A work of nonfiction in which James Rebanks reflects on a life-changing summer spent on a remote island off the coast of Norway, where his only [companions were two women] who practiced the ancient tradition of collecting eiderdown from birds that nest on this landscape each year.
A strange, enchanting book ... Has the loose, elliptical quality of Tove Jansson’s beloved novel The Summer Book (1972) ... This is presented as a grand realization—though it is hard for this reader to receive the epiphany with grace. Can Rebanks really have been ignorant of how loud and condescending men can be? How little he must have listened to us womenfolk, keening our sad songs of frustration, all his life ... To his credit, he writes of his season with the duck women with elegance, acuity and a rare tenderness. And he thanks his wife effusively at the end.
Are we in for a magnificent obsession and a baggy monster of a book that shouldn’t really work but somehow does? The perhaps surprising answer is: we are ... His prose is deceptively unvarnished with flashes of colour: bright birds’ eggs in a well-found barn. Our best observers of the world around us are farmers, not only Rebanks but John Lewis-Stempel—nature writers with dirt under their fingernails ... With the patience of a man making his rounds of birds’ nests, Rebanks shows that degradation of the environment happens in small ways and faraway places, too.
A book of stillness, quiet, vigilance, and the kind of patience that is measured not in hours but in lifetimes ... A tender, diaristic, inevitably elegiac account of his apprenticeship with Anna and her friend Ingrid ... Each phase in this arcane process is meticulously described ... From the precision of these descriptions an exquisite, limpid beauty gradually emerges.
