Natural Wonders
| Author | Woodward, Angela |
|---|---|
| Year | 2016 |
| First published | 2016 |
| Publisher | Tuscaloosa: Fiction Collective 2 |
| Number of pages | 152 |
| Edition | First Paperback Edition |
| ISBN | 9781573660556 |
| Keywords | earth sciences, literary or mainstream, FMS Library Book |
Abstract
In Natural Wonders, Jenny is given the task of assembling a memorial edition of her recently deceased husband Jonathan’s lecture series about the physical history of the earth. With little knowledge of his work or of Jonathan himself, Jenny constructs from his fragmentary and disorganized notes her own version of our planet’s past.Presented as a series of lectures, Jenny’s earth history is an amalgam of stories from science and about scientists—a Serbian mathematician and his theory of the ice ages, a Swiss doctor camped on a glacier, the mysterious materia pinguis thought to have drifted down from stars to form fossils. Into these stories she interweaves scenes from their marriage as well as material she finds on Jonathan’s shelves. In her history, an explanation of continental drift becomes enmeshed with a schoolboy’s erotic encounter with an older woman. Icebergs in an Andean lake launch a woman’s jealous affair with a third-rate actor, and H. G. Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau is dramatically recounted in new form. (Amazon)