Sharona Muir - An imaginative, delightful field guide to animals that seem to be visible to only a few people—including amateur naturalist and narrator Sophie. As her detailed descriptions of the fantastic creatures unfold, Sophie reveals a bit about human nature

Sharona Muir, Invisible Beasts. Bellevue Literary Press, 2014.

Lines blur between the human and animal worlds in this richly detailed debut from Muir (The Book of Telling), which is part fantasy novel, part field guide. Imbued with a rare power to detect animals invisible to all humans except for a few of her family members, amateur naturalist Sophie takes the reader on a tour of nature as she sees it. Arranged like a bird-watching book, but with creatures that even the sharpest of naturalists couldn’t identify, the book is filled with minute details about each species’ origin and habits, along with keen insights on what the beasts have taught her about human nature. Some of the animals depicted, and their interactions with the human world, are humorous (particularly the Wild Rubber Jack, which, as Sophie bluntly states, is “an invisible American ass”); others provide insight into Sophie’s character (she faces an existential dilemma over whether or not to reveal the Feral Parfumier Bee’s existence to her biologist sister). In Sophie’s struggles to find her footing in a world only she and a few others can see, Muir expertly pinpoints the frailty of the human condition. This is an amazing feat of imagination.

“Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It’s wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.” —ANTHONY DOERR, author of All the Light We Cannot See and The Shell Collector

Sophie is an amateur naturalist with a rare genetic gift: the ability to see a marvelous kingdom of invisible, sentient creatures that share a vital relationship with humankind. To record her observations, Sophie creates a personal bestiary and, as she relates the strange abilities of these endangered beings, her tales become extraordinary meditations on love, sex, evolution, extinction, truth, and self-knowledge.

In the tradition of E.O. Wilson’s Anthill, Invisible Beasts is inspiring, philosophical, and richly detailed fiction grounded by scientific fact and a profound insight into nature. The fantastic creations within its pages—an ancient animal that uses natural cold fusion for energy, a species of vampire bat that can hear when their human host is lying, a continent-sized sponge living under the ice of Antarctica—illuminate the role that all living creatures play in the environment and remind us of what we stand to lose if we fail to recognize our entwined destinies.

“A wild and woolly hybrid that refreshingly defies classification. . . . Compelling throughout . . . it’s the literary lovechild of Lewis Carroll and Rachel Carson filtered through the lens of zoology’s godfather, Darwin himself.” —Bostonia

“An imaginative, delightful field guide to animals that seem to be visible to only a few people—including amateur naturalist and narrator Sophie. As her detailed descriptions of the fantastic creatures unfold, Sophie reveals a bit about human nature.” —Stanford Magazine

An eccentric bestiary that playfully and thoughtfully underlines the pain and loss of extinction.

Muir (The Book of Telling, 2005, etc.), an academic, poet and essayist, combines fact and imagination in 20 fables narrated by an amateur naturalist named Sophie who has the ability to see invisible creatures. Without getting too didactic, each tale conveys a lesson about the beauty, fragility and complexity of living things. Humor and barbs come through in comments on politics, Wall Street and other subjects. There’s an invisible jackass that kicks people intent on making deals and money. “The Spiders of Theodora” offers Swiftian satire on the customs of a town like Washington, D.C. The sad “The Foster Fowl” touches on climate change and the role of even caring humans in hastening extinction. In "The Oormz," that cloudlike being drapes its faint cashmere self comfortingly over Sophie’s head and shoulders, helping dispel dark moods and recall memories of “the first spring I’d ever seen.” “The Golden Egg” is a marvelous capsule of natural history spanning many eons. “The Hypnogator,” with its mesmerizing reptile, stands out as one of the few tales (“The Foster Fowl” is another) with the heft of a good short story, not to mention crackling suspense. Sophie sometimes consults her biologist sister, Evie, who adds to a stratum of science that runs through the fantasy like a long, faith-building footnote for the dubious reader. In stark moments, the real world sounds like this: The “mass extinction” of species “is the only one caused by a single organism capable of seeing the big picture, understanding its own destructive role, and changing that.”

