By Paul Carrier
Animal-centered memoirs are not exactly a rarity, but there’s no denying that The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is a unique contribution to the genre.
The book is based on Bailey’s experiences while bedridden in Maine with a debilitating disease that left her largely incapacitated for extended periods of time. A visiting friend who dug up some field violets as a gift planted them in a pot and added a snail she found in the woods. Therein, the makings of this chronicle.
Bailey’s narrative, alternately meditative, observational and scientific, combines personal reflections and natural history, including ruminations on the intersection between her life and that of her gastropod guest. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating seamlessly blends Bailey’s observations about her own condition and the knowledge she acquired about snails, some of it from the delightful writing of 19th-century naturalists.
“After weeks of around-the-clock companionship, there was no doubt about the relationship; the snail and I were officially cohabiting,” Bailey writes. The snail “was adding a welcome focus to my life, and I couldn’t think how I would otherwise have passed the hours.”
At first, it wasn’t even clear that the snail was alive; it was tucked into its “brown, acorn-sized shell” when it arrived. But it emerged soon enough, gliding down the side of the flowerpot to explore the outside of the pot and the dish beneath it. The snail would make its way back into the pot after these nocturnal forays, tucking itself into its shell to sleep under a leaf during the day.
Thus began a relationship that continued after the snail, whom Bailey did not name, took to chomping on withered violet blossoms. “I could hear it eating,” she writes. (It turns out snails have a ridiculously large number of tiny teeth.) “The sound was of someone very small munching celery continuously. I watched, transfixed, as over the course of an hour the snail meticulously ate an entire purple petal for dinner.”
The snail eventually moved into a more suitably fitted-out terrarium, where it displayed a great fondness for portabella mushrooms. A well-meaning attempt to expand its diet beyond fungi did not go well when Baliey tried “a concoction of wetted-down cornstarch and cornmeal,” as recommended in a snail-care pamphlet. The snail loved it. Very much. It overate and got sick, but recovered overnight.
One of the great accomplishments of this tiny gem of a book is that it instills, or reinforces, an appreciation for all of the creatures to be found in the natural world. The lowly snail ranks somewhere above worms in the order of things, so if even snails are fascinating, complex and mystifying (witness the section on their exotic mating practices), then the same must be true of other forms of life that we might be inclined to dismiss or overlook.
Bailey does not anthropomorphize her snail; there’s no need to. The plain facts are amazing enough without embellishment. A snail may look pedestrian, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Snails estivate, which is a shortened summertime version of hibernation, which they also do. They are hermaphrodites. They have two pairs of tentacles, and some snails, including this one, have eyes at the tips of the upper pair. A snail can retract its eyes into the tentacles, and pull the tentacles into its head. And of course there is that shell, “a tiny, brilliant accomplishment of architecture” with a spiral whose radius “increases exponentially as it progresses.”
In the end, though, it is Bailey’s relationship with the snail, which she calls “the best of companions,” that makes the strongest impression on the reader. “Naturally solitary and slow paced, it had entertained and taught me, and was beautiful to watch as it glided silently along,” she writes of "her" snail after it was returned to the woods. “The snail had been a true mentor; its tiny existence had sustained me.”
The book is based on Bailey’s experiences while bedridden in Maine with a debilitating disease that left her largely incapacitated for extended periods of time. A visiting friend who dug up some field violets as a gift planted them in a pot and added a snail she found in the woods. Therein, the makings of this chronicle.
Bailey’s narrative, alternately meditative, observational and scientific, combines personal reflections and natural history, including ruminations on the intersection between her life and that of her gastropod guest. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating seamlessly blends Bailey’s observations about her own condition and the knowledge she acquired about snails, some of it from the delightful writing of 19th-century naturalists.
“After weeks of around-the-clock companionship, there was no doubt about the relationship; the snail and I were officially cohabiting,” Bailey writes. The snail “was adding a welcome focus to my life, and I couldn’t think how I would otherwise have passed the hours.”
At first, it wasn’t even clear that the snail was alive; it was tucked into its “brown, acorn-sized shell” when it arrived. But it emerged soon enough, gliding down the side of the flowerpot to explore the outside of the pot and the dish beneath it. The snail would make its way back into the pot after these nocturnal forays, tucking itself into its shell to sleep under a leaf during the day.
Thus began a relationship that continued after the snail, whom Bailey did not name, took to chomping on withered violet blossoms. “I could hear it eating,” she writes. (It turns out snails have a ridiculously large number of tiny teeth.) “The sound was of someone very small munching celery continuously. I watched, transfixed, as over the course of an hour the snail meticulously ate an entire purple petal for dinner.”
The snail eventually moved into a more suitably fitted-out terrarium, where it displayed a great fondness for portabella mushrooms. A well-meaning attempt to expand its diet beyond fungi did not go well when Baliey tried “a concoction of wetted-down cornstarch and cornmeal,” as recommended in a snail-care pamphlet. The snail loved it. Very much. It overate and got sick, but recovered overnight.
One of the great accomplishments of this tiny gem of a book is that it instills, or reinforces, an appreciation for all of the creatures to be found in the natural world. The lowly snail ranks somewhere above worms in the order of things, so if even snails are fascinating, complex and mystifying (witness the section on their exotic mating practices), then the same must be true of other forms of life that we might be inclined to dismiss or overlook.
Bailey does not anthropomorphize her snail; there’s no need to. The plain facts are amazing enough without embellishment. A snail may look pedestrian, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Snails estivate, which is a shortened summertime version of hibernation, which they also do. They are hermaphrodites. They have two pairs of tentacles, and some snails, including this one, have eyes at the tips of the upper pair. A snail can retract its eyes into the tentacles, and pull the tentacles into its head. And of course there is that shell, “a tiny, brilliant accomplishment of architecture” with a spiral whose radius “increases exponentially as it progresses.”
In the end, though, it is Bailey’s relationship with the snail, which she calls “the best of companions,” that makes the strongest impression on the reader. “Naturally solitary and slow paced, it had entertained and taught me, and was beautiful to watch as it glided silently along,” she writes of "her" snail after it was returned to the woods. “The snail had been a true mentor; its tiny existence had sustained me.”
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