Servants of the Map FROM THE PUBLISHER
Ranging across two centuries, and from the western Himalaya to an Adirondack village, these wonderfully imagined stories and novellas travel the territories of yearning and awakening, of loss and unexpected discovery. A mapper of the highest mountain peaks realizes his true obsession. A young woman afire with scientific curiosity must come to terms with romantic fantasy. Brothers and sisters, torn apart at an early age, are beset by dreams of reunion. Throughout, Andrea Barrett's most characteristic theme -- the happenings in that borderland between science and desire -- unfolds in the diverse lives of unforgettable human beings. Although each richly layered tale stands alone, readers who are already fans of Barrett will discover subtle links to characters in her earlier works. "Servants of the Map," the title story, was selected for Best American Short Stories (2001) and Prize Stories: The O'Henry Awards (2001).
FROM THE CRITICS
Barry Unsworth - New York Times
The characters in Servants of the Map, Andrea Barrett's book of interconnected stories, have a rich texture, narrative interest and are imbued with the scientific spirit.
Book Magazine - Don McLeese
Barrett's story collection cuts across continents and centuries, exploring the ways scientific inquiry, faith and the heart's desires converge. The book, Barrett's richest to date, serves as a companion to 1996's National Book Award-winning Ship Fever, with the closing novella, "The Cure," providing connections with 1998's The Voyage of the Narwhal. Yet readers need no prior knowledge of the author's body of work to appreciate this book. The author shows characters grappling with the limits of their self-knowledge, coming to terms with the ways in which they're linked yet remain alone at a time when Charles Darwin was profoundly changing humanity's conception of the universe and our place in it. "I can hardly understand where I am myself; how shall I explain it to you?" writes a nineteenth-century surveyor to his wife in the title story, knowing that it might take months for his letter to arrive home across the ocean. By that time, he will be transformed by his experience, no longer the same man who wrote the letter. "The world is other than we thought," he realizes, an epigram that could stand for the collection as a whole.
Publishers Weekly
Travelers, naturalists, nurses, botanists, surveyors a multitude of seekers and healers populate this luminous new collection of two novellas and four stories by National Book Award-winner Barrett (Ship Fever; The Voyage of the Narwhal). Tracking her wandering protagonists from the banks of the Schuylkill in Pennsylvania in 1810 to the Himalayas in the 1860s and on to New York's Finger Lakes in the late 20th century, Barrett elegantly portrays the transitory nature of life and love. Selected for Best American Short Stories (2001) and The O. Henry Awards (2001), the title novella follows young British surveyor Max Vigne on a long, arduous mapping expedition as he writes letters home to a cherished wife that become a chronicle of the distance that is growing between them. Partings and reunions of loved ones recur in these stories. In "Theories of Rain," a young orphan studying the mysteries of precipitation and passion yearns for the brother she was separated from as a child; in the novella "The Cure," a nurse at a village in the Adirondacks finds the brother she lost years ago and yet struggles to communicate with him. In the contemporary "The Forest," Barrett creates a lovely comedy of the inevitable gap of perspectives between an illustrious Polish scientist who has grown nostalgic with age and a young woman who yearns to break free of the past. The mark of Barrett's artistry is her ability to illuminate loneliness and isolation, but also to capture the improbably forged bonds between her disparate characters. Familiar figures appear and reappear in more than one story, and many readers will be able to make connections between these tales and Barrett's earlier works. Yet each is rich and independent and beautiful and should draw Barrett many new admirers. Author tour. (Feb. 1) Forecast: An elegant sepia-toned jacket and Barrett's rapidly growing reputation as one of the finest writers at work today will assure a substantial audience for this radiant collection. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
All six of the intricate and closely related tales in Barrett's latest collection depict intriguing moments of tension between scientific endeavor and human nature, dating from the early 19th century to the present. In the mesmerizing title story (selected for both Best American Short Stories 2001 and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards 2001), young Max Vigne seeks the adventure of a lifetime as part of an 1863 expedition to map the Himalayas but instead finds personal anguish and unexpected self-knowledge. "The Cure," set in 1905, finds Max's daughter Elizabeth reflecting on the strange paths that led her to becoming a healer in the Adirondack wilderness. "The Mysteries of Ubiquitin" portrays an up-and-coming female biochemist distracted by a chance to live out her childhood dream of romance. This book more than matches Barrett's earlier story collection, Ship Fever, which won the National Book Award. Highly recommended for most fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/01; Barrett was just awarded a MacArthur Foundation Award. Ed.] Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
The scientific themes that made Barrett's novel The Voyage of the Narwhal (1998) and her NBA-winning collection Ship Fever (1996) two of the most unusual literary successes of their decade again predominate in this superb new gathering of four stories and two novellas. Two are roughly contemporary. In "The Mysteries of Ubiquitur," a girl who grows up in an ardent, articulate family "packed with scientists" spends her life in the comforting, smothering shadow of the older man who had encouraged her childish curiosity. And in "The Forest," an elderly biochemist seduces a vibrant young woman into a complex visit to his past. The inchoate, unclassifiable nature of human emotions is studied in "Theories of Rain" (and famed naturalist William Bartram makes an appearance), while the problem of reconciling science with religion and the conjoining of two separate lives are examined in "Two Rivers," a searchingly ambitious story that could have been even more elaborately developed. Barrett is at her best in the longer tales. The title novella is about a cartographer who, after being posted to India's Himalayan range, becomes obsessed with the region's harsh splendor and exiles himself from his homeland and marriage. And "The Cure" (with its slight echoes of the earlier "Ship Fever") is a brilliant story of several generations' ordeals (in Ireland, the North Atlantic, and the Adirondacks) relative to the mingled beauty and fury of the natural world and the futility and necessity of human efforts to control and comprehend it. There are many connections, genealogical and otherwise, among these six tales and the content of its two immediate predecessors. One understands how the intricacies of thecomplex phenomena Barrett has studied have possessed her imagination: she's still filling in gaps, revisiting scenes, reworking materials. Gorgeous, illuminating, entrancing fiction. Author tour
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