One doubt Muir doesn’t quell is whether such a fanciful treatise has a chance of enlightening that organism, but she deserves a good-size audience to give the experiment a fair shot.—Kirkus Reviews

“The various fantastical beings presented here are described in careful scientific detail with results that are weird, whimsical, and somewhat unsettling. Like very fractured Just So Stories.” —Library Journal

“Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It’s wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.” —ANTHONY DOERR

“In this twenty-first century, there’s no one like Sharona Muir who can write, in bright accurate language, animals real or imaginary in an updated bestiary that riffs on evolution, extinction, and what it means to be human among other species. We need this view, and you’ll be right there with her on every page of Invisible Beasts.” —JOHN FELSTINER

“Invisible Beasts is a delightful and stunning feat of environmental imagination, endlessly enjoyable and fascinating. With the deep inventiveness of Ursula Le Guin and the quirky vitality of Annie Dillard, Sharona Muir seduces us into a cautionary world full of creatures, at once fanciful and utterly convincing, who hold unexpected lessons for ourselves.” —ROBERT FINCH

“Many writers are inspired by symbiology—the interdependence of nature, culture, and technology—but Muir’s intelligence and breadth of knowledge are exceptional. You could not find a better little book of ethics, politics, and ecology for our time.” —REGENIA GAGNIER

“If you’ve lost your capacity to wonder at the myriad forms of life swarming, burrowing, swooping, and gamboling around you—and inside you—then look no further. Equal parts science and imagination, Invisible Beasts takes us on a journey to another world that turns out to be our world, as if seen and experienced for the first time. If you’re interested in what it means to be alive, and share life, then read this book.” —CARY WOLFE

Before Sharona Muir’s debut novel, Invisible Beasts, was a book, it was a game. The game was played like this: Muir would invent an animal with characteristics based on current scientific research, then describe it to fellow biologists at Bowling Green State University, where she is a professor. Without fail, her friends would name a real animal that fit the profile, reminding Muir that “whatever human imagination could conceive, nature already had.”

And thus Sophie, an amateur naturalist with the rare ability to see invisible animals and the protagonist of Invisible Beasts, was born. The book dovetails nicely with Bellevue Literary Press’s mission to publish literary work at the intersection of the arts and sciences, a fact that did not escape associate editor Leslie Hodgkin’s attention when he received it on submission. “It blends elements of fiction and nonfiction—stories of imaginary animals that could plausibly exist according to the rules of evolutionary science,” Hodgkins says. “Sharona created a wonderful hybrid form between speculative science and literature. I was swept away.” Erika Goldman, publisher and editorial director of Bellevue Literary Press, was equally impressed, and they made an offer—their standard $1,000 advance, which allows the nonprofit to invest marketing, editorial, and publicity for every book on their list.

Like many authors who move from big houses to small, Muir, whose memoir, The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secrets of My Father’s Lives, was published by Random House, has found her experience with Bellevue more satisfying than working with a for-profit publisher. “While Random House paid a lot more, my experience there was unfortunate,” she says, going on to describe a publicity snafu that would make most authors put their head in their hands. Muir and her agent, Valerie Borchardt, initially found Invisible Beasts hard to place. “A number of editors praised its originality but didn’t know what to do with it,” Muir says. Bellevue, where commercial concerns are secondary, turned out to be the perfect fit.

“We look for books that will stand the test of time as great literature,” Hodgkins says. “Invisible Beasts delivers a powerful message: the future of the human race is intimately tied to the future of our planet and those who share it with us.” No doubt Muir’s colleagues and the animals she invented would agree. - Julie Buntin                            

    

For a book that is at least superficially interested in categories, it's surprisingly tricky to find a category in which to place Sharona Muir's Invisible Beasts. First, let's start with what it is not.

The book is comprised of tales narrated by Sophie, an amateur naturalist who has the rare ability to see a whole host of animals that are otherwise invisible to humans. It's not a novel, at least not in the traditional sense, even though it has a fallible protagonist and universal themes. But it also feels inaccurate to label it a short story collection because many of the stories don't rise above the vignette and are essentially plotless, though beautifully written. It is certainly not propaganda because, despite the narrator's (and author's?) aim to convince readers of something, it doesn't present a concrete, identifiable cause behind which one could rally.

It seems to fit the definition of a bestiary: "a descriptive or anecdotal treatise on various real or mythical kinds of animals, especially a medieval work with a moralizing tone" (Oxford American Dictionary). However, the incidents Sophie recounts are so intensely personal—since she's the only person who can see the creatures—and her own involvement in the encounters is essential to their telling. The contemporary setting and emphatic focus on science, coupled with a decidedly modern gonzo narrator, feels anachronistic to a medieval genre.

What it might most closely resemble is a love letter. Full of language that is at once passionate and precise, flowery and full of information, the book is bursting at the seams with a strange duality, a dizzying mash-up of romanticism and science. But more on love later.

Sophie leads the reader through a Fibonacci-spiraled taxonomy of invisible animals. There are common beasts such as The Couch Conch (which sometimes appears in one's bedroom the morning after lovemaking, reflecting on its shell scenes from the prior evening's amorous exploits) and Truth Bats (tiny bats which cling unnoticed to the bodies of truthful people, only to be scared off when one tells a lie). There are also imperiled and rare beasts such as the Foster Fowl, a peacock-like bird that will raise any egg placed in its nest and is somehow able to teach "a duck to swim, an owl to hunt, and a vulture to scavenge." Sophie also tells us about Grand Tour Butterflies, which display stunning pictures of the far-off places they've visited in the patterns on their wings.

Along the way, Sophie is intermittently advised by her sister Evie, a 'real' scientist studying, among other natural phenomena, soil gases, using a fascinating coiled contraption affectionately dubbed "The Worm." Although Evie's unable to the see the invisible creatures herself, she (and the rest of her family) "accepts the odd-sighted person without quibbles or qualms, in the spirit of generous tolerance and fun that animates the scientific community." She aptly and patiently provides both foil and complement to Sophie's temperament and endeavors.

At various points, Sophie opines that if human beings knew about the existence of this entire world of unseen animals living amongst them, they would surely kill or enslave them immediately. But she doesn't claim to be better than anyone else. Sophie, too, can be shortsighted, acting unthinkingly. Although her tone occasionally teeters on the edge, she somehow manages to stay just this side of the thin line between earnest and holier-than-thou. What saves her from veering into cloyingness is that she can't even stop herself from destroying what she sets out to protect: she believes she may have been the cause of an entire species' extinction. Instead of delving into self-loathing, Sophie doesn't dwell upon her shortcomings. Aside from one melodramatic sentence about "the weighing of souls," she states her mistakes and faults plainly, then moves on. Regarding mass extinction (not only inevitable, but already in progress), her philosophy seems to be less, Won't somebody please think of the children?! and more, Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.

In Invisible Beasts, Muir has penned a not-so-subtle call for awareness, for attention to be paid to the world around us. This little treatise peeks its head out from the midst of our decidedly indoor, inwardly focused society in which nature itself is becoming an increasingly smaller and smaller niche interest. It is published by Bellevue Literary Press, a non-profit publisher working "at the intersection of the arts and sciences because [they] believe that science and the humanities are natural companions for understanding the human experience." Muir's intellectually exuberant, impassioned writing fits Bellevue's mission statement almost too perfectly. Like any worthy scientist, she raises questions but doesn't provide easy answers. Instead, she implores her readers to open their eyes, their hearts, and their imaginations, because "without imagination, we can't stop extinction."

The result is a head-on collision of heavy-handed romantic prose and detailed scientific description, both of which are equally rapturous. In addition to the invisible beasts, Muir also describes the biological processes of some real animals. She writes these real animals almost more passionately than the imaginary ones, so much so that it's sometimes hard to tell which scientific facts are real and which are invented. In one story she explains the respiratory system of spiders, called "book lungs," which sounded so fanciful I had to look them up. (They're real.)

Muir's most prominent theme is an ancient and familiar one—that human beings are animals. Sophie states plainly, "It's the belief of a scientific observer of animals. I'm animal through and through." But the more interesting themes may be only a little deeper beneath the surface.

For most of the book, Sophie is alone, literally but also romantically. She has neither lover nor partner. Once she meets a man, Sam, who piques her interest, but he is a "devoted naturalist" who studies visible animals and lives in a "parallel, nonintersecting universe." Clearly, it would never work between them.

It's not until the epilogue when the idea of a real-life love is introduced and even then, Sophie is alone in bed, save for her dog, reading a love letter, the majority of which seems to be recounting an old fable about Aristophanes. Sophie's ability to see the unseen isolates her—from other naturalists, from potentials lovers, even from her sister. What does it mean for her to be alone in this gift?

Still, it all comes down to love for Sophie. Which may be why the book refuses to fit neatly into a category, especially the one it most closely mimics, whose main goal is to moralize nature. Sophie does not seek to moralize anything, despite her momentary lapses into an adjacent tone. On the contrary, she seeks to emphasize the animal nature inherent in all humans, and in turn, the love inherent in all of the animal kingdom. - Nora Boydston

For Sharona Muir, the bestiary is a literary genre of its own. Her novel Invisible Beasts is part anthology and part field-guide, but mostly it's the story of a young woman who sees animals nobody else can. Her experiences unfold in the form of a scientific catalog of animals.

These descriptions are sensitive and elegant. However, this book maintains a sense of polemical urgency, to which the very invisibility of the beasts it describes is a testament.

Invisible Beasts explores the development of Sophie's skills, and of her discovery of the next in her family to share this ability:

I come from a long line of naturalists and scientists going back many generations, and in each generation we have had the gift of discovering hard-to-see phenomena, from a shelled amoeba lurking between two sand grains, to the misfolded limb of a protein pointing to a genetic flaw. This book also follows a venerable family tradition, but one never exposed to public view. Perhaps "trait" would be a better word than "tradition." Every so often, that is, every second or third generation, someone is born in our family who sees invisible animals.

As is evident from the meticulous distinction Sophie makes between tradition and trait, this book hews to evolutionary rules. These fantastical creatures follow the laws of natural selection, even in their invisibility.

The entry for "Feral Parfumier Bees" describes a bee colony, isolated in the Pleistocene:

Invisible, or Parfumier, Bees are natives of Asia, where they likely spring from the oldest lineage of honeybees, the red-bellied dwarf honeybee, Micrapis Florea. Though noble in their antiquity, Micrapis have never been the brightest bees on the planet—they never learned to waggle-dance, for example.

Sophie's biologist sister, Evie, offers, throughout the text, scientific explanations, and sisterly wit, even though she lacks the sight that her sister possesses: "What that means," Evie says, explaining the term escalator to extinction, "is, like, birds follow the plants and animals they eat into cooler climates…for which they haven't evolved."

As with the bees, the evolution of invisibility sometimes appears as itself an adaptation, for animals that struggle in their environment, whether that's the Asian bees that evolve into parfumiers rather than honey-makers because of their subsistence on unfamiliar resins, or the Pluricorn, a "wretched" animal barely clinging to the survival of its species:

Craning into the leafage, he sported a barbed brow horn, a fringe of curly tusks, a horn projecting from his chest, and big spurs, like ivory artichokes, on his rather knock-need legs. Over his head, a massive rack cast a grotesque, thorny shadow. Poor beast, he kept bashing himself on the hawthorn trunk, or tipping too far to one side and pawing rapidly to adjust.

Most of his equipment looks like antler tissue gone berserk, but his leg spurs look like naked bone protruding from under his skin. That has to hurt.

Invisible Beasts' publisher, Bellevue Literary Press, dedicates itself to books at the intersection of art and science, and it's in the descriptions of the invisible beasts, like the Parfumier Bees and the Pluricorn, that the affinity between the two seemingly disparate fields is revealed most clearly. Storytelling remains the only access to those real, visible species, now extinct, like the dire-wolves and the ground sloths that shared the Parfumier Bees' cave, or to the many living species most humans will never directly encounter, whether Rotifers or Chinese water deer, whose tusks the Pluricorn shares.

And it's through this affinity between storytelling and evolutionary biology that the book's urgency comes through. While the interlinked entries are packed with fanciful, beautiful, often humorous descriptions of invisible animals, the book's implicit argument is that all animals are invisible until humans recognize them, and so recognize their own dependence on a diversity of species, even those that seem invisible to most of us.

