A Sucker For Octopus: Shelby Van Pelt
Shelby Van Pelt’s debut novel, “Remarkably Bright Creatures,” has seen amazing success in the four years since it was published.
It’s sold more than 2 million copies and spent more than 64 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It was adapted into a movie starring Sally Field and Lewis Pullman that debuted on Netflix on Friday.
Van Pelt will be in Spokane on Tuesday for a session of The Spokesman-Review’s Northwest Passagesbook club.
The Story of A Woman, Her New Friends ... And An Octupus
“Remarkably Bright Creatures” is the story of 70-year-old recently widowed Tova Sullivan, who works nights cleaning a Seattle-area aquarium. She’s dragging a bit, still mourning the loss of her 18-year-old son in a boating accident in the Puget Sound more than 30 years before.
Tova befriends Marcellus, a curmudgeonly giant Pacific octopus who lives in a tank at the aquarium. Tova helps Marcellus by allowing him small helpings of freedom from his captivity. In return, Marcellus deduces what happened to Tova’s son and works to ease her pain.
The Netflix movie stars Sally Field as Tova and Lewis Pullman as Tova’s young trainee, Cameron. “There is a right way and a wrong way to do things,” Tova tells him, explaining that one must clean the clear walls of tanks with a circular motion, rather than up-and-down.
Colm Meaney stars as Ethan and Alfred Molina provides the voice of Marcellus. Also appearing in the movie: Joan Chen, Kathy Baker, Beth Grant and Sofia Black D’Elia. The film was directed by Olivia Newman, who made her directorial debut in 2022 with “Where the Crawdads Sing.”
ANONYMOUS CONTENT/NIGHT OWL STORIES/NETFLIX
Inside The Head of An Octopus
Yes, real-life octopuses are very smart — nearly every bit as smart as the fictional Marcellus. They can solve mazes, open jars, play with toys and recognize people’s faces.
A curator at London’s Natural History Museum says that a lab there noticed fish disappearing from their tanks. The staff set up a video camera and found an octopus was opening the lid on its own tank, climbing out, traveling to the fish tanks and helping itself to fresh seafood. It would then squish back to its tank and close the lid behind it to hide the evidence.
Other interesting facts about the Giant Pacific Octopus:
- On average, they grow to 12 feