The Sparrow A Novel
About
A visionary work that combines speculative fiction with deep philosophical inquiry, The Sparrow tells the story of a charismatic Jesuit priest and linguist, Emilio Sandoz, who leads a scientific mission entrusted with a profound task: to make first contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life. The mission begins in faith, hope, and beauty, but a series of small misunderstandings brings it to a catastrophic end. Praise for The Sparrow “A startling, engrossing, and moral work of fiction.”—The New York Times Book Review “Important novels leave deep cracks in our beliefs, our prejudices, and our blinders. The Sparrow is one of them.”—Entertainment Weekly “Powerful … The Sparrow tackles a difficult subject with grace and intelligence.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Provocative, challenging … recalls both Arthur C. Clarke and H. G. Wells, with a dash of Ray Bradbury for good measure.”—The Dallas Morning News “[Mary Doria] Russell shows herself to be a skillful storyteller who subtly and expertly builds suspense.”—USA Today
Review
At times a slog—I found myself reading this far slower than my average—but absolutely worth it. Incredible book that will sit with me for a long time.
Unchaptered
p. 13
The mission, he thought, probably failed because of a series of logical, reasonable, carefully considered decisions, each of which seemed like a good idea at the time. Like most colossal disasters.
Characters: John Candotti
p. 41
Have you noticed that lullabies nearl always use a lot of command form?
Characters: Sofia Mendes
p. 44
“The first time you’re here, you are a guest,” she informed him, looking into his cyes “After that, my darling, vou’re family. Get your own damned beer.”
Characters: Anne Edwards
p. 47
“Feelings are facts.”
Characters: Anne Edwards
p. 76
She learned that mortal fear resolves into lethal anger, that the men who cried in her arms were likely to try killing her before they left, and she learned to use a knife. She learned what everyone learns in war. Living through it is all that matters.
Characters: Sofia Mendes
p. 78
She resisted both hope and fear. Either could weaken you.
Characters: Sofia Mendes
p. 79
And one had a sense of being overwhelmed at the beginning of a project. She was always starting from scratch and there was always the chance that, this time, she wouldn’t be able to understand, that something would simply be beyond her.
Characters: Sofia Mendes
p. 128
He was aware of his agnosticism, and patient with it. Rather than deny the existence of something he couldn’t perceive himself, he acknowledged the authenticity of his uncertainty and carried on, praying in the face of his doubt. After all, Ignatius of Loyola, a soldier who had killed and whored and made a thorough mess of his soul, said you could judge prayer worthwhile simply if you could act more decently, think more clearly afterward. As D.W. once told him, “Son, sometimes it’s enough just to act less like a shithead.” And by that kindly if inelegant standard, Emilio Sandoz could believe himself to be a man of God.
Characters: Emilio Sandoz
p. 171
that was the gift D. W. Yarbrough offered Sofia Mendes: the opportunity to do something so difficult that she’d be stretched to her limits, feel her own possibilities, find something in herself to rejoice in.
Characters: D. W. Yarbrough, Sofia Mendes
p. 173
Like many musicians, he had a precise and orderly mind and had, in fact, minored in mathematics.
Characters: Alan Pace
p. 187
“Precisely. People change. Cultures change. Empires rise and fall. Shit. Geology changes! Every ten years or so, George and I have faced the fact that we have changed and we’ve had to decide ift makes sense to create a new marriage between these two new pcople.” She flopped back against her chair. “Which is why vows are such a tricky business. Because nothing stays the same forever. Okay. Okay! I’m figuring something out now.” She sat up straight, eyes focused somewhere outside the room, and Jimmy realized that even Anne didn’t have all the answers and that was either the most comforting thing he’d learned in a long time or the most discouraging. “Maybe because so few of us would be able to give up something so fundamental for something so abstract, we protect ourselves from the nobility of a priest’s vows by jeering at him when he can’t live up to them, always and forever.” She shivered and slumped suddenly. “But, Jimmy! What unnatural words. Always and forever! Those aren’t human words, lim. Not even stones are always and forever.”
Characters: Anne Edwards, Jimmy Quinn
p. 203
Most men were simple. They were looking for security, or power, or a feeling of usefulness or of certainty or competence. A cause to fight for, a problem to solve, a place to fit in. There were many possibilities but once you grasped what a man was looking for, you had the beginnings of understanding.
Characters: Vince Giuliani
p. 207
The trick is not to care. I have a perfect indifference to winning.
Characters: Emilio Sandoz
p. 211
Self-disclosure is almost like sex, she thought. It isn’t easy to bare your soul.
Characters: Anne Edwards, Emilio Sandoz
p. 229
He was always working or laughing or studying, and his intensity and humor made him seem ageless. She knew something of his life, having worked with him and recognized him as one of her own kind, an eternal beginner starting over and over in a new place, in new circumstances, with new languages, new people, a new commission. They had this in common: the continual, rushed confrontation with change, the feeling of being hothoused, forced to bloom early. The exhausting exhilaration of doing the unreasonable not just adequately but well and with grace, flexible then and adaptable but not authoritative
Characters: Emilio Sandoz, Sofia Mendes
p. 242
Sailing is the perfect antidote for age, Reyes. Everything you do on a sailboat is done slowly and thoughtfully. Most of the time, an old body is entirely capable of doing whatever needs to be done while you’re cruising. And if the sea is determined to teach you a lesson, well, a young back is no more capable than an old one of resisting an ocean, so experience counts more than ever.
Characters: Vince Giuliani
p. 300
It seems to me that sainthood, like genius, is rooted in a sort of inspired persistence. It’s a consistent will of one thing.
Characters: D. W. Yarbrough
p. 313
It’s very difficult sometimes to tell ignorance from lack of intelligence.
Characters: Emilio Sandoz
p. 326
He learned the universal laws of trade: buy low and sell high; cut losses and let profits run; smell the emotion of the market, but don’t give way to it.
Characters: Supaari VaGayjur
p. 358
Engineers don’t go to confession when they screw up; they find a fix.
Characters: George Edwards
p. 369
Later, D. W. Yarbrough would recall how Alan Pace had given such a great deal of thought to the music he would first present to the Singers to represent human culture. The subtle mathematical joys of a Bach cantata, the thrilling harmonies of the sextet from Lucia di Lammermoor, the quiet evocative beauties of Saint-Saens, the majesty of a Beethoven symphony, the inspired perfection of a Mozart quartetall these had been considered. There was an unintentional remembrance of Alan Pace, in the event.
Characters: Alan Pace, D. W. Yarbrough
p. 406
Deep in the Jana’ata soul there was an almost unshakable conviction that things must be controlled, thought out, done correctly, that there was very little margin for error in life. Tradition was safety; change was danger. Even Supaari felt this, although he defied the instinct often and to his profit.
Characters: Supaari VaGayjur
p. 452
“There are no beggars on Rakhat. There is no unemploy. ment. There is no overcrowding. No starvation. No environmental degradation. There is no genetic disease. The elderly do not sufter decline. Those with terminal illness do not linger. They pay a terrible price for this system, but we too pay, Felipe, and the coin we use is the suffering of children. How many kids starved to death this afternoon, while we sat here? Just because their corpses aren’t eaten doesn’t make our species any more moral!”
Characters: Emilio Sandoz
p. 466
There are times, he would tell the Reshtar, when we are in the midst of life moments of confrontation with birth or death or moments of beauty when nature or love is fully revealed, or moments of terrible lonelinesstimes when a holy and awesome awareness comes upon us. It may come as deep inner stillness or as a rush of overflowing emotion. It may seem to come from beyond us, without any provocation, or from within us, coked by music or by a sleeping child. If we open our hearts at such moments, creation reveals itself to us in all its uniry and fullness. And when we return from such a moment of awareness, our hearts long to find some way to capture it in words forever, so that we can remam faithful to its higher truth.
He would tell the Reshtar: When my people search for a name to give to the truth we feel at those moments, we call it God, and when we capture that understanding in timeless poetry, we call it praying.
Characters: Emilio Sandoz
p. 490
As current events amply demonstrate, warfare has not withered away beneath the bright and cheerful sunshine of international trade, perhaps because war itself is so deliciously profitable. Nobody ever went broke selling arms to angry people and the human genius for wholesale murder abides. We are a species whose evolution featured a transition from convenient prey to top predator. It doesn’t take much to make us afraid, and for all too many of us, it’s a short step from fear to fury.
p. 491
Music and religion have existed in all known human cultures past and present. On a species level, religion and music are as diagnostic of Homo sapiens as traits like bipedalism, opposable thumbs, and articulate language.
p. 494
Now, I know that many people believe that religion and science are opposites, but for me, religion is very much like music.
No one would argue that music is the opposite of science. No one would ask if music is more true than science, or if science is more accurate than music. Those comparisons are meaningless. Nobody would expect a musician to reject science because it isn’t a timed sequence of pitches and tones, nor would anyone expect a scientist to reject music, simply because music is not a collection of empirical facts organized into a body of theory that generates testable hypotheses..
Think of a geologist studying a piece of Greek sculpture—aware, all at once, of the origin of the marble, of the skill of the sculptor, and of the antiquity of the human reach for immortality. In studying religion, I am aware of the natural world, of human artistry brought to bear on nature, and of something else, both elusive and enduring: a human yearning for the divine, whether or not divinity is there to care about or respond to such yearning.