The stories Sophie tells imagine the animals' evolutionary path. The Fine Print Rotifer, included, punnily, under a section headed Invisible Beasts in Print, not because, like the other animals included in this section, this rotifer exists only in written records, but because it literally lives in, and on, print:

We are talking optimal foraging theory, which applies to all animal foraging, including your own shopping route. … And where do FPRs find their tasty ink molecules? In letters and words. So they develop foraging routes in the shapes of letters and words.

Fine Print Rotifers, in Muir's account, are responsible for the impenetrability of fine print because they subsist on the fine print of contracts, insurance policies, and mortgages.

Despite the passion Muir has for her subjects and the stories of their evolution—"Who could not love a process that refined raw accidents into rare advantages?" Sophie asks—this book is neither didactic nor preachy, and Muir never lets the catalog structure make the narrative repetitive or plodding. Her storytelling is both funny and tender. In the section in which Sophie discovers a previously-unknown invisible species, the Hypnogator, Muir combines includes both danger and romance.

On trip to a Georgia sea island, Sophie discovers an invisible species she has never encountered. But its invisibility does not make the Hypnogator any more friendly than its visible counterparts:

the cold, ugly, glowing stones appeared. They blinked, left, left, right. I couldn't stop my mind from following their code, the code to confusion. I remembered that I'd locked onto Leif's kicking body, but a mental mist—like the one when you're about to black out—had kept me from knowing, except in glimpses, if I was still holding on.

The Hypnogator, like its visible brethren, is terrifying, and dangerous. There is, here, no excessive sentimentality about animals—whether visible or not. Rather, the attention to detail that our naturalist/narrator brings to her observations of beasts only she can see, also serves the narrative, developing characters and relationships that are flawed, poignant, beguiling.

This inventory of fantastical beasts allows Muir to tell a story at the level of the human, but also all of humanity. We don't, Invisible Beasts argues, have to be able to see animals to value them. Beasts exert profound influences on the way humans live, both in individual relationships and in our relationship to the world. And beasts, a category used here in all its expansiveness, includes everything from the human to the microbe. This book is a wondrous testament to those relationships, interdependencies, and affinities. Invisible Beasts makes the bestiary a document of profoundly human dimensions, and offers to all readers, whether devotees of science or of fantasy, very real pleasures. - Madeleine Monson-Rosen

Invisible Beasts is a peculiar, whimsical book with some very original ideas. The writing has a unique aesthetic born of a series of keen observations based on biological rhythm. Surprisingly existential, it’s filled with explorations on what separates human and animal, as well as some of the things we may have in common. The text is written in a guidebook style, with various entries on the different invisible beasts that Sophie has encountered. This structural choice is a dual-edged sword; on the one hand, the guidebook field notes are interesting stand-alone anecdotes, but they do make the reading a bit choppy. These aren’t purposeless diversions, however, and they exhibit some skilled writing and secondary observations on human behavior through the lens of a naturalist cataloging animals. 

Not a great amount of time is spent on Sophie’s personal life—she is, after all, on a serious quest to catalogue the most endangered of all species, and has little time for social niceties. There is some development regarding the relationship between Sophie and her sister, but it’s less of a focal point and more of a side note. Rather a shame, as the glimpses at Sophie’s character are quite compelling, and it’s easy to imagine the kinds of places Muir could take a more linear tale. Readers who pick up Invisible Beasts expecting a traditional story thread will likely be disappointed, but there is still reward enough for those who continue on through the book.

Those who are not daunted by the lack of strong narrative will find that the pages move very quickly, as Invisible Beasts is not an extremely lengthy work. Muir’s various animal concepts range in varying degrees of believability, but many are eccentrically charming. My personal favorite of the beasts were the Keen-Ears, creatures with hearing so excellent, they can detect the pulse of an owl flying overhead, or the sound of blood coursing through vessels. There is also an Antarctic Glass Kraken. If that doesn't intrigue you, I don't know what will.

