It is worth noting that Bailey begins each section with a brief quotation, and laces the text with her scholarship-though she never treats the scholarly study of snails with the reserve or distance of an academic.
Survival, resilience, and intellectual curiosity also emerge as themes, and the illness narrative transforms, in Bailey’s clear prose, into an exploration of the vital possibilities of even the smallest life-forms. The snail is treated as both a creature apart from the author and as an objective correlative for the author herself-but this story is not only about vulnerability and safety. The book’s main concern is the subject of her increasing obsession-her relationship with, and intellectual curiosity about, her pet snail. Her text, however, does not linger on discussion of her illness or her particular symptoms. As many people with profound illnesses do, Bailey experiences disorientation, listlessness, an attenuated sense of time. After an initial period of sickness and recovery, Bailey becomes bedridden again, and she explains that “more sophisticated testing showed that the mitochondria in my cells no longer functioned correctly and there was damage to my autonomic nervous system all functions not consciously directed. We learn the origins of Bailey’s medical condition in the first pages of the book: “At age thirty-four, on a brief trip to Europe, I was felled by a mysterious viral or bacterial pathogen, resulting in severe neurological symptoms” (4). The snail arrives in a pot of wild violets dug up from the woods beside a friend’s studio apartment, and it becomes a companion to Bailey during her illness. Mixing genres effortlessly, the author relates detailed facts about the lives of snails, literary appreciations of gastropods, her own medical history, and the moving story of her long, bedridden year with one very particular snail for a pet. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elizabeth Tova Bailey, is a brief study of snails, among other important subjects.
I remembered the snail from the world of childhood, perhaps the last time I had the opportunity to stop what I was doing long enough to appreciate the tiny life-form. Its brown body was retractable into its slightly darker brown shell. “Snails teach children about vulnerability and safety,” the catalog claimed, but I had already gone past the text and was gazing instead at the little snail head, its two horns happily protuberant, its mouth open, holding a couple of fragments of leaf. Once, a catalog of children’s therapy supplies offered something I instantly wanted-a hand-puppet of a snail. I’d bring them upstairs, then flip through them at the kitchen table. Sometimes, catalogs arrived in the mail for special purposes: play therapy toys, professional development courses. Years ago, I had a housemate who was a psychologist.
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