Book: The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elizabeth Tova Bailey

[Krishna]

I started this book with not a mild, but a lot of skepticism. There was a buzz about this when it came out but I did not think I’d like a story about a snail and what it does. And the small size of the book suggested that it was just a quick description of a snail and (as I understood from the blurb) a sick woman. So, how good can it be?

 

It turns out that it can be astoundingly good. I am so glad that I read this book despite my initial misgivings.

 

The narrator is afflicted with a sickness that confines her to bed. While convalescing, a friend brings a garden variety snail in a flowerpot with a plant next to it. The story is lyrical, the prose is moving, and she sees wonders in everyday world that is fascinating to read. The first day she and the friend even wonder if it is alive at all because what the friend brought, on the outside is just a shell. The second day it slowly comes out and the third day, she sees that the envelope that was next to it has a tiny hole in it – as if something with tiny teeth tried to eat it. Cute.

 

She bonds with the snail which seems to explore more and more during its nocturnal waking period.

 

Nice for a while but afterwards it gets a bit boring to hear of the snail’s activities and her thought process as she sees it wander in the little moss garden she had set up for it.

 

There are a lot of interesting pieces about snails – cold blooded, how the four antennas on its head function, how they are unique to snails, how pretty and geometrically proportioned its shell is, how it is created by secretions and grows with the snail. All nice to read. If you are happy with no story in it except to watch the companionship between a human and a snail (One sided, as the snail is not feeling the companionship and goes on about its life) is something you want to read about.

 

Strangely, the lyrical prose and the enthusiastic narration makes it feel pleasant to read – contrary to what I expected when I started giving this book a try.  You learn about the snails being poikilotherms (cold blooded where the body temperature falls and rises with surroundings) as opposed to mammals which are homeotherms (regulating their temperature to a constant level). You also learn that the slime they produce is the most important. They have amazing properties (they stick to your hand even after a wash; if you stir them in a beaker of water, they have enough strength to coagulate and – get this – self siphon out of the beaker). They use slime to travel and for other purposes and they actually produce different slimes for different purposes.

All of which makes it a marvel and you are as amazed as the  biologist David Rollo who opined ‘A bag of cold water that cannot even move unless it leaks should not be able to survive outside a bog’ and yet it survives very well.

 

And you learn of microscopic snails, and many other very interesting facts about them. Nice. How an ecosystem of bacteria helped form snails (and every other being including humans).

 

I never knew about estivation of snails and how they go into a trancelike state, and how it is different from hibernation, which also the snails do, until I read this book. This tiny book is packed with fun facts like this.

 

And then comes the amazing fact : Did you know that two snails in the course of their courtship throw “tiny darts” at each other and they are amazingly fashioned?

 

The more I read this book, the more it reminds me of Bill Bryson’s amazing book A Short History of Nearly Everything. Packed with surprising facts for such a small book, it gets more and more enjoyable as you go along. No wonder this book is famous.

 

And then the fact that a snail can carry a sperm for several years until conditions are right to fertilize it, and that a snail, being a hermaphrodite, plays the male in one sexual union and the female in the next, and that it buries its eggs under soft earth are all revelations that increase your wonder about these gastropods.

 

When the terrarium is full, the author is also released from the hospital and she just takes one tiny snail, releasing the rest, including the mother into the same bog where it was first found.

 

So, a brilliant, moving, educating, interesting story about nothing but a snail and an incapacitated lady. Who would have thought this plot could produce such a lovely book?

 

8/10

– – Krishna