Invisible Beasts does something that not a lot of books strive to do. It doesn’t make firm statements or try to draw readers with a complex plot or characterization. Its real purpose appears to be highlighting the true bizarreness of life on earth and all the planet’s tenants. Keeping that in mind, it’s easier to accept Invisible Beasts as an erudite guidebook to the “animals” that walk unseen among us. - Leah Dearborn

Ever seen a Feral Parfumier Bee? A Beanie Shark? A Truth Bat?

Of course not. They’re invisible.

In Sharona Muir’s charming and inventive Invisible Beasts*, which will be available tomorrow, we meet Sophie, a naturalist with a peculiar genetic quirk: she can see invisible animals. Invisible Beasts belongs to these invisible creatures, rather than to Sophie, but her humane (in the best sense) voice links each tale together, and gradually we gain a sense of her life’s contours and concerns. Her sister, Evie, is a biologist, and the two sisters are linked by their concern for the natural world, though pushed apart, sometimes by how they perceive it.

Because Invisible Beasts eschews plot in favor of description — and rightly so — it feels odd to call it a novel, when really it is, as Sophie points out, a bestiary, a compendium of beasts. Bestiaries date back to antiquity, and have been written in every age since. Often, an animal — real or imagined — is pictured, a description is given, and some sort of lesson is imparted (for example, how an animal is an allegory for a virtue or a vice). Ms. Muir’s book forgoes illustration, of course, but her descriptions are glorious in their multi-textured detail. Part of the fun of reading Invisible Beasts is the unexpected, so I won’t quote here — but I hope you’ll have the pleasure of reading it for yourself. Sophie, through her whimsical and funny descriptions of her beloved creatures, offers us insights about love, sex, truthfulness, perspective, and the passage of time.

As for lessons: Ms. Muir is significantly more subtle than her medieval predecessors, though Invisible Beasts is deeply concerned with humanity’s relationship with the natural world; this is definitely environmental fiction. Invisible Beasts is a book about, at its heart, symbiosis, and how we understand our own humanity through the non-human. - rosemaryandreadingglasses.com/2014/07/14/recommended-reading-invisible-beasts-by-sharona-muir/

A Conversation with Sharona Muir on Invisible Beasts

Q: I think we all sense that there is an invisible world around us, but through Sophie’s eyes and the magic of fiction, you allow readers to “see” it. Why is this “seeing” so important?

A: The problems facing humanity’s relationship with nature can seem impossible: the bees we rely on for pollination are dying; the fish we eat are dwindling; pandemics are on the rise; so are the oceans; and species are going extinct en masse. In this time, we need to see through new eyes. We need “consilience”—E.O. Wilson’s term for the unity of knowledge: art, science, and the humanities working together, toward a more harmonious culture. Maybe, too, we need to think a bit crazy, follow Folly. In the words of Sophie, the narrator of Invisible Beasts, “we need to see the beasts that we don’t see.”

Q: Throughout the book, the beasts Sophie interacts with are seemingly integral to her own wellbeing. Why is that?

A: I volunteered for a year with Humane Society animal cruelty officers. I watched the officers teach people to better care for their pets, attended the trial of a hardened abuser, and followed the case of a dog burned by its owners. I also observed the complex ties between human and nonhuman wellbeing. Humane officers, for example, are mandated to look for child abuse when they find abused animals, and battered women more often leave bad situations when the Humane Society shelters their pets for them temporarily. Mainly, I learned that animals and people make up a single system in society, inseparable from each other: where the animals are healthy and happy, so are the people, and vice versa. This experience inspired the chapter, “The Riddle of Invisible Dogs.”

Q: Invisible Beasts is published by Bellevue Literary Press, a nonprofit press with a mission to publish work at the intersection of the arts and sciences, and it’s clear how much scientific fact is folded into the imaginary creatures of Invisible Beasts. Did you consult with scientists and, if so, why was it important to you to “get the science right” in a work of fiction?

A: When I was small, my father, who was then inventing the world’s first remote cardiac catheter in his home laboratory, told me that Mother Nature visited him in dreams, offering ideas. When I asked what she looked like, he replied, “A beautiful lady who sits in a golden egg.” Like my father’s visitor, the truth I try to convey in writing lies somewhere between a dream journal and a research abstract. Since childhood, I’ve always loved best the stories that scientists tell about nature.

