Winner (Bronze), 2020 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards – Science Fiction
Winner (Silver), 2020 Literary Titan Book Awards
Finalist, 2021 International Book Awards – Science Fiction
Centuries from now, in a post-climate change dying boreal forest of what used to be northern Canada, Kyo, a young acolyte called to service in the Exodus, discovers a diary that may provide her with the answers to her yearning for Earth’s past—to the Age of Water, when the “Water Twins” destroyed humanity in hatred—events that have plagued her nightly in dreams. Looking for answers to this holocaust—and disturbed by her macabre longing for connection to the Water Twins—Kyo is led to the diary of a limnologist from the time just prior to the destruction. This gritty memoir describes a near-future Toronto in the grips of severe water scarcity during a time when China owns the USA and the USA owns Canada. The diary spans a twenty-year period in the mid-twenty-first century of 33-year-old Lynna, a single mother who works in Toronto for CanadaCorp, an international utility that controls everything about water, and who witnesses disturbing events that she doesn’t realize will soon lead to humanity’s demise. A Diary in the Age of Water follows the climate-induced journey of Earth and humanity through four generations of women, each with a unique relationship to water. The novel explores identity and our concept of what is “normal”—as a nation and an individual—in a world that is rapidly and incomprehensibly changing.
“Evoking Ursula LeGuin’s unflinching humane and moral authority, Nina Munteanu takes us into the lives of four generations of women and their battles against a global giant that controls and manipulates Earth’s water. In a diary that entwines acute scientific observation with poignant personal reflection, Lynna’s story unfolds incrementally, like climate change itself. Particularly harrowing are the neighbourhood water betrayals, along with Lynna’s deliberately dehydrated appearance meant to deflect attention from her own clandestine water collection. Her estrangement from her beloved daughter, her “dark cascade” who embarks upon a deadly path of her own, is heartwrenching. Munteanu elegantly transports us between Lynna’s exuberant youth and her tormented present, between microcosm and macrocosm, linking her story and struggles-and those of her mother, daughter, and granddaughter-to the life force manifest in water itself. In language both gritty and hauntingly poetic, Munteanu delivers an uncompromising warning of our future.”
—Lynn Hutchinson Lee, multimedia artist, author, and playwright
“Transcendent….A book of genuine power, A Diary in the Age of Water, is simply and beautifully told, profoundly true; a novel that invites us all to embrace the wisdom of ages. The story stirs its readers, teaches them about the importance of water, and leaves an indubitable imprint on the canvas of the literary and scientific world.”
—Lucia Monica Gorea, author of Journey Through My Soul
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125.5.2 AW
We are the water-keepers. The keepers of legends. We are the keepers of the memory of prophecy. These “memories” are recorded outside of time and space. The prophecy of Gaia speaks of the great dying of our friends, the breathers. They breathe us in to receive our gift, and then breathe us out with their gift inside us. Their extinction is also a gift, just as all taking is giving and all giving is taking. We are the water-keepers.
The first truth of water-keeping is that water cannot be kept.
The Library
Kyo runs through the dying forest of the north. The last boreal forest in the world.
The rain earlier this morning left the forest dripping with living moisture and saturated the air with the scent of giant conifers. Their fragrance is intoxicating, a fresh pungency that lingers like the smell of fresh water. The giant buttressed trees rise like pillars out of soggy ground. They push past the mixed hardwood canopy and pierce the mist, announcing the future. Lichen drips off branches and clothes the fibrous trunks in crenulated patterns. Moss covers everything. A filigree of green, silver, and russet plays in the breeze, dancing like a wild shadow. Tugged by the wind, Kyo’s hair flows behind her like a dark turbulent river as she leaps over rough ground, her skirt flying.
Her four dark blue arms stretch out for balance as she navigates the obstacle course of fallen trees, tall ferns, and horsetails.
Already high in the sky, the sun is a large blushing orb that bathes everything in hues of pink. Nam calls it Gaia’s heart- light, a poem to heaven. Nam told her that the light was very different during the Age of Water, when the sun was sharper and shone brashly in a brilliant cerulean blue sky. Kyo imagines this sky the startling blue colour of Nam’s winking eyes. Nam, like Kyo’s other mentors, only has two arms and flesh the colour of the sand—not the electric blue of Kyo’s own skin. Despite their differences, she thinks of Nam like a mother and secretly wishes she looked like her older mentor.
Kyo stops for a moment to catch her breath and listen to the forest. Cardinals, robins, and thrushes warble and fl loudly, as if complaining about destiny. Yet, they are the interlopers. According to Myo, they took up permanent residence in the north when the climate warmed during the Age of Water. The birds that had previously lived in the north had had nowhere else to go, and had perished. Kyo remembers Ho telling her that the piping plover used to lay its eggs directly on the sand of the northern beaches. The beaches are no more, casualties of sea level rise, erosion, and storm surges; the plovers that nested on them are also no more. But other birds are coming….
The bird symphony flows through Kyo, pulsing with the Earth’s heartbeat. She catches the absolute pitch of a starling, tuned to 432 Hz as she aligns herself with nature’s intimate frequency. Renge taught her that light, sound, and matter are expressed at different frequencies, and some are only heard by the heart. All movement follows its own path, expressing its relationship with the world. Even things that aren’t moving have a potential for rhythm, internal clocks that beat their messages. Kyo runs on, gathering coherent waves of vibration, intent, and motion into one continuous and harmonious rhythm. She understands that rhythm embraces a fractal continuum that ranges from microscopic to cosmic proportions. Cell division aligns with the planet’s circadian rhythms; bees synchronize their flight with the phase of the moon; planets and stars ex- ert gravity and frequency on each other, resonating with the harmonic music of the spheres. Her world flows in constant oscillation from high to low, particle to wave, dark to light, separating and uniting, creating and destroying, and back again. All through water.
It is then that she feels her sisters the most, the other Kyos—other blue beings like her—scattered over the world in small enclaves like hers. Each whispers a harmonic tone in a soft symphony of wisdom—frequencies from all over the world, carried in the coherent domain of water vapour to resonate through her interstitial water.
They are waiting for her.
She shares their eagerness for the Exodus, but she also har- bours a secret yearning for the past as though some hidden part of her has lodged there, like a tendril of a vine reaching across time, seeking resolution—redemption, even. What is holding her back in this drowning forest? It isn’t the trees…. There is always sadness in the end of things, but endings are also beginnings, Kyo in Siberia whispers across the northern atmospheric river.
We do not feel this Canadian sadness, Kyos from Scandinavia chime in. Perhaps that part of us still clings to the mundane comfort of familiarity, given that the maple still stands strong in northern Canada.
