Halfway through this extraordinary novel I had my doubts. After all, you could say that it’s all about going round and round in circles. But in the end Samantha Harvey very much more than justifies her Booker. There are writing gurus who swear that the fundamental secret, bar none, to all good writing is the sentence: get that key component right and you’re on a winning streak from the off. If that were all there was to it, even then Harvey would certainly be a winner. Her sentences are beautifully structured and sparkle and shimmer with wit, insight and feeling. She’s a born writer, but her novel goes way beyond the mere accomplished sentence. The centre of her book is the visionary experience of the Earth seen from space. Oh, the stars and the moon come into it too, but what concerns her are the six astronauts (well, four astronauts and two cosmonauts, Russians) in the space station two hundred and fifty miles above the planet. Orbital is a close, intimate recreation of twenty four hours in the lives of these two women and four men, confined in their cramped metal container as it spins through sixteen orbits, working its way over continents, islands, seas and deserts, while they experience sixteen sunsets and sixteen sunrises (a helpful map at the start shows you their detailed trajectory). They carry out their set routines of cleaning and maintaining the craft, performing the vital physical exercises to keep themselves trim in a weightless environment, and carrying out various scientific experiments. Chie, for example, the Japanese crew member, rejoices when the lab mice she’s supervising finally learn to float, instead of desperately trying to rely on non-existent gravity. Meanwhile, she grieves for her mother, back in Japan, who has just died. She recalls her favourite moments with her, but will miss the funeral. Other events outside impinge. They witness the build up of a super-typhoon in the Pacific, but beyond reporting back to mission control, are of course powerless to do anything about it. They enthusiastically follow the launch of a new Moon-landing expedition, not a little envious of their fellow astronauts. They fret about home and families, treasure the few mementoes mounted around each of their individual cramped sleeping quarters. But the centre of everything is what they see through the windows: ‘They don’t know how it can be that their view is so endlessly repetitive and yet each time, every single time, newly born.’ They experience ‘A sense of gratitude so overwhelming that there’d be nothing they could do with or about it, no word or thought that could be its equal…’ In the end, Harvey’s sense of the extraordinary adventure of orbiting in space, witnessing the marvel of the globe beneath you, widens out into an enthralling vision of mankind’s future explorations and the planetary wonders beyond Earth.
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A wonderful, not overlong, meditative work. Touching constantly on the personal and the global. With a good deal of high tech space station reality thrown in for good measure.
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..an exercise in writing. Beautiful at times, at times even moving, but an exercise, not a novel. Astronauts are the most generic of humans - they have to be super-normal, it's in the person spec - but it makes the writing generic too. Nothing was weird or unexpected enough to kick off a story. I did like it, but in a kind of fuzzy way, like enjoying something communal - New Year fireworks, for instance - instead of the experience of having one's individuality suddenly seen and addr esed, as happens in truly great novels.
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Samantha Harvey writes like a dream, and I feel it would be stingy to give her anything less than five stars for descriptions such as this: 'Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they [the astronauts] dream it stalking through their quarters.' Or this: 'Space shreds time to pieces. They [the astronauts] were told this in training: keep a tally each day when you wake, tell yourself this is the morning of a new day.' The concept of the novel is brilliant and Harvey must have punched the air when she she thought (or dreamed) it. But even she could feel uncertain as to whether she could fill in all the space between the structure of her very clever, orbiting idea. The parallel stories of the six characters (one, for instance, deeply in love, another disillusioned) and the reflections on the meaning of life started off well but seemed to lose momentum; and in the end I lost interest, and maybe the author did too. The descriptions of beautiful earth and our fragile human future come across so touchingly, but the ending feels like the story's creator ran out of fuel.
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I found it interesting and entertaining. It doesn't really go anywhere, but I guess that's the point. They just go round and round and round... Lots of characterisation and no plot. But still well worth the read.
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I didn’t expect to find this as beautiful and moving as I did, making me think hard about human life and our place in the universe and take great pleasure in the extraordinary, poetic descriptions of the Earth. Is it a novel? I’m not sure. Is it a significant and valuable literary work? Yes.
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Not much happens in this book, but also everything happens. Samantha Harvey manages to look at the earth from the outside and detach us enough to see all of the earth's beauty and also it's absolute fragility. Harvey tells us something we all know but are afraid to acknowledge, in beautiful, heartbreaking prose.
