On one of my usual trips to the Helsinki Library for returning a stack of books and hunting for new ones, I wandered past the shelf of “most borrowed” titles near the entrance. I’d spotted Orbital by Samantha Harvey sitting there before, but this time curiosity won me over, and I borrowed it home.

From the very first pages, I had the strangest feeling (in a good way): no one could have written this book in an ordinary state of mind. Harvey’s prose is deep, lyrical, and achingly beautiful. It is almost as if she were channeling something elemental. I found myself pausing often, rereading entire sentences just to let them sink in, and even copying them into my commonplace book so I wouldn’t lose them and I could reread them anytime in the future when I am looking for something beautifully written.

What touched me most was the way Harvey writes about our planet, about human anxiety, and about the slow, unstoppable passage of time. She manages to capture feelings I’ve carried for years but never had the words to express. Reading her work felt like someone had finally spoken aloud the things I could only sense.

After finishing the book, I looked it up on Goodreads and was genuinely surprised by the average rating. The most common criticism seems to be that it has no plot. However, I didn’t notice that while reading, because I was too touched and carried away by Harvey’s words. If I had seen those numbers beforehand, I might have skipped it altogether. That realization left me with a strange sense of luck, as though I’d stumbled upon something quietly extraordinary, something many readers may have passed over. I’m glad I trusted my own curiosity instead of the Goodreads crowd; otherwise, I might have missed a book this remarkable.

My Favorite Bits

• .. all those things are beautiful, because their beauty doesn’t come from their goodness, you didn’t ask if progress is good, and a person is not beautiful because they’re alive, like a child. Alive and curious and restless. Never mind good. They’re beautiful because there’s a light in their eyes. Sometimes destructive, sometimes hurtful, sometimes selfish, but beautiful because alive. And progress is like that, by its natural alive.

• We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnace of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievements of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything.

• How are we writing the future of humanity? We’re not writing anything, it’s writing us. We’re windblown leaves. We think we’re the wind, but we’re just the leaf.

• because he’s a man who disappoints himself with his need of firm ground. He needs stability inside and out, and to simplify his life lest it overwhelm him. There are people like him (so he says) who complicate their inner lives by feeling too much all at once, by living in knots, and who therefore need outer things to be simple. A house, a field, some sheep for example. And there are those who manage somehow, by some miracle of being, to simplify their inner lives so that outer things can be ambitious and limitless. Those people can swap out a house for a spaceship, a field for a universe. And though he’d give his leg to be the latter, it’s not the kind of thing you can trade a leg for – in any case who’d want his leg if they already had limitlessness?

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Author: Samantha Harvey
Publication date: 2 November 2023
Number of pages: 224 pages

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