Larger Than Life: An Inspiring Novella About Elephants by Jodi Picoult

It was nearly the end of 2019. I was looking for a novella that I could finish before the year was over, and feel good about it.  It had to be a different experience from the total nightmare that was my last read.  Yes, it had been important for me to read The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, but I wanted a narrative about a heroic woman who was struggling to do the right thing.  This didn't mean that there wouldn't be terrible things happening.  I just wanted a window into the life of a woman who wanted to make the world a better place.

As I looked down the list of novellas that I could read on my Kindle,  I thought about authors who had really delivered more than once with powerful stories dealing with significant themes, and characters who lived in the real world but needed to make a difference.  It occurred to me that Jodi Picoult could be the author I was looking for.  Her themes run the gamut, but when she has written about someone who cares about animals I have been totally hooked. I hadn't read about elephants in either fiction or non-fiction, but Larger Than Life would be an opportunity for me to learn about this threatened species. I downloaded the novella for free from Amazon as a benefit of my Prime membership.

                          

Larger Than Life was published five years ago.  Some readers might say that the time for me to review it has passed. Admittedly, it's been some time since I've read Jodi Picoult.  Yet when I started Larger Than Life I felt like I'd come back home.  I was home even though I was in Botswana because Alice Metcalf is just the sort of protagonist that I love to read about.

I was very moved by Alice's attachments to elephants that she had studied in African wildlife sanctuaries. Her dedication to the survival of elephants was inspirational.

Over the course of the novella, Alice's characterization deepens as we discover how her mother encouraged her to become a scientist, and her ambivalent relationship with her mother.  Ada Lovelace, the originator of the computer algorithm was also encouraged by her mother, Annabella Milbanke.  In fact, the parallels between the mother/daughter relationships of Ada Lovelace and Alice Metcalf  seemed so strong to me that I wondered if Jodi Picoult had partly based the background of her protagonist on that of Ada Lovelace.

I saw a review of  Larger Than Life on Goodreads that complained about all the elephant facts.  Alice is an elephant researcher.  It would be strange to me if a story about a woman who does research didn't contain any facts about the subject she was researching.  Alice was researching elephant memory.  A study in Namibia mentioned in this novella revealed that elephants could survive drought because the herd matriarchs remembered the location of water holes that they hadn't accessed in years.

 I am interested in human memory. So I was reminded of  indigenous Australian songlines which allow them to remember the locations of waterholes and other natural features. The hyperlink will take you to the Wikipedia article about this topic.  Indigenous Australians may have something in common with elephants, but they don't have the memories of elephants.  Humans use mnemonics to assist us in recalling what we have learned.   Human memories are also built through networks of associations.  This is what allowed me to remember songlines.  The next link in my associative network was Bruce Chatwin ,who wrote The Songlines, which is where I found out about this type of mnemonic. I consider it delightful to exercise my memory in this way.  I enjoy books that give me the opportunity to do that.

 Larger Than Life is a prequel to  the Jodi Picoult novel, Leaving Time.  I loved Larger Than Life.  So I'm definitely going to want to read Leaving Time in the foreseeable future.