When Elisabeth Tova Bailey was laid flat after a serious illness and successive relapses, her interactions with the outside world were drastically reduced. She had a caretaker to help her, and friends and family who came to visit, but her day was condensed into a series of moments. She writes, "each moment felt like an endless hour, yet days slipped silently past. Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all."
So when a friend brought a land snail living in a pot of violets to her room, Bailey began watching the snail go about its daily life. With her own life slowed to a snail's pace, Bailey became absorbed in the little creature she was now cohabitating with. She studied its eating habits--listening to it munch on wilted flower petals or a piece of portobello mushroom in the dark of the night--and its sleeping patterns, and she examined the way it moved on its slime trail. As her fondness for the snail deepened, Bailey had a terrarium installed in her room for the little creature and enjoyed searching for it among the ferns, mosses, rotting birch log and other tiny plants. The snail's daily habits and routines, which Bailey writes about in a poetic and whimsical way, helped fill the empty hours. "Pondering its circumstances with a regal air, as if from the turret of a castle, it waved its tentacles first this way and then that, as though responding to a distant melody."
She also did tremendous research on snails, reading old books written by naturalists and scientists, and she deftly interweaves what she discovered about the gastropod into her narrative. Readers learn about snails' complex teeth and the patterns they make as they chew, and their mating habits and their egg-laying process, events that unfolded in front of Bailey as she continued to make the gradual climb toward better health, a topic she also discusses but without much fanfare. Although illness forced Bailey's life to come to a screeching halt, her writing in The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is a meditation and a call to slow down, to take life at a more leisurely pace, so that nothing, even something as seemingly inconsequential as the life of a land snail, is missed. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer
Shelf Talker: When a serious illness leaves a woman bedridden, she discovers a new world of enjoyment and entertainment in watching the daily routines of a land snail.