But Kyo knows that is not true; the sugar maple—has been migrating north, scrambling to keep up with the beech, and realizing the native legend. Several are stunted, withholding the sap Kyo loves so much. Many are yellowing at the tips of their leaves and showing bare insect-infested crowns. Soon the maple will drown in the swamps of the north.
Kyo understands that she is holding her sisters back with this selfish sentiment and preoccupation with a past and a people she has only dreamed of. How is it that she alone stands apart from the rest? It is not her lack of adventure or faith. She embraces her future. Nam calls her Sprite; an endearment, she knows, but one based on Kyo’s curiosity and yearning for adventure. If her mentor knew of Kyo’s perverse and guilty obsession, she might call her something else. And certainly not with a wink.
Kyo stops at a small flowing creek, crouching to study the tracks in the muddy banks. She recognizes the giant paw marks and wide-swathed tail track of a three-metre-long beaver, a relative of the ancient giant beaver. If Renge was here she would peep with fear; but Kyo is not afraid of the huge rodent—even with its giant incisors. She focuses on the eddies that form around the rocks. Renge told her that water’s vitality relies on its rhythmic movement along surfaces and its shifting phases in a dance of synchronicity, chaotic yet self-organizing. It does this by embracing paradox.
Kyo involuntarily swallows down the truth and sits on a moss-covered boulder. She knows that her reluctance to leave has to do with the villainous Water Twins, who destroyed humanity because of their hatred for their own kind. She feels an unreasonable longing—as though a cord were tugging her back to them. The Water Twins were the first ones, the only ones from the Water Age, who had the power to instruct water, and they did so long before the new children of the forest learned how. The Twins unleashed a wrathful Gaia with their alien technology, frequency generators, and shamanic potions. Kyo has dreamed about most of it. Myo and Ho confirmed her vivid dreams with their historical documents. Why is she being plagued by accurate dreams of a time she has never experienced?
Kyo is convinced that the Water Twins somehow spawned the children of the forest—those like her. If not for the Twins, she might be normal, like the others. It is an outrageous supposition, yet she cannot shake it. The Twins destroyed the world, after all. Like Shiva and Kali. The Twins didn’t look like the children of the forest, who came much later, after humanity had been all but extinguished. It is impossible that the Twins would be connected to her.
Yet that is exactly how Kyo feels. She desperately wants to believe that the Water Twins somehow did the right thing in causing the storms and eliminating humanity from the planet; she keeps dreaming that she is there with the humans, suffering as they suffered, until only a handful of females remained. Myo, who is far too forgiving, once suggested that the Twins did it to heal both the planet and all life, like a doctor removes a festering limb to heal the body. But how can you heal with hatred and destruction? And why is it so important to Kyo?
Kyo stands up with a shrug. No matter. Today is the day she has been both dreading and anticipating for so long. Today, she will finally learn some ecological history and make her personal atonement to Gaia, who must prepare for a new age. And then she—Kyo—will transcend her current existence to make the Exodus.
Nam instructed her this morning to go to the Age of Water Library in the small beech-maple grove for her last lesson. Nam has been like a mother to Kyo: tall and elegant, with wise maternal eyes the colour of deep water, and carrying the scent and air of Nature. It is time to let go, said her mentor. Time to devote yourself to and fuse your life with the Mystic Law of Water. Time to learn about humanity’s legacy, all that humans have learned and done to prepare for their journey with water. A journey that will ultimately take them all home. At the library, Kyo is meant to choose a work, or else be given one by Ho, the librarian. Kyo will then commit it to memory before burning it and offering it in the water-keeping ceremony, which will prepare them all for their final journey.
Kyo hopes she will be worthy of her choice.
Kyo approaches the solid maple door.
She knows which book she wishes to study. It is clearly ambitious of her. Ho will be cross with her for presuming such an undertaking. The textbook is over a thousand pages; it will take her at least six months to learn it. Confident that she will convince the old librarian, Kyo glances back at the forest of her birth and pulls in a deep breath, committing it to memory. Then she reefs open the heavy door and enters the place she will spend the rest of her life on Earth.
***
The Diary
April 12, 2045
fetch: The distance that wind or waves travel unin- terrupted across open water.
—Robert Wetzel, Limnology
I remember every nuance of my mother.
Her deep laugh. Her willowy gait. Her scent, fresh and brac- ing, as though she’d captured the outdoors. The way she filled a room with her wise and gentle essence. How she spoke, in a lilting cadence, words delivered like sparkling clear water. The way she winked at me with conspiratorial joy and called me meine Wassergeist, my water sprite. Her name was Una.
Her smile came from that childhood place where the world is simple and pure. It made her eyes crease into a million golden rays. Her hair was a nest of dark curls that she sometimes pulled back, especially when she worked in the shed behind the house.
When she came inside, she brought in the smell of rain and leaves that she wore like an old coat you never want to throw away. Una sensed how the natural world worked. She’d had little formal education, yet she seemed to know more than most of my university professors. She had a keen and passionate mind, which she applied to a strong environmental ethic.
I know she loved me fiercely. But that fierceness—which extended to her passion for the planet—also had negative consequences. Like the time when she was arrested at a demonstration in Nathan Phillips Square. I was sitting in my first-grade class, listening to Ms. Belanger tell us about trees, while the rcmp arrested demonstrators protesting the ludicrous American proposal to construct the Rocky Mountain Trench Reservoir in British Columbia. When school was over, Una wasn’t waiting at the front gate to take me home. I watched as my classmates left with their parents or caregivers until I was the only one left. Then I started to cry. Our neighbour finally came to take me home. Mrs. Kravitz said I should stay with them until my mother came home from jail.
I know that she didn’t mean for it to happen, but I still felt abandoned.
After apologizing to me, Una explained that building the Rocky Mountain reservoirs and associated pipelines threatened to inundate and destroy several small towns and Indigenous communities in the Yukon and British Columbia. Canadians had to support their government in the fight against the U.S. predator who was wooing us with promises of shared wealth. It was like the U.S. was saying, give me all your candy and maybe later I’ll share some with you. Only the candy was all ours to begin with. “Imagine our home and our neighbour’s home suddenly under water,” she said to me. “We would all have to move away so people three thousand kilometres away can fill their swimming pools. If the Americans have their way, all of Canada will become their reservoir.”
Una sang all the time. German folk songs that her mother used to sing to her. Songs like Muss i denn, Die gedanken sind frei, Kein schöner Land in dieser Zeit, Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär, and Goethe’s tune Sah ein Knab ein Röslein stehn. Each day was like a glittering drop in a flowing narrative of gems. She had a way of imparting deep wisdom while either entertaining or comforting me.
