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I wrote this book when I was living in a little French village, and became fascinated by how odd our ordinary days would appear if we shifted perspective, and paid attention to what's hidden from us because it's too slow, or too fast, or too small.
It was hard to sell to publishers. The first print run was small, but shortly after it came out Newsweek ran several pages in color of pictures from it. That was just before Christmas, and sales skyrocketed.
In everything I'd written before, I'd ended up copying other peoples' tone. This is one of my favorite books though - for it's the first one that was really my own. D.B. |
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Extract
From the alarm clock a spherical shock wave traveling at Mach 1 starts growing outward, spreading till it hits the wall. Some of the energy it carries causes the curtains over the window to heat up from the friction of the onslaught; much of the rest rebounds back, enters the ears of two sleepers, and rouses them awake.
There's a rolling of eyes and a stirring of head, then a female hand gropes out from under the security of the comforter, fumbles on the bedside table, finds the alarm clock, and clacks down the button on top to turn it off.
Soon the tuning knob on the bedside radio is sent rolling across the megahertz to the new location. There's a crackling as it moves between stations; a slight hiss and buzzing too which the waker single-mindedly ignores. Certain of the hissings are the cries of distant exploding galaxies, consumed in their death throes and sending out massively powerful particle radiation across space and time in the process of obliteration. Other static comes from lightning strikes on distant continents, which send electro-magnetic pulses through the upper atmosphere that travel across deserts and seas into the bedside radio; all are received, then passed over and ignored in the hunt for the right station.
...The waker is on his way out of bed, but there's something which moves under his feet, some things rather, roused out of their sleep as the waker strides over them.
These are the mites, thousands and thousands of tiny mites: male mites and female mites and baby mites and even, crunched to the side away from the main conglomeration, the mummified corpses of long-dead old great-grandparent mites. Brethren of theirs stir in the bed too, where they have spent the night snuggling warm and cosy under our sleepers, and which now, the great burden above them stirring, are beginning to stir for the day too.
It sounds unpleasant, but is quite normal. You don't have to leave the same sheets on for weeks, let the dog crawl everywhere, and generally do all those other awful, unhealthy things we expect of people whose rooms are infested with bugs to get them. Even if the room is well aired and the floor clean - the dog never, ever let up to play - the mites will still be there. Epidemiological studies show that nearly 100 percent of our houses are host to these creatures.
The consolation is that these are not great visible mites that produce itching, let alone the all too visible and loathsome bed-bug, but rather a special, ultra-tiny (so small they were only first discovered in 1965) breed that lives in human carpets and beds and nowhere else. They look like armored personnel carriers with legs on...(and the book goes on for another 80,000 words, bringing in lipstick, margarine, blue jeans, lightbulbs, a terrified housefly and much else along the way. The hardcover edition has a number of glossy pictures as in the image gallery above ; the paperback is only the text.)
Explores the kind of science that sits unnoticed under every homeowner's nose, turning such mundane articles as a threaded needle into objects of wonder
- Newsweek
Utterly original and mesmerizing
- Washington Post Book World
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