Invisible Beasts began as a game played with some biologist friends. I would glean a few odd facts from the Internet, and then invent an imaginary animal based on them. I would then describe the imaginary animals to the biologists. Typically, they would reply, “Oh yes, there’s a creature that does that.”

This proved the principle that whatever human imagination could concoct, nature already had.  Finally, I invented an animal (“The Golden Egg,”) that I was sure didn’t exist: it nourished itself on the energy released by natural cold fusion. I mean, cold fusion. My biologist colleagues smiled and said, “In principle, it’s possible … and we don’t know everything that’s out there.” This seemed magical.

I also love medieval and ancient bestiaries: they are enchantingly poetic; they tell us how weasels conceive through their ears and give birth through their mouths, like talk show hosts; or how snakes stun prey with their dazzling beauty. What they did not do—rather spectacularly—was to concern themselves with real biology. By bringing science into Invisible Beasts, I kept a factual core to evoke a sense of real animals, wonderfully different from us. I also had fun learning some biology and using it in my stories with the weirdest possible logic.

Q: Writers such as Karen Russell, who has been credited with transforming “the everyday into a wriggling bestiary” and Caspar Henderson, who wrote the popular work of nonfiction The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary, also seem to be putting contemporary spins on the classic genre. Is there something about the bestiary form itself that seems right for this moment?

A: The book I first loved passionately was Moby-Dick. I used to read my palm-sized edition on the Boston subway, going to and from school. If a fellow passenger asked whether I was reading “the Good Book,” I’d say, “Yes.” Each of those many depictions of whales was a window into life—and the life of the mind—through an animal, a fantastic beast with a mind of its own. But Invisible Beasts is no White Whale—it’s more like a Jurassic Park dinosaur, hatched out from the ancient bestiary genre in the twenty-first century.

I learned about bestiaries in college, as a Renaissance major. Bringing this form, the catalogue of animals, into a new literary era, owes something to science fiction, but also to my living in a small forest, in rural Ohio, where you just tell animal tales. When you live around foxes, hawks, warblers, toads, eagles, snakes, woodchucks, coyotes, opossums, mice, bees, rabbits, deer, wild turkeys, butterflies, and who knows what else—you gossip about them. It’s only human. You gossip about the raccoon that ate the wren eggs; you wonder if the lonely toad that was singing in cold weather found a mate. Then you talk about the tadpoles that suggest he did. You sit out late on your porch because a catbird is giving a concert of improvisations that would have delighted Bird.

In this atmosphere, Invisible Beasts became my tribute to the bestiary, a beautiful form that helped—and still helps—to create poetic, meaningful connections between the image of an animal and the concerns of human life.

Q: Are there other works of fiction that particularly inspire you?

A: The Praise of Folly is a 16^th-century bestseller dashed off by the great humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam, while staying with his friend Thomas More, later beheaded. My copy dates from 1942, translated by Hendrik Willem van Loon, a Dutch historian banned by the Nazis. In this droll little book for serious times, the Goddess of Folly proves in a public lecture that all human beings are fools, and therefore, should smile tolerantly upon one another. The imagination, wisdom, and large spirit of this book are my standard candles. I also find them, twinkling as it were, in the exquisite fables of Italo Calvino.

Q: Among many other things, Invisible Beasts is a poignant meditation on family and love and the responsibilities that pass from one generation to the next. Sophie’s story—and that of her nephew who shares her gift—is also a reminder that we all handle responsibilities differently and that burdens can’t always be shared, even with the ones we love the most. Despite all of that, your novel is one of hope. Is there any single message you wish readers to take away with them after turning the last page?

A: I had to write about serious times in The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secrets of My Father’s Lives. That memoir arose from my chance discovery, after my father’s death, that he had built Israel’s first rocket, together with a secret group of scientists, during Israel’s war of independence. Finding the group, and writing their untold story, I learned something important about creativity. Living through the Holocaust and the 1948 war, the group had suffered events no one had believed possible. One result was to abolish, from their imaginations, the limits of the possible. They’d try anything. Nothing was too crazy. “I always begin with the impossible,” said the director of Israel’s missile program in the 1960s. He added, “If it isn’t a little impossible, it isn’t R&D.”

