The Magic Of Swimming
One of the books I really liked in 2024 was Whalefall by Daniel Kraus. A friend of mine read it because I recommended it. While reading it, she texted me.
WTH is with this book?
And, thinking this meant she loved it, I messaged, Isn’t it great?
Her response was not so glowing. Is the whale or his dead dad talking to him? I have so many questions.
And my response was, But there’s swimming!
Three blinking dots appeared on my phone, then disappeared. I was, as the kids would say, left on read.
A few days later, I met up with my friend and some other friends. The topic of my book recommendations came up.
“You can’t just say a book is great because there’s swimming in it. In Whalefall he’s dying inside a dying whale! And he’s running out of air. And he’s moving through the whale’s stomachs! That is all fucked up!” my friend argued.
“But there is bioluminescence,” I replied, clearly demonstrating that it wasn’t just the swimming that made the book good.
This response was not the zinging rebuttal I thought it would be. No was impressed.
“What about Island of the Sea Women?” she said.
“Oh yeah, a lot of swimming in that one,” I said. “The old ladies go swimming all day.”
“IT WAS ABOUT GENOCIDE AND RAPE.”
I thought about that. When she mentioned it, I did remember some pretty violent stuff in the middle of the book, but the rest of the book was about women swimming.
“Yeah, but there was also swimming,” I tried.
“And genocide…”
And while I think Island of the Sea Women by Lisa See is a perfect example how one book can have both genocide and swimming in it, her argument did get me thinking.
I love all books involving shipwrecks. Not because there tends to be a lot of swimming in those books (most people involved in eighteenth to early-twentieth century shipwrecks didn’t seem to know how to swim, not that it would have often mattered), but there is something compelling about stories on the ocean. And when I really thought about it, I was willing to sit through tons of pages involving starvation, cannibalism, insanity, and frostbite if it meant I get to read about some venture into the great blue yonder.
And, as a kid, I loved watching James Bond movies. When I got older my friends were appalled.
“Those are really racist and sexist,” they told me.
But… Thunderball: The longest underwater fight scene ever filmed up to that point (1965 release). The Lotus: Not only a sports car but also a submarine? Submarine espionage! Mediterranean archeological digs! There is so much swimming in James Bond movies. And not only is there swimming, there’s skiing, parkour, motorcycle chases, sky diving, more skiing, I mean the list goes on. But really, the underwater James Bond scenes are the best. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched that final water based battle of Thunderball.
But trying to catalog all the different underwater scenes of the James Bond canon was distracting me from the conversation at hand.
“I’m just saying…” My friend was saying. “You said it was a book about women swimming, but it turned out it was about war. Scoring books on a ‘swimming’ scale may no be totally accurate…”
And while generally people like my book recommendations, my friend, it seemed, had a point.
So, if I tell you I like a book, it’s worth asking if it involves swimming or oceans. If it does, I will admit, the rest of it doesn’t matter to me. I mean, who cares about violence, mayhem, and the erosion of world as one knows it if, in the end, you get to swim a bit?
Right?