Terrifying and Beautiful—at the Same Time
A book review.
Title of the book: In This Ravishing World
Author’s Name: Nina Schuyler
Name of Press: Regal House Publishing
Publication Date: July 2, 2024
Reading In This Ravishing World by Nina Schuyler is an engrossing experience, for sure. But also, a necessary read. The ten stories explore the climate crisis, pollution, hope and despair, love and fear, the ongoing quest for personal and planetary survival.
These stories have everything a short story needs—characters with complex motives, narratives with high stakes, stories that reflect wider views, endings that stick with the reader. The first story in this short story collection begins with a first-person voice and then it changes to a third-person intimate. Makes you ask what the hell is going on. Makes you want to know who this first-person is.
Nina Schuyler, in an interview she gave with lithub, talked about how she came up with the title of this book. “This wonderful, amazing, astonishing earth seizes and carries things off by force through hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and tsunamis, and it showers us with immense beauty.” That last and is shown in all stories in this book, how terrifying the force of Nature is—and, at the same time, how nothing is more beautiful than Nature.
There’s a sustained camera shot that keeps following every character in the stories, and we see the beating heart of what this camera—an overarching narrator, personifying Nature, with a striking honest voice—sees. Out of the ten stories, in eight of them, after they end, this voice speaks to us directly, which I have never seen in another short story collection. In an interview Christine Sneed made with Nina Schuyler, Schuyler writes, “Then there is Nature’s first-person voice woven throughout, commenting, thinking, reflecting, and pleading.” In the simplest terms, this voice feels like a commentary on each story, but it is so much more. This voice shoves a mirror in front of our faces, forces us to look deep into our reflections. It condemns us for what we have done to our planet—and for what we continue to do. The questions it asks of us are soul-shattering. The insights this voice offers are gut-punching that you will never look at a rat wandering in your kitchen, or a flood ravaging the city you live in, or a wildfire swallowing your neighboring city, the same way. Some of these paragraphs, after reading them, chills crawled in my skin as if the room I was reading had turned terribly cold. Because most of us find it hard to look hard things in the eye I imagine readers would flinch from these paragraphs narrated by Nature itself. But I also think this is where these stories draw their power—to make us look outside through our windows and stare at the tall trees, to make us run outside to feel the wind on our faces.
These stories lift the windows on characters’ lives, only for a moment. After we’ve seen enough to understand something about that life, the windows are closed. In a few pages, what Schuyler’s characters want most in the world, what they fear, is bared to its bones. These people are so colorful, have rich backstories, and are fully dimensional. There is the discouraged old woman who has dedicated her life to environmental reforms—like reducing deforestation of the Amazon—who is about to be honored with the Goldman Environmental Prize for lifetime achievement and she’s fretting over her lack of lasting accomplishments, there’s the scientist devoted to eliminating plastics, the teenager worried about a flower—whether it would be able to breathe because a fire is filling the sky—, the millionaire preparing for the end of the world as we know it, the coder who doesn’t know when he last saw the world beyond his screen. There’s the executive (not a lead character) who takes care of a zebra. Is there hope for human beings? This character who takes care of a zebra in his spare time makes me think there is. And there is hope in these stories. Yes, despair and bleakness leak out of the pages as these people fight to keep our planet, our trees, our birds, safe, but there is hope, like a candlelight fighting to keep its light on in the darkness, ordinary people doing extraordinary things, scientific advances, activism, the energy and optimism of children.
As I kept reading, as I kept meeting more characters, I couldn’t help but fall in love with these characters who describe the world around them in relation to the birds, the sky, the rivers, the trees, the wind. “Out the window, the big oak sways its green leaves, its spiraling branches spanning the backyard, making a lace of shadow on the ground. The apple and peach trees hand her incredible shades of green, and her nose fills with the fragrance of resin and deep moss.” “Joe’s voice is calm as if he’s got a deep river running inside him.” “His fingers are on fire for those flowers.” “…and the sky is the color of sand.” “…and the sound of water gently licking the dock has to be one of the loveliest sounds in the world.” “The trees are holding the light in their leaves.” There are heart clutching descriptions, that make you wish for a planet where we do not see these images when we walk in our neighborhoods, “On the bridge, the wind is blowing so hard the seagulls are having trouble flying.” “In the fog, the lights looked like ghostly moons.” “…and the city lights blot out the stars.” “Eleanor looks at the big sycamore tree in Diana’s front yard and is horrified to find she sees not only the tree but the tree’s future, dried up, dead, and stripped of leaves.”
There are dialogues that overtly state the theme, that I’m still thinking about, “We can’t get beyond self-interest, which is one of the most destructive forces.” “You call young women beautiful, but have you truly looked at a flower?” “What did the birds do to deserve this?”
The setting in these stories is not just a physical place, it takes the broader world into account. In almost every scene, every moment, the bigger elements in the background are vividly drawn. A heat wave; the trees fighting the uproar of the wind to stay upright; a bird singing a faint song like it is its last song, like this bird in that leafless tree is the last of its kind.
There are moments that lift from the page and haunt like when a character looks outside through the window to make sure that it—the world as we know it now—is still out there. And lines that make you think of the flowers in your garden, ache for them. “Fires somewhere again, the smell of smoke blowing into the city. He wonders if the lavender flowers can breathe.”
Each story is told from the point of view of a different character. And all stories are told in third-person intimate, and in the present tense, which feels right in the context of these stories, in what these stories explore—the devastation of our planet in one way or another at this moment in history.
The stories in In This Ravishing World are interconnected. Characters cross paths. I recommend reading the first story, then the second, and so on—because there is an overlapping plot. In the last story “The Big Picture,” the point of view, from section to section, shifts between characters, we meet lead characters again, and we see the aftermath of the overlapping plot.
In This Ravishing World is an essential book—with astonishing microscopic details and so many lovely sentences—with an important message lurking underneath the lines calling out to you, to me, to all of us, to do something, now, right now, to help our planet from dying.