The lesson remains: begin with the impossible.

Q: And do you find joy in that mission?

A: Writing is usually awful: you sit in silence, alone, prone to munchies, hunched over in a miserable posture, losing circulation, and staring at tiny black marks with dried-out eyes. But when I wrote Invisible Beasts, I laughed all the time. I even laughed in my sleep. - blpress.org/author-qas/conversation-sharona-muir-invisible-beasts/

An Interview with Sharona Muir, Author of Invisible Beasts

Sharona Muir, The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secrets of My Father’s Lives. Bison Books, 2008.

Sharona Ben-Tov Muir discovered after the death of her father, inventor and New Age guru Itzhak Bentov, that he had created Israel’s first rocket. A secret group of scientists working in a rooftop shed, the “Science Corps,” of which he was a part, invented weapons during Israel’s war of independence and later developed Israel’s nuclear resources and other major scientific projects. Bentov, however, settled in Boston and made his fortune with such medical inventions as a cardiac catheter, which he created in his home laboratory, where Muir played as a child. Haunted by the question of why her father had never discussed his past, Muir traveled to Israel to find the Corps.

Through her own memories and the memories they share, Muir comes to know the brilliant, impassioned, and creative young Bentov as he demonstrates his latest invention for her, takes her canoeing, and reveals his thoughts about consciousness and the cosmos. Muir elegantly evokes the hubbub of Jerusalem streets, the wartime adventures of her hosts, and the inner lives of Israelis. The resulting story of invention and self-invention, of the Corps’s wartime experience as told for the first time, and of a deep, abiding love between father and daughter is an incandescent memoir. The author provides a new preface for this new Bison Books edition.

“Sharona Muir’s gifts for narrative, cultural insight and imagery make this memoir a brave and remarkable book, all the more remarkable for being free of easy sentiment. As a tender but unflinching memoir of a lost soul, it is hard to forget. As a personalized account of a country shaped by desperation, it contains the kernel of the Israel we know—or think we know—today.”—Kapka Kassabova

“In her compelling memoir . . . . Muir discovers that Hemmed’s work and the inventiveness of her father in particular was grounded in something other than weapon-making.”—Jerusalem Post

“The Book of Telling tells of a woman’s journey to uncover the secret life of her father and to find herself in the process, an unusual counterpoint between personal history and the history of a young nation. Haunting, powerful, and beautifully written.”—Alan Lightman

“Sharona Muir has written a gripping personal memoir about her odyssey to rediscover and reclaim her father. Along the way she uncovers some hard truths about the heroic founders of Israel and the Beginnings of Israeli science. The Book of Telling keeps in all the fears and resentments and consolations and warmth of such a process—at once her own story and the tale of a nation.”—Edmund White

“In the rich field of contemporary Jewish American female memoir, this book is among the finest in print. With this daughter’s journey come remarkable insights into the nature of genius, the nature of cultural dislocation, the inventions of new identity, memory, femininity, and history. Identity, female identity included, as Muir painstakingly unveils it in this novel of origins, is inseparable from world history, personal memory, postmodern diasporas, the age of science, and the ever-present threat of Jewish extinction.”—Gloria Cronin

“An extraordinary story, exceptionally well told, and absolutely true to character. I met people like these during my years in Israel, painful amalgams of irrepressible brilliance and unconquerable melancholy who would sometimes allude to a mysterious past but seldom elaborated. Sharona Muir has done so well in getting them to talk while, at the same time, bringing out their faults and human flaws.”—Norman Lebrecht

“The Book of Telling opens with a sequence of lyric evocations of the elusive father whose influence made Sharona Muir into both a poet and a scholar. By the end of this memoir, her passionate investigation has drawn Itzhak Bentov partly out of the shadows that protected his work as an Israeli defense scientist, and given the book a historical scope that never ceases to be poignantly intimate.”—Diane Middlebrook

“A fascinating narrative, both poetic and sober, appreciative of complexities and free of self-delusions, working from sign to symbol, through personal experience and second-hand testimony to flashes of imaginative reconstruction and existential insight.”—Leona Toker