The Flitting

August 1, 2024
Literary son seeks to connect with his outdoorsman father by exploring the latter's lifelong fascination with butterflies. Masters, who teaches English literature and writing at the University of Nottingham, is a devotee of American popular culture, while Dad, "steeped in natural history," spent his life in the fields and woods of rural Northamptonshire. In this moving memoir, Masters cares for his terminally ill father while taking a crash course in lepidoptery. His "butterflying journey" goes beyond "trophy butterflies up in the canopies" to encompass poetic descriptions of their various forms of beauty, such as the "tiny white bit of punctuation on each hindwing of the Commas, short breaths for dead clauses." Masters alternates passages of his lessons in natural life with stories from the lives of famous literary lepidopterists such as Vladimir Nabokov and Virginia Woolf. Nabokov advanced methods for classifying butterflies and identified a new species; Woolf portrayed her fellow novelist E.M. Forster as a pale blue butterfly. But for all of the entomological references Masters finds in great books, nature poetry, and pop culture, his memoir really resonates when he gets personal and describes the deepening of the father-son relationship in the face of imminent death. Along the way of his transformation "from butterfly-ignorer to butterfly-obsessive," Masters brings his writerly skills to bear, such as when he describes the silver-washed fritillary as "an ingenious piece of orange origami powering above and disappearing into the hedgerow." There are paeans to great insects like the purple emperor with its "owlish eyespot" and the white admiral with its "leopardish underside." His recollections of his naturalist father and their late-in-life connection is replete with butterfly themes and imagery, but ultimately it is the humanity of their story that compels. A heartfelt remembrance.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 2, 2024
Masters (Noughties) takes up lepidoptery to connect with his dying father in this affecting blend of memoir and literary criticism. After his nature-loving father received a terminal cancer diagnosis on the eve of the U.K.’s 2020 Covid lockdown, Masters was determined to be his dad’s link to the outside world. He began texting his father snaps of butterflies he encountered during walks in the park, growing intrigued by the creatures’ sublime beauty and sheepish about his adolescent dismissal of his father’s fondness for the natural world. With his father’s help, Masters began to recognize previously indistinguishable specimens, tracing, for example, the subtle differences between the Small White, the Large White, the Green-veined White, and Orange Tip (“I figure the whites as the John, Paul, George, and Ringo of the British butterfly kingdom”). Searches for elusive specimens take on poignant significance, stirring in Masters an “aching nostalgia for a future that Dad and I will not share.” In between chapters of personal reflection, Masters documents famous literary encounters with butterflies, including Virginia Woolf’s frequent use of the insect as a metaphor for fluid identities and Vladimir Nabokov’s contributions to the field of lepidoptery. While these analyses are plenty stimulating, it’s Masters’s heartfelt account of building bridges with his father that lands hardest. This is sure to tug on readers’ heartstrings. Agent: Jessica Wollard, David Higham Assoc.

September 1, 2024
T his beautifully written memoir tells of a son's evolving relationship with his dying father, couched within a natural history of butterflies. On the surface, university literature professor Masters seems to have built a life and different from his dad, a robust outdoorsman and aficionado of hunting and fishing. But during the author's father's final year of life, as he succumbs to cancer and faces one indignity after another, their differences dissipate, and Masters learns more about the man he grew up with--and presumably away from. This resulting text artfully weaves together family stories and memories, Masters' continuing education about lepidoptery (his father's great passion), references to writers ranging across time from Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov to Prince and Zadie Smith, and the author's musings on raising his own son, a toddler, couched within regrets stemming from his own childhood. The father shares previously penned poetry; the son recounts butterfly sightings in the wild. This is a heartfelt account of a relationship forged late in life, all the sweeter for its timing.

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