One wave, glimpsed from the inside, twists “like the iris of a camera lens opening.” Another has “hues in its depths so intense they felt like first editions.” He enshrines the texture of dozens if not hundreds of them. Finnegan seems to remember every wave he ever surfed. There are so many fine descriptions of waves that, as you await more sets of them to emerge on the horizon, you begin to feel like the Estonian judge at a skating event, ready to hold up a score card that reads 7.4 or 8.9. He becomes a walking database of oceanographic information. If this is your thing, this will be your thing. The star is the surfing, and the waves, which the author studies all over the world, from a hundred different angles.
This is a very long book with excellent things in it, but it can be like watching a brooding film that’s mostly fine cinematography. “Barbarian Days” reminds you, though, that not being able to find fault with something isn’t the same as loving it.
There isn’t a line the most mischievous critic could single out for ridicule. Just sturdy verbs, a casual flowing power, tantric masculine reticence, a melancholy sense of a sidewise-drifting life, little humor. Finnegan, with “Barbarian Days,” has written a memoir that passes the outback test with ease.
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