One day stands out. She was wearing a bohemian, layered dress that smelled of the forest. Her dark hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail. Several rogue strands hung over her right eye. It was the day Ralph tricked me at second recess into giving him my favourite Pokémon card—a sparkly Charizard. I burst into the back shed where Una was fixing our neighbour’s chair and I just stood there, trembling with emotion. She immediately saw that I was upset and coaxed out my story.
Una then squatted to my height and looked directly at me with her intense green eyes. “Don’t make the mistake of think- ing the bully is your friend. He was never your friend. He will never be your friend.” Then she placed her hands gently on my shoulders and added with dreadful calm, “You can play with the bully. But don’t make him your friend. Demand his respect. Or you will become the bully…”
Then she pulled me close to her in a deep embrace and whispered, “come, Wassergeist….You liked sparkly Mew just as much. Now she will be even more special.” She winked.
I burst into grateful tears as she held me. Then she left the broken chair she was fixing and took us into the kitchen, where she made us some hot chocolate and told me silly stories about the chickens in the yard.
Una died today. I’ve lost my mentor. My friend. My link to compassion, wisdom, and unity. She would have been sixty-five. She should have lived another thirty years at least. Why do I feel like she’s abandoned me? I had so wanted my little Hildegard to get to know her grandmother better.
I fear what I will become…
Inanna Admin –
A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu
reviewed by Mary Woodbury
Dragonfly.eco – August 18, 2020
https://dragonfly.eco/a-diary-in-the-age-of-water-nina-munteanu/
Nina Munteanu’s newest novel, A Diary in the Age of Water, deftly follows four generations of women fighting for—and exploring scientifically, spiritually, poetically, and philosophically—water. Lynna’s mother Una and daughter Hilde understand water scientifically, but Hilde, influenced by her love-of-life Hanna, often dips into pseudoscience, which Lynna grapples with. Lynna is a limnologist, a word that has been forgotten in our future world when our current post-truth atmosphere expands and “science” is superficially served on a platter by corporations. Lynna, a real scientist, has little use for water muses outside metaphor, though she transforms throughout the novel and begins to regret some of her prior actions in life. Then there’s the youngest sprite, Kyo, an electric-blue female with four arms, who is self-conscious about her appearance and searches for the truth about where she came from, why she is different, and why the world has become the way it is.
Kyo’s questions lead to her to a sacred library where she finds Lynna’s diary, which makes up the biggest portion of the novel. Why is the world the way it is, and who is she? I won’t spoil things, but Lynna’s diary exposes how the world has gotten the way it is. Lynna, born in our decade, writes about her life’s experiences and memories. Readers will recognize her past but not the world we become. Lynna’s a pragmatic water scientist, one who lives and breathes knowledge. At the start of each diary entry is a definition of a scientific term, often relating to water, and then what follows is usually Lynna’s human experiences that reflect the biological behavior of the term. The experiences are regretful, nostalgic, solastalgic (yes, a term that’s real, describing the distress one feels with environmental change and destruction), and memorable. Lynna writes sentimentally about her mother and daughter—the people who mean the most in the world to her. But she also speaks of the world, and in the setting of the story—the last half of the 21st century—corporations and policies have continued to ruin natural ecology and change the long-term climate in the world. At the heart of everything, Lynna reminds her diary, is water. It makes up two-thirds of our bodies and two-thirds of the planet.
A Diary in the Age of Water is an insightful novel, where at the heart of life is water and when water is destroyed, so is life. Like Ouroboros, this destruction and creation cycle continues, as it has forever, only Diary shows the extreme events set into motion by humans on Earth that have caused the current cycle of destruction to happen before its time. The author is Canadian, where the story is set, and reveals through Lynna how Canadians have sold off their fresh water to companies in China and the US. And now water is so limited that having a cistern of any kind is illegal. Having lived in Canada now for nearly 15 years, I clutched at the places in the story that I’ve known, holding them dear and close as if embracing them could somehow prevent them from scampering off to their deaths: the Great Bear and boreal forests, the Athabasca Glacier, many rivers, some of which I’ve paddled on, like the Bella Coola and the Fraser—and even my current home, Nova Scotia. And I nodded to the Canadian stories the author revisits in the novel, stories I’ve learned while living here, like the true story of Josephine Mandamin, an Anishinaabe Elder, who performed water-healing walks around the Great Lakes (described in the novel as great puddles now). Diary gives testament, too, to the power of women and how they are and have always been the water-keepers. However, the first truth of water-keeping is that water cannot be kept.
Diary is eye-opening, even if you already understand and acknowledge the great climate catastrophe happening before our very eyes. The biological definitions and metaphors within the novel are salient and engrossing. They shape the reader’s understanding of the natural world and how humans are part of that world but don’t usually make the smartest decisions about how to live in it. This is fiction to be reckoned with. It joins many other recent novels where artists attempt to elucidate, explore, and transpose to story-form our changing world. New and diverse literary genres have sprung up in the last few decades to wrap their heads around real climate and ecological changes, and older genres, such as science fiction, have continued to fold these novels under their wing. Diary is a unique story among these because the reader gets to know a mother and a scientist’s viewpoint of the world that we’re in and are headed, and, if nothing else, we should be trusting our mothers and real scientists. That world is not pretty. It’s not a world we want to be in, but we’re already there, as Diary gives testament to early on. Diary is a cautionary tale rummaging through the forgotten drawers of time in the lives of four generations. It pulls out interesting tidbits, facts, and heartwarming memories along the way, and sets them afloat in the ever-present current of time. This whirling, holistic, and evolving novel comes alive, like we imagine water does.
Inanna Admin –
A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu
reviewed by Bianca Bowers
Foreword Reviews – August 19, 2020
https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/a-diary-in-the-age-of-water/
Clarion Rating: 5 out of 5
Nina Munteanu’s engrossing science fiction novel, A Diary in the Age of Water, explores the impacts of climate change through four generations of women.
Kyo, a four-limbed blue being, runs through the last boreal forest in the world. While she can access the past with her dreams, she cannot recall the mysterious Intervention that saved humanity from extinction during the Age of Water. Wanting to understand, Kyo reads textbooks in the Gaia virtual library. But her progress is slow before she discovers a journal, dated 2045, written by Lynna.
Lynna’s evocative journal entries introduce three generations of women—Una, Lynna, and Hilde—whose unique relationships with water inform their personalities and trajectories. Though Una lives through water’s abundant phase, she anticipates that water restrictions will follow water commodification and climate change, and she combines her parental and environmental activist roles into one. Lynna takes a safer approach to parenting and water when she becomes a limnologist. Like the inland bodies of water she studies, Lynna is both restless and captive, having chosen to uphold the status quo to protect her daughter, Hilde. Lynna works for CanadaCorp, from whom Canadians collect their daily water quotas. But Hilde, who anthropomorphizes and deifies water, recognizes its entrapment and is compelled to liberate it somehow, and at any cost. As the greater story unfolds through Lynna’s journal entries, Kyo pieces pre-Intervention events together in her mind and learns about the origins of her kind.
Water is the dominant motif, and the world building cornerstone, in this futuristic and familiar setting, in which climate change has resulted in a new world order and a sociopolitical climate of distrust and fear. Here, China owns the US, and the US owns an unrecognizable version of Canada in which Niagara Falls and house taps are shut off. Lynna worries that her dehydrated neighbors will become informants should they discover her illegal collection of rainwater or her domestic cat, Kleos, who, along with all pets, is considered an “unaffordable water burden” and is therefore forbidden.
Scientific terms and theoretical definitions are woven into the poetic narrative in a deft manner. A thalweg, which marks the natural direction of a watercourse, becomes an analogy for how these three generations of women navigate the challenges that arise in their lifetimes. While Una always follows the thalweg, regardless of human-made obstructions, Lynna does not possess this skill, but suspects that Hilde inherited the trait.
Supporting characters, including Lynna’s conspiracy theorist work colleague, Daniel, and Hilde’s capricious American friend, are intriguing additions who heighten the stakes of Lynna’s internal conflicts with her external world. As water scarcity increases and authorities grow more dangerous, Lynna worries that she has not properly equipped her idealistic daughter with the right tools to survive in a world of subterfuge. She resorts to reading Hilde’s private journal, but her anxiety is exacerbated when she finds entries that link the wrath of Hindu gods with the ideological belief that water is alive and beseeching to be liberated. As the environment deteriorates and tension between the mother and daughter mounts, Lynna questions her parental choice to save Hilde at the expense of the planet.
Weaving lyrical language into a dystopian landscape, A Diary in the Age of Water is as much an ode to water as it is a cautionary tale about the dire implications of climate change.
Inanna Admin –
A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu
reviewed by Kirkus Reviews – August 26, 2020
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/nina-munteanu/a-diary-in-the-age-of-water/
In Canadian ecologist Munteanu’s novel, a child in a world of climate disaster discovers hidden truths about the past in a mysterious journal.
In a story set centuries in the future, a young girl with four arms named Kyo lives on the last vestige of a planet damaged by climate crisis, water scarcity, and a cataclysm brought on by semidivine figures called the Water Twins. Kyo comes across the 21st-century journal of a limnologist named Lynna; over two decades, the journal’s author details Earth’s fate with scientific observations on the harm wrought by corporate greed, as well as her own personal struggles raising a child in a world of catastrophe and authoritarianism. She’s a deeply relatable and tragically flawed character who’s wracked by doubt, fear, and cynicism—a stark contrast to her fierce environmentalist mother, Una, and her spiritual, idealistic daughter, Hildegard. What unites them all is the study of water: its intrinsic properties, its mysteries, and ultimately its necessity to the planet. In poetic prose (“We’re going down in a kind of slow violence”) with sober factual basis, Munteanu transmutes a harrowing dystopia into a transcendentalist origin myth. The author’s ambitious approach may not appeal to some; it veers toward heavy exposition, and its incorporation of Vedic mysticism can be as confounding as it is compelling. The narrative’s seeming assertion that humanity is too complacent and selfish to allow for an alternative future is frustrating, although there are copious references to the efforts of Indigenous water protectors and progressive activists. Are capitalistic humans a virus that must be eradicated for the sake of the planet, or is humanity worth saving? However, it’s worth noting that Munteanu references irreparable, real-life environmental damage, and the inevitability of her future is dependent on continued, present inaction. As with much apocalyptic fiction, the author asks uncomfortable questions and explores the effects of one generation’s actions upon the next as they ripple outward like a stone dropped in a pond.
A sobering and original cautionary tale that combines a family drama with an environmental treatise.
Inanna Admin –
A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu
reviewed by Literary Titan – September 4, 2020
https://literarytitan.com/2020/09/04/a-diary-in-the-age-of-water/
Nina Munteanu’s A Diary in the Age of Water follows the tale of Kyo, a blue four-legged creature in a post-climate-change world. Kyo is constantly plagued by dreams that appear to be experiences from a previous life. Constantly trying to find out the meaning of these dreams and where she fits in in this world and the one that existed before, Kyo spends a lot of the time at the library.
She consequently stumbles upon an ancient diary that holds illuminating revelations and heart-filled messages. As she goes through it and is immersed in its author’s experiences, we come to understand the circumstances that led to the climate change led apocalypse.
With a lot of scientific terms, explanations, and even drawings, the plot is quite believable, and can even be a little scary. The fact that Nina goes as far as mentioning our current world governments and how they contribute to this now desolate world is eerie, to say the least.
As a reader, part of me even begins to think that this could truly be our earth’s fate, giving me serious jitters. Now I may just be gullible but this book is quite convincing. Clearly, the author did a lot of scientific research before writing it. She dives deep into the science and various spiritual beliefs that support the inevitability of an apocalypse. As far as science fiction goes, this one is quite believable.
Moreover, the character development is quite strong, leaving us with a deep understanding of characters like Lynna and Hilde. The use of storytelling through different timelines is also quite an efficient way of weaving all the details of the story together.
Ultimately, this story is extremely detailed and well thought out. However, the many scientific paragraphs, even though drenched in poetry, can make it difficult to read, especially for those without a proclivity for science.
While bringing attention to the current politicization of climate change, the story maintains important underlying themes like family, love, forgiveness, and the complexity of the human soul. The author has gone to great lengths to show that there are different layers to each character, none fully evil nor fully good. A Diary in the Age of Water is an exceptional and thought-provoking dystopian fiction.
Inanna Admin –
Futuristic novel awash with water warnings
A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu
reviewed by Joel Boyce
The Winnipeg Free Press – September 26, 2020
https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/entertainment/books/futuristic-novel-awash-with-water-warnings-572546211.html
‘Perhaps by then the water barons will have found a way off this planet they’ve mined to death. They’ll take what they decide is theirs and leave behind what they no longer want. Is that what the Bible really meant by ‘the meek shall inherit the Earth?’”
This is one of several unrelenting questions Nova Scotia’s Nina Munteanu poses through her main protagonist and narrator in her engaging epistolary novel. An ecologist and environmental activist herself, Munteanu has no difficulty voicing a fully formed literary character who is both scientifically literate enough to understand how quickly human society is entering its final ebb, and humane enough to mourn the fullness of this tragedy.
The prose here is beautiful and purposeful in the tradition of environmentally and socially minded novelists such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood. The way Munteanu structures her story compares in some ways to Atwood’s apocalyptic tale Oryx and Crake (and sequels), where the story opens in a ruined future before shifting back to the main story, set in a more familiar albeit still future setting, but before the big disaster.
Unlike Atwood, there is no shifting back and forth between parallel stories. The girl in Munteanu’s opening paragraphs, a rare human in the last boreal forest, appears for only a few pages bookending the main story. In the opening she stumbles upon a leather-bound diary covering a period in the 2040s, which we are given to understand will shed some light on how the world, and humankind, came to ruin.
It comes down to water: ice sheets, rain and drought, the loss of water tables and the collapse of marine ecologies in an acidifying ocean. The pulse and rhythm of life on this planet is water. Its death throes, too, can be read in the flow of water.
The 2009 film The Age of Stupid used a similar structural trick, using the framing device of a man in a post-collapse 2050s sorting through real archival footage from the period of the film’s creation in order to hammer home the danger. This future setting allowed him to ask, on behalf of the filmmakers, “why didn’t anyone do anything to stop this?”
And while this was a clever twist on the documentary structure — to foreshadow with a fictional framing rather than warn with a scientific model — the film as a whole was not nearly as engaging as Munteanu’s fully fictionalized (but thoroughly researched) work, which also works on literary terms. Here Munteanu has produced something which joins George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, Le Guin and Atwood, a warning of the direction we are heading that will be valuable even if we manage to avert disaster.
It will be valuable because it will represent a time of crisis, a point in our history where we could have gone either way, and the sort of meditation on the human condition that becomes most clear when facing the void and understanding the fragility of all that humanity has built. It will also, unfortunately, be valuable in the same way that Orwell continues to be valuable.
His warning against the rise of totalitarianism, written in the wake of the just defeated Axis powers of the Second World War, was an eternal one, one that was invoked again in the rightward slide that began again in democratic countries in the 2000s.
Likewise, environmental disaster of one kind or another, due to human shortsightedness and the politicization of numbers and scientific facts, will be a recurring challenge for some time to come.
Joel Boyce is a Winnipeg writer and educator.
Inanna Admin –
A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu
reviewed by Lisa Timpf – Guest Poster
The Miramichi Reader – September 28, 2020
https://miramichireader.ca/2020/09/a-diary-in-the-age-of-water/
Categorized as “cli-fi,” or climate fiction, A Diary in the Age of Water depicts an interesting story about four generations of women, and a cautionary tale about what might happen if we fail to respect the importance of water. The prologue of the book takes us to the “dying forest of the north. The last boreal forest in the world,” (p. 5) where a four-armed, blue-skinned entity called Kyo is seeking to resolve one last issue before leaving the planet along with a cadre of her cohorts. We learn that a catastrophe triggered by the Water Twins, unleashing the power of water, caused storms that eradicated humanity from the planet. A diary Kyo unearths in the archives gives us deeper insight into the events leading up to that calamity.
Segments of the diary comprise the meat of the novel. Though the book is clearly a work of fiction, the diary sections, which begin with an entry made April 12, 2045, also weave in facts about water and the environment. Each diary entry is prefaced with a quotation, many of them coming from Robert Wetzel’s Limnology. The diary’s “author,” a character named Lynna, uses these quotations as a springboard for her musings. For example, in a section introduced with a quote from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, Lynna notes:
With exports, water uptakes, and associated loss, the water levels are steadily declining. Once lake levels drop below eighty percent of their historic volume, they will reach a tipping point. After that, the water will never return. That’s how the Great Lakes will become the Great Puddles.” (p. 26)
A Diary in the Age of Water commands reader interest on a number of levels. There is a sense of mystery as we read Lynna’s accounts, seeking to understand what happened to trigger the cataclysmic change that resulted in humanity’s extinction. In the novel, control of Canada’s water resources has been commandeered by the United States, which has diverted a substantial portion of Canada’s western waterways to feed to the southwestern US. Meanwhile, water resources are also being exploited by unscrupulous companies, and environmental de-regulation has allowed corporations to desecrate the environment. The story of evolving water shortages, resulting in stiffer and stiffer quotas, provides a chilling but believable portrayal of what might happen as fresh water becomes scarcer.
Lynna’s personal and professional story as told through her diary is also of interest. She is honest about her own shortcomings, berating herself in her diary with regrets about things she has done in the past, and fretting about her daughter Hilde and about the future of the planet. She also shares memories of happier times spent with her mother Una.
The factual content is explained in an easy-to-understand manner. Line diagrams scattered through the book help to illustrate the concepts. The fact that author Nina Munteanu is herself a freshwater scientists lends the novel a deeper authenticity.
There’s a sense of sadness surrounding the events as Lynna witnesses her quality of life steadily eroding as a result of the environment’s deterioration. That doesn’t mean A Diary in the Age of Water is a depressing read; at least, I did not find it so. Munteanu uses wry humor and irony to good effect, adding to the enjoyability of the book.
Water is one of the most critical factors affecting our well-being, and ultimately, our survival. Munteanu’s novel provides a cautionary note for what might happen if we fail to pay attention to this precious resource. The good news is that the possible future depicted in A Diary in the Age of Water is still far enough away that we can avoid the grim outcomes depicted if we have the will to do so.
Inanna Admin –
A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu
reviewed by Anthony Avina – October 9, 2020
https://authoranthonyavinablog.com/2020/10/09/a-diary-in-the-age-of-water-by-nina-munteanu-review/
The author has done a fantastic job of instilling both horror and hope into this narrative. The way the author weaves both post-apocalyptic and sci-fi elements into real-world threats to our environment, in particular water, made this a gripping novel that was impossible to put down.
Character development and imagery played huge roles in the story here, as the author wrote the narrative in a journalistic style that showcased four generations of women who had ties to water. Both the bond these women shared and their struggles in the face of environmental disasters made the story much more profound, especially when real-world facts about current political administrations and actions against the environment were included, making this fictional sci-fi world feel much more realistic.
A must-read sci-fi and post-apocalyptic read with an eco-twist, author Nina Munteanu’s A Diary in the Age of Water is a hit. The beautiful way the author relates these characters to the audience along with numerous facts both historically and scientifically that readers were treated to make the story come alive in a way most aren’t able to accomplish. An eye-opening story for those who are still on the fence about climate change, this is the perfect fall read for both sci-fi readers and eco-interested readers alike. Be sure to grab your copy today! Rating: 10/10
Inanna Admin –
A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu
reviewed by Lee Hall
Reedsy Discovery – October 29, 2020
https://reedsy.com/discovery/book/a-diary-in-the-age-of-water-nina-munteanu#review
A truly important once in a generation read that flows like a wild river right through your imagination and heart.
This captivating book doesn’t hold back in presenting readers with the potentially damning path humanity is going to take and how we might lose our most important resource; water. You’ll find the subject of water flowing everywhere in a story that is sometimes heart wrenching but also wonderfully informing, it’s metaphoric, symbolic and even a character.
Everything that surrounds the subject of water or limnology as it’s technically defined has been woven into a wonderfully researched plethora of information and fiction. Fact and fiction merge flawlessly in this story that takes readers on a dramatic and eye opening voyage. Just what will this planet be like after our footprint has done all the damage it can do? Well that’s how this story starts in what appears to be a far off time after this world has healed itself from us.
We are then taken back to how we got there and the years much closer to our present through the eyes of a Canadian woman who relays her years from childhood to retirement. From the inspiration and spirit of her mother all the way to her daughter growing up in a world of water rationing and stricter controls. This tale of motherhood is just part of a rich story all told through these diary entries which all begin with some wonderful definitions that relate to the ecology of water and the nature of our wider planet – there is information everywhere and all of it points towards us failing to preserve our most precious resource. It began to open my eyes and also pierce my heart that we seem to be wasting and slowly destroying this planet’s eco systems that all provide us with life. The politics behind water are particularly on point in relating to today’s leaders and corporations but it’s not just empty statements or finger pointing to bad leaders. This book stands up and in the face of those who do not care for our ecological future, for that it’s one of the most important books of a generation.
“it will slip through their fingers. That’s what water does…”
There always seems to be a big time corporation pulling the strings for control and that’s the same in this situation which as the diary moves forward in time so does the struggle. From mass droughts to the technological advances of weather control to even punishing those who collect rain water, this future is both a potential reality and also quite scary. History is being erased or adjusted to suit the less informed society who are ignorant to the struggle. It also maintains this story of a mother concerned for her daughter, a parental tale much like what is going on in the world and future, sometimes you have to just let the next generation go. Perhaps we are too busy trying to save ourselves when really we should be focused on the place we live.
“‘We’re turning into migrants, condemned to wander the earth in search of a nirvana that doesn’t exist, all because we didn’t treasure the nirvana we had…'”
Nina Munteanu has put together a story about the pitfalls of humanity while also being wonderfully informative and inspirational towards highlighting the importance of preserving our water and wider planet. It’s beautifully original, modern and even patriotic in some senses which tells me the author proudly cares immensely about a story where there is so much more underneath the shimmering surface.
Inanna Admin –
Dystopian Novel Envisions Water Oligarchies Threatening Human Existence
A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu
reviewed by Annis Pratt
The Sonoma Independent – December 2020
https://www.sonomaindependent.org/dystopian-novel-envisions-water-oligarchies-threatening-human-existence/
You would think we would know by now that if we keep on exploiting nature for our own profit, nature can’t continue to sustain us. It is a dystopic world – the opposite of an ideal one – that we are creating as we emit carbon, destroy forests, and degrade whole ecological systems. In her dystopian novel A Diary in the Age of Water Canadian limnologist Nina Munteanu imagines a world in which water – that most crucial of all our resources – is drained away by corporate greed.
My last foray into Nina Munteanu’s Oeuvre was to review her non-fiction study of water, Water Is…:The Meaning of Water which was rich with scientific detail, natural history, literary allusion, and imaginative speculation typical of this protean limnologist. In her new novel she presents her idiosyncratic blend of science and ecological philosophy via the genre of science fiction.
In Chinese box fashion, there is a framing narrative and two inner stories. The framing narrative is science fiction, with elements of the Solar Punk genre. The two inner boxes are the diaries of Lynna and of her daughter Hilde. Munteanu employs Solar Punk’s (manifesto) technique of using dystopic descriptions of present ecological catastrophe to predict the end of the world as we know it, and to indicate a utopian future.
The hero of the framing narrative is Kyo, a four armed, blue-skinned young woman with a profound affinity for water. She is being mentored by one of the few surviving humans about how she and many like her, who are all female (having been born through a process of parthenogenesis found in water science) will transition to a better world when the earth is no longer habitable.
Here is the scientific basis to the way Kayo and her sisters communicate:
“She understands that rhythm embraces a fractal continuum that ranges from microscopic to cosmic proportions. Cell division aligns with the planet’s circadian rhythms; bees synchronize their flight with the phase of the moon; planets and stars exert gravity and frequency on each other, resonating with the harmonic music of the spheres. Her world flows in constant oscillation from high to low, particle to wave, dark to light, separating and uniting, creating and destroying, and back again. All through water. It is then that she feels her sisters the most, the other Kyos…”
These “other blue beings like her” are scattered over the planet in small enclaves, soon to gather together for an “Exodus.” Unsure about her origins, and puzzled over what she is expected to do, Kyo finds a diary account of the events that brought her present world into being.
The diary, written by a Canadian limnologist named Lynna who works for an oligarchical corporation, CanadaCorps, looks back from 2045 to events in the 2020s to chronicle the hijacking of Canada’s lake, river, and glacial resources after Trump sells North American water to China. Lynna is deeply worried that her daughter Hilde and an American friend, Hanna (the destructive “Water Twins” of the fantasy frame) are conducting experiments blending science with ancient meditative practice that could endanger human survival on the planet.
Although much of the diary reads like straight scientific exposition, Munteanu uses Lynna’s limnological particulars to construct futuristic metaphors. For example, she deploys the concept of Stable chaos to prophesy the birth of Kyo’s future world on some other planet:
“STABLE CHAOS: A precept within chaos theory, which suggests that order emerges spontaneously from chaos as synchronous self-organization…. created and regulated by the same nonlinear twists that create the unpredictable turmoil around it.:”
If the world of 2020-2045 is chaotic, it is incubating a new world for Kyo and her water sisters “where chaos self-organizes into some kind of order or stability.”
In another example of science as predictive metaphor, Munteanu bases the reduction of the human race to one gender on a limnological phenomenon that Lynna’s lab assistant discovers in “some parthenogenic pond life that can exist only in the female gender. “
Lynna’s diary extrapolates dire future outcomes from events she witnesses in what would be our present. Here’s her example from my own (Detroit Metropolitan Region) experience:
“Forty years ago, when the water engineers shut off the taps in Detroit because poor people couldn’t pay the tax, the public outcry was tremendous. Activists vilified the city for its lack of compassion and declared water a human right.”
The future difference is that “This time, there is no reaction . . .It was like a giant Ponzi scheme . . . in which one company pollutes the water and then, with the help of the World Bank, develops the technology to clean the water, and then finally sells it back to the very people they stole it from in the first place—for an additional profit.”
Munteanu uses the dystopian technique of extrapolating from a deplorable present to prophesy a frightening future. Her method is associated with Solar Punk’s abhorrence for the present day oligarchy of corporate CEOs, energy interests, and the very powerful, very rich 1% controlling it all. While Solar punk posits alternate worlds where human traits of invention and ingenuity rescue the planet, A Diary in the Age of Water is more dystopian than utopian, its utopian future predicted but not described. Although more science than fiction, Munteanu’s novel provides an effectively dire prophesy about what is likely to happen to the human race if we fail to stand on our feet and fight “A ‘governmentality’ that treats the environment as a subversive object to investigate, securitize, and manipulate; and treats the human masses like cattle to be cultivated and controlled.”
Inanna Admin –
A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu
reviewed by Daniel Haeusser
Strange Horizons – February 22, 2021
http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/a-diary-in-the-age-of-water-a-novel-by-nina-munteanu/
It’s a strange time we are living in. One moment we are scorched by a hot sun with no water below or above us; another moment, the receding lake lashes out like an angry child with five-metre high waves against our dilapidated shoreline, or a dry river swells into a churning torrent that forces its way into our homes … We’re going down in a kind of slow violence. (p. 134)
The majority of Nina Munteanu’s new novel speculates about the continuation of climate change’s slow violence on the Earth, and explores its effects on one family through three generations of women. Structured as a diary written by a Canadian limnologist (freshwater biologist) named Lynna, the novel reveals the gradually developing ecological and societal catastrophes that occur between 2045 and 2066, moving the Anthropocene into a new geological era. Alongside Lynna’s recording of current events, she recalls memories of her childhood, and of her mother Una, when the growing indications of climate change became undeniable, yet somehow were still controversial. As Lynna bears witness to society falling apart amid the water scarcity and conflict that Una once predicted, she struggles to secure a safe future for her own daughter, Hilde.
Dystopic climate fiction is not new, and several additions to the subgenre have appeared recently. Munteanu’s experience in bridging the worlds of biology and writing makes A Diary in the Age of Water unique in being strong and focused from both the scientific and literary perspectives. An ecologist and novelist from Toronto, Munteanu has taught writing, published limnological research, and written about ecological topics in both her nonfiction and fiction.
Munteanu’s 2016 book Water Is …: The Meaning of Water caught the attention of Margaret Atwood, who placed it at the top of her recommended reading list for that year in the New York Times. Atwood’s appreciation is understandable, given the similarities between the authors and their interests. Both Canadian female writers with a background (formal or informal) in biology, their fiction tends to the speculative, although it is marketed as general literature. Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, they mix themes of science, nature, politics, feminism, history, spirituality, and even metaphysics.
And, they both evangelize about the importance of water for our world, and for life, and recognize its endurance even against human alterations. In The Penelopiad, Atwood writes: “Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient.” Munteanu gives similar words to her characters in A Diary in the Age of Water, a fictionalized retelling of those concepts she presented in Water Is …:
Water is a shape shifter. It changes yet stays the same, shifting its face with the climate. It wanders the earth … stealing from where it is needed and giving whimsically where it isn’t wanted. Water is magic. Most things on the planet shrink and become denser as they get colder. Water does the opposite. This is why ice floats and lakes don’t completely freeze from top to bottom. Water is paradox. Aggressive yet yielding. Life-giving yet dangerous. Floods. Droughts. Mudslides. Tsunamis. Water cuts recursive patterns of creative destruction through the landscape, an Ouroboros remembering. (p. 220)
Despite the similarities with Atwood’s work, Munteanu’s writing never appears derivative, nor any less powerful. Munteanu also brings a heavier emphasis to the scientific details than one would expect from a typical novel, even when compared to something like the “hard” science fiction of another Canadian author, biologist Peter Watts. Not only does A Diary in the Age of Water include an extensive bibliography of research, but it also starts each chapter (diary entry) with a quotation, most often from the classic textbook Limnology: Lake and River Ecosystems by Robert Wetzel. This textbook also features in the plot of the novel, to the point that it begins to feel almost like another character, testifying to well-established observations of nature that are beginning to disappear, such as the climate cycles and associated seasonal behaviors of plants and animals. Beside quoting from it, Lynna uses it as a means of teaching her daughter about the natural world in relation to what is happening in the plot, and in this way Munteanu also teaches readers, even down to accompanying illustrations of concepts, as if doodled into the diary by Lynna.
For example, Lynna’s November 11, 2049, diary entry begins with a definition of the term “Dimictic Lake” from Wetzel’s textbook: “A typical lake of moderate size that undergoes two periods of vertical mixing of water (lake turnover), one in the spring and one in the autumn.” Lynna then compares this quality, drawing on her experience, to the behavior of governmental departments, using an image of lake turnover, that is, the seasonal mixing of the water column:
They don’t communicate at designated times and under particular circumstances==like a conference or inter-departmental meeting. Even then, we remain guarded, sharing only the minimum required to show due diligence. Scientists are the worst for sharing. We’re like misers. Just as the hypolimnion guards its nutrients, scientists hoard and guard their findings. (p. 109)
With all of the biological details to be found in A Diary in the Age of Water, it is remarkable that Munteanu can nonetheless create a captivating plot, touching character development, and vibrant, flowing prose. And do it all so well. Her writing humanizes the science, even with something as foreign to the general public’s experience as the unseen work of microbes. And she links it to the threats of climate change and, with an ironic twist, the plot of the novel:
“Can you smell the ocean?” [Una] asked me.
She cupped some ocean froth off the rocks and pointed out to sea. “There are billions of phytoplankton and bacteria in there,” she said to me. “And they make the smell of the ocean.” She told me that tiny phytoplankton produce a compound that, when broken down by bacteria, creates the distinct smell of the sea. That same compound also stimulates cloud formation by oxidizing sulfur dioxide and sulfate aerosols, she told me, pointing to the fluffy cumulus clouds above us.
I remember thinking right then that the sky was just another vast ocean. I suddenly felt dizzy in the largeness of it.
As our oceans stratify under global warming, like James Lovelock predicted so long ago, fewer nutrients from the deep ocean are available for the phytoplankton populations in the euphotic zone. Less phytoplankton, less everything.
Our oceans don’t smell the same. Nothing does. (p. 51)
As Lynna observes deteriorating ecosystems, she begins to see how the effects on biological life now are also limiting human existence, threatening social and political systems. Though phenomenally rich in arable water as a resource, the nation of Canada has nonetheless lost “control” of much of that resource to other entities such as the United States and China. Munteanu peppers her speculations on this worsening political situation of water control (and the water conflicts it engenders) with historically true details, such as the NAWAPA (North America Water Power Alliance) Plan for water diversion that was proposed in the 1950s, but later abandoned amid opposition to its potential financial and ecological costs.
Lynna turns to collecting water on her own account to cope with shortages and restrictions, but politics soon makes this act illegal for her (a current fact of legality in many locations). Neighbors and family begin turning in “water criminals” to the authority, while governments tighten control over the population. Politics begins to chip away at Lynna’s academic freedom to carry out science, or to speak the truth. Slowly, Wetzel, her beloved textbook, is phased out, replaced by state propaganda aiming to “deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate,” as The X-Files has put it so well.
Yet, even within its dystopic setting of growing authoritarianism and absurdities about the idea of ownership or domination of nature, Munteanu imbues her novel with a transcendent optimism that an ecological core will abide the sins of humankind, including a remnant of humanity being reborn as something new. This concept manifests itself in a pair of chapters that bookend the novel, set in a far future Age of Trees that arose from our present Age of Water. These chapters feature Kyo, a young girl who lives in a decaying former boreal forest, who, with her blue skin and multiple arms, seems more alien than human. As an acolyte in a society calling itself “Exodus,” a group that seeks humanity’s new future, Kyo has dreams of the cataclysmic past that brought about this new Age, and finds answers to her visions and the mythology of that past in a diary that she discovers: Lynna’s.
While intriguing, these opening and closing chapters of the novel feel so different as to be out of place. One almost wishes they had been developed into something larger, or left out altogether. Thematically, they do tie in to the rest of the novel, however, particularly in the progression of Lynna’s daughter Hilde, who grows into an activist more willing to act than her mom has been, and who develops a deeply spiritual, almost metaphysical view of nature and, above all, water. This grows as an extension of the science, almost like a pseudoscience that ascribes an intelligence or consciousness to water, beliefs nurtured in Hilde through interactions with an online friend that slowly become intimate.
Water is an altruist. Ultimately water will travel through the universe and transform worlds; it will transcend time and space to share and teach. Water will do its job to energize you and give you life, then it will quietly take its leave. It will move mountains particle by particle with a subtle hand. It will pain the world with beauty, then return to its fold and rejoice. I am water. I am joy. (p. 220)
Through conversations with her online friend, Hilde begins to embrace Hindu philosophies, and a cyclical view of history, featuring the coupling of destruction and rebirth (Vishnu/Kali). The symbolism of Kyo’s seemingly alien morphology and skin tone in the first chapter of the novel now becomes clear.
None of the characters in A Diary in the Age of Water is perfect: they all have flaws, sometimes self-realized, other times understandably shaped by past wrongs against them. The characters often act in selfish ways, as microcosms of what humanity as a whole has done to the planet. For instance, Lynna betrays a colleague/friend and rationalizes this as being necessary for the survival of herself and her daughter. As the planet and its ecology responds to this selfishness, they witness the natural system correcting itself to account for this inherent fact of biological evolution, to our loss.
Munteanu reminds us that some human societies—through western science or through other means—have understood the connection between our lives and the rest of the planet, including the life upon it. They have understood that our biological selfishness cannot go unchecked. Echoing the tenets of ecology, and the teachings of the Indigenous peoples of North America discussed elsewhere in the novel, A Diary in the Age of Water observes that “When we lose our natural diversity, we lose our natural resistance.” The novel illustrates how catastrophically that may continue to proceed. At the end some sort of ecosystem will survive, but we may not be a part of it.
Inanna Admin –
A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu
reviewed by Buried in Print – April 28, 2021
http://www.buriedinprint.com/earth-changes-habit-changes-1-of-4/
It’s hard to resist identifying the author with Lynna, the most prominent character, who also works as a limnologist, although her employment is increasingly precarious, as her timeline hastens toward ecological devastation.
A predominantly female cast, a mythic framing narrative and, most saliently, the focus on water, all made this an interesting read for me.
The book’s epigraphs are from Maude Barlow and the chapters’ epigraphs from textbook definitions (sometimes excerpts from limnology texts), and there are even cutaway diagrams that you’d expect in a lecture hall.
Ultimately, it exists in an in-between place, some mystical elements of the generational tale possibly alienating the dedicated science-y readers and the instructional elements possibly alienating fiction devotees. And, yet, I read on: strangely compelling.
Inanna Admin –
A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu
reviewed by Sound & Fury Book Reviews
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-s00QF116U
Watch in full at the link / the takeaway:
“[A] downright terrifying look into the future of our planet.”
Inanna Admin –
A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu
reviewed by Herizons Magazine (issue 35,1) – print – May 2021
http://herizons.ca/
Excerpt:
In Nina Munteanu’s striking near-future novel, A Diary in the Age of Water, we meet Una, an environmental activist who owns a small acreage outside Montreal…Munteanu’s own science also appears, complete with diagrams, via Linnea’s diary. The inclusion of swaths of non-fiction makes this book a bit of a hybrid, and Munteanu a risk-taker. I personally enjoyed the detailed explanations of the water cycle.
Inanna Admin –
A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu
reviewed by Alternatives Journal Vol. 46.1 (summer issue) – print – June 2021
https://www.alternativesjournal.ca/
Excerpt:
A Diary in the Age of Water should give you a wake-up call as it highlights our current underappreciation of water, its existence, and dependence on it in our daily lives. What will happen to us at the end of the Age of Water? We’d be damned if we do find out.
Inanna Admin –
Where Waters and Fictions Meet
A Diary in the Age of Water by Nina Munteanu
reviewed by Mary Woodbury
ClimateCultures – July 5, 2022
Excerpt (full review at the link above):
According to UN Water, an organization of international parties working on water issues, water is the primary medium through which we will face the effects of climate change. Warming temperatures in oceans means that species not capable of adapting will migrate or die out, which harshly affects ocean ecosystems. Water has become more scarce globally. Meanwhile, extreme weather patterns that cause droughts, floods, wildfires, increase in air temperatures, and other conditions point to low-income communities being affected the worst by health and food insecurity, political instability, the increase of changing disease environments, and altered snow and ice patterns—things that are already happening all around the world.
While facts are something we can and should pay attention to as we follow scientific integrity, models, and reports, another mode of telling the story about water has been alive forever: churned, spoken, and written by authors who dream up fictional stories related to our past, present, and future world. Where fact and fiction mingle like this is an area of reflection and speculation, tied by imagination. These tales of water ripple out once the pebble sinks in. The intersectionality of diverse water fiction results in reader empathy, learning, inspiration, and shared commonalities around the world. Local dignity comes alive against a backdrop of planetary crises.
The author is a Canadian ecologist and is deeply knowledgeable about water in all its forms. A Diary in the Age of Water is a lyrical polemic about the future of our water. Engaging, educational, and flowing, like water on the page, the story follows a fictional memoir about a limnologist dealing with unjust politics at work and in the world, dwindling water, her independent and headstrong daughter, her own aging, and the mystery of a strange girl.
This is the definitive novel about all things water. Each chapter starts with a fact related to water, which gets drawn out to a metaphor happening within the chapter. Written in the style of a diary, the story is personable. Munteanu communicates well as a scientist and breaks down complex ideas and information into understandable prose. By the time you’re finished, you’ll know more about water than ever before.