Antarctica, on Ross Island” on November 28, 1979. So I am delighted to call attention to a new book, Erebus, which is classified as Poetry/Documentary. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, which I described at the time as “a dream you wished would go on forever.” It felt exactly like that when I first read it and my feelings for that beautiful hybrid of a book engendered an interest in everything Sebald wrote thereafter and anything that supports his notion that literature and fact and photographs and statistics and maps are inextricably intertwined and can be used to make literature. I felt that way when The New York Times sent me W.G. Once in a while a book crosses my desk that defies categorization. Sibling Rivalry Press, 185 pages, $24.95. ![]() Erebus is wonderful, original book that defies categorization.Įrebus, by Jane Summer.
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