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Lengthy descriptions of the Earth from space. This book is 80% lengthy descriptions of the Earth from space. And they are overwritten to boot. Throw in some pretty cliche Astro and Cosmonauts who remember why they became astronauts; have dreams about their families and realise that politics and stuff doesn’t make sense when you see the earth from space and, like, what’s a country, really? On a philosophical level, I was expecting more depth, more humanity. These characters - the Christian American and his unwavering belief in a creationist God, the Chinese woman who thinks about race and gender as she reflects on her families history from the lofty climbs of space - are just dull. Tedious. The words became increasingly like rows of data after about 50 pages.
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Orbital is a beautifully written meditation on human aspiration and its inevitable limitations. I loved (almost) every chapter. I will read this again, and probably yet again. I enjoyed the fact that each chapter was short so that I could read one before sleeping, and I could think and dream about what I had just read. In my experience, that is the best way to read this wonderful book. In any event, it made me think about our planet, our place in the solar system, galaxy, and universe. Not many books do that.
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A beautifully written gem. That's a book to read time and again.
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I needed one more book to finish the 52 Book Club: Week 2024 Challenge, and the prompt was for "nominated for the Booker Prize." I decided I wanted to select a book nominated for the 2024 Booker (the nominations were announced yesterday, July 30), and I picked "Orbital" by Samantha Harvey, because it sounded different and interesting. I am so glad I chose this book -- it was unlike anything I've read -- while the basic premise involves the lives of a group of four astronauts and two cosmonauts assigned to the final mission of the Space Station, this book is so much more than that. The structure, the plot -- well, there is no traditional plot that most people would recognize as such -- the descriptive narrative that is beautiful and mesmerizing, the characters that you really come to relate to, the fact that world geography and climate change is a major part of the novel... I just finished reading it, and I already want to re-read it just to experience Ms. Harvey's beautiful prose. One of my favorite side stories of the book involves a postcard the astronaut Shaun brought as a personal item to the space station. When Shaun was in high school, a teacher showed her class a photo of Diego Velazquez's most famous painting, "Las Meninas." Shaun, who only wanted to learn how to be a fighter pilot, couldn't appreciate fine art, while his future wife understood the beauty and meaning of the painting and sent him a postcard 15 years prior to his trip to space, in which she tried to explain the painting to him -- he brought his postcard with him on his space voyage. I won't get into all the specifics, but Shaun shows the postcard to a a fellow astronaut (an Italian), who shows him a new way to interpret the painting -- a valuable lesson to apply not just to art, but to assumptions about life in space, life on earth and humanity in general. Another of my favorite aspects of the novel is the astronauts' use of lists, not just to pass the time but also to share personalities and opinions. There were lists of "anticipated things" (plums, slamming a door in anger, fried eggs, skiing, etc.), "surprising things" (imagination, Jackie Onassis's mode of death, a blue pen with a red lid, etc.), "irritating things" (tailgaters, tired children, lumpy pillows, stuck zips, etc.), and others. So relatable! There isn't a lot of political talk -- other than the two Russians having one toilet and the Americans, Asians and Europeans using another -- and they weren't supposed to share food or supplies -- all of which they ignored, but the underlying message is all countries and continents are connected (you can more visibly see this from low orbit), and we are all humans, no matter the ethnicity or nationality. This review really seems kind of disjointed, but the book fits that description. I loved it, not only because it was so out of the realm of most books I read (and I read a lot), but because it makes you appreciate our humanity and how we must work to save it.
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Die Autorin lässt uns in die Köpfe von 6 internationalen Astronauten auf der ISS gucken - wie sich durchgetakteter Alltag mit Experimenten und notwendigen Verrichtungen mischt mit den abschweifenden Gedanken eines jeden einzelnen. Es ist kein heroischer Weltraumroman sondern ein Blick durch die Augen der Protagonisten auf einen zwar spektakulären aber dann doch regulierten Alltag, der viel Zeit für die eigene Reflektion lässt. Ich habe nicht gebannt und gespannt auf der Bettkante gesessen, um zu erfahren, wie es weitergeht, aber ich konnte mich auch nicht dem Fluss der Geschichte entziehen. Für jeden, der schon einmal davon geträumt hat, einige Zeit auf der ISS zu verbringen eine wirklich ergiebige Geschichte.
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Es un libro mágico
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