Not that I may even read the book…I’m still a little worried about all this mustelid death…

I also learned from Books and Culture’s book review of So Brave, Young, and Handsome that the title is indeed, as I suspected, from an old ballad. It’s called “The Cowboy’s Lament.” However, the review also called Enger’s novel “picaresque,” which is in my opinion inaccurate, so take that for what it’s worth.

As an aside, one person I found writing about Tarka described it with the following: “By the end of the film, I wanted to keep it, pay the video store fee, and burn it so nobody else would have to see it. It’s that bad.” And: “Tarka the Otter should probably have been called Tarka Runs For His Life. Though nature is often cruel, this film takes cruelty to a new level.”

Despite not being able to imagine there being another otter snuff film out there, I didn’t remember some of the scenes described (such as the protagonist dying in single combat with a dog), so I changed my Google terms from “otter killed movie” to “otter shovel.” Among the first results was an actual clip from Ring of Bright Water featuring the clip that traumatized me as a youth.

And its not hard to see why. A woman and a puppy and the otter are each frolicking down a county road. The music is light and buoyant. They run into a friendly ditchdigger, with whom the woman shares some kind words, a pleasant Good Morning. The music continues happy as could be. Then the digger glimpses Mij the otter and within the span of two seconds has raised his hovel, face in an animal snarl, and brought it down again—to the horrified scream of the woman, “Angus!” To which Angus, in mild mea culpa form (still probably curious what exactly he did wrong), explains: “I thought it was just an otter!”

Chilling.

Freakin’ Ring of Bright Water. You robbed me of my childhood, you G-rated movie, you!

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As I recall (and I of course only saw the movie once), the farmer killed the otter because he thought it was a mink, and minks and farmers in Britain have a long-standing battle.

There’s also this kind of similar (from what I hear), earlier British book called Tarka the Otter, from the period when people were starting to call attention to animal rights by depicting shocking cruelty to animals in order to wake readers up. I don’t think it’s a tactic that would fly as well these days, though (though I wouldn’t put it past PETA, whose ad campaigns are generally offensive and out of touch with reality).

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Hm, in truth, I don’t even know if the death scene was at the end. All I know is that for me, it was the end of the movie—there could be no life on the screen after that.

I’m trying to remember where the film was from. I can’t, but I’m gonna say it was Welsh anyway. Just ‘cuz in my mind they’re all otter/ferret/mink-killers.

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p.s. Are you trying to say that Carissa was not writing an article about my reading habits?

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I think the title needed the “and” to keep it predictable (in the positive sense Carissa described), and easy to remember and say. But the cover designer seems to have shared your opinion, tucking the “and” in between the big words like another cloud. Ahh, synthesis.

Incidentally, I think Enger’s book would have been more strikingly titled had it dropped the “and.”

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The nice thing about realism and romance is that they’re not styles that are limited to particular eras. There’s a Romantic period and there’s a Realist period, but romance and realism aren’t confined th those movements. Naturalism, however, the other literary movement I mentioned, is usually viewed as more period-specific. For naturalist writers, life is nasty, brutish, and short. We are determined by our genes and instincts. Nature is indifferent or harsh. Examples of naturalist writers would be Jack London, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris. (Women writers didn’t seem to get into the whole naturalism thing much.) Across the pond, I suppose D.H. Lawrence would fit the bill.

That’s an interesting list you’ve compiled, and I’m not even going to try to classify most of those (things don’t fall always fall into neat categories, much as English teachers often wish they would–and the closer we get to our own era, the harder it is to put things in boxes). I’ll say that Vonnegut is usually classified as postmodern in style, but that’s as far as I’ll go.

• Raymond Chandler (American)
• Haruki Murakami (Japanese)
• Kazuo Ishiguro (British)
• Harper Lee (American)
• William Golding (British)
• Kurt Vonnegut (American)

From what I remember, Mary Shelly was a romantic and Thoreau was a, what, transcendentalist? Shoot, it’s been a long time.

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