"Rare Bird's" wordplay on the female protagonist and the swallows strikes a sour note, but Barrett chooses a unique means of portraying a well-read woman circa 1762.īarrett's previous novel, The Forms of Water, was an insightful but conventional portrait of a quirky extended family "Ship Fever"'s novella and seven short stories represent an imaginative departure for the author. To me he looked more like another Nageli." A Mendel-like correspondence occurs in another tale, "Rare Bird," whose 18th-century heroine questions Carolus Linnaeus's notion that swallows hibernate underwater. By then I knew that he liked to think of himself as another Mendel, unappreciated and misunderstood. identified himself too closely with Mendel, and painted Nageli as too black a villain. Later, a long-preserved letter from Mendel to Nageli reminds the woman of her mate's shortcomings: "He. "Ship Fever and Other Stories" opens with "The Behavior of the Hawkweeds," in which a young woman woos a genetics student with the tale of Mendel's misguided experiments. Where some readers might see only repetition and frustration in Mendel's story, novelist Andrea Barrett sees heartbreaking dedication - and useful metaphor. Neither man knew that some hawkweeds can develop an embryo without fertilization Mendel, hungry for approval, followed Nageli's advice and contradicted all his earlier findings. His work was nearly undone when a Munich professor, Carl Nageli, dismissed his pea theories and suggested that he study hawkweeds. An exemplar of patience, he spent years cross-pollinating pea plants and developing a theory of heredity that was not to be accepted in his lifetime.
: Science, Nature And RegretĪustrian monk Gregor Mendel was an outwardly unromantic figure.
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