Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume

Stream of Consciousness, Second Person Narrative, The Unreliable Narrator The dog gets him in trouble and they are coming for him, so he flees, but little do we know what he is really escaping. We don’t know at the time how out of character that is for him.

She does so, by his act of taking in a homeless dog. Handiwork was such a sliver of a book, it was over so quickly, small morsels, often only a paragraph to a page, it was a delight to go on a fictional journey here, once she was able to get her protagonist out of the house. Her rhythmic style of storytelling, the repetition of words are all giveaways. I have to remind myself the narrator is an older man, not Sara Baume, because she is so present, looking out through her character’s eyes, all-seeing. So when I meet the 57 year old man in Spill Simmer Falter Wither, it takes me a while to think of him as that man, because seeing through his eyes and listening to his inner conversation with OneEye, the injured, undisciplined dog he has just adopted, I see how this character too, has been sculpted with as much care and detail as one of the many birds in Handiwork. I know she is someone who spends her mornings at her writing desk and her afternoons and evenings working with her hands, accumulating and gathering things around her, writing about objects, thinking about people, what they said and did, making things, a ponderer who crafts with their hands. It is an interesting situation to have read an author’s work of creative nonfiction before reading either of her two novels, so I come to Sara Baume’s novel, knowing her as a sculptor of birds, an acute observer and thinker about bird migrations.

Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume