Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
Several years ago I was in Salt Lake City for a publishing conference, and was lucky enough to visit the wonderful indie bookstore The King’s English. At the top of what seemed like a very steep hill (I walked there), it’s in a house, and you wend your way through a warren of rooms, each with different categories of books. What a great bookstore!
My visit was enjoyable in many ways – the friendly staff, the colorful and appealing children’s department, the great dinner recommendation I got – but mostly I want to mention one of the books I bought there. I was seeking a book to discuss at a workshop I would be leading at Kripalu Yoga Center, and the knowledable booksellers steered me toward The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery.
In this book I learned to be interested in and care about a creature about whom I previously knew very little. It started with discovering that in multiple they are octopuses, not octopi, and went on to teach me about their habits and abilities, including how intelligent they are and how they can fit their bodies through tiny spaces.
This all came back to me recently when I read the new novel Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt.
Really, it’s a story about a bunch of people who are lost in their lives for one reason or another, and we follow them through their struggles until they all wind up… well, I’m not a plot spoiler.
But what makes the book different is not that it is narrated from different points of view, but that one of those viewpoints happens to belong to Marcellus, who is an octopus, a giant Pacific octopus, to be specific. Marcellus resides in a tank in an aquarium in Puget Sound, and he, like his species, is very intelligent. And like the octopus whom Sy Montgomery befriended in the Boston Aquarium in her book, this octopus also knows how to make friends, to convey thoughts and feelings, and to figure things out. He’s the most charming octopus I’ve ever met, and he makes this book into a more compelling story.
Kudos to Van Pelt for creating this charming and loveable character, along with the rest of the cast in Remarkably Bright Creatures. Put this on your summer reading list!
