Sarah Lark's literature is a hymn to beauty, to idealization, to the happy integration of the human being with the most natural environment and to resilience from the reunion of the person with the fundamental ecosystem in which to find new airs with which to detoxify from the murky conditions of our civilization.
And nothing better to escape from those stale environments in which we live than to get away to that country of the white cloud already made the literary utopia between the exuberant exoticism and the contrast of a world that we physically turn around as a metaphor for the necessary turn towards the reunion.
But more or less philosophical readings aside, The Year of the Dolphins presents us with a new paradigmatic character towards vital recomposition. She is Laura, a woman with the burden of her destiny tracing a very different path from the one she would have wanted to write.
In that usual vital contingency, sometimes called the crisis of the forties, in which not a few rethink their place in the world, Laura decides to launch that reset towards the encounter with the parallel path, the one that is longed for in dreams and glimpsed when peering into another life illustrated in books or even on television.
And of course, Laura had her creator's own imagination, a space back in New Zealand where she could develop an old passion for life under the sea and who knows if she even dump other types of passionate aspects buried in her ordinary lifestyle.
The greatest adventure can be the one undertaken when no one expects more from you than to continue with the routine. The biggest challenge is to renounce the inertia of what is there and face all kinds of fears, guilt and other negative feelings to tackle a dream. After all, New Zealand looms like a distant horizon with no memory, where no one from Laura's world today can show up to give advice or claim damages.
Laura and life resumed from 0 when the past weighs the most. Laura and the rediscovery of much fuller sensations with each new heartbeat.
If after reading this book you don't start saving to take a ship to the country of the white cloud, you don't have a heart.
You can now buy the novel The Year of the Dolphins, Sarah Lark's new book, here: