Bjarki, not Bjarki On floorboards, love, and irreconcilable differences

Matthew J. C. Clark, 1982-

Book - 2023

"Clark tells the story of his attempts to write a magazine-style essay about Bjarki Thor Gunnarsson, a climate change denier and conspiracy theorizer who also happens to manufacture the widest, purest, most metaphorical pine boards around. Set mostly in rural Maine, Bjarki, Not Bjarki combines personal narrative, immersive journalism, and environmental rumination, all told in a distinctive essayistic voice. While Clark considers the motley theatre of rural masculinity, North American colonization, woodpeckers, gift cards, crab rangoon, and bald eagles, the new pine floor in his newly renovated home buckles. He and his wife separate. He puts on a mask, goes to Florida, and does not cry. Upon Clark's return, Bjarki's famous boa...rds seem only to exist in his mind. The book asks: How do we make sense of the world and of ourselves, especially when the floor beneath us is so unstable, when nothing is quite what we had hoped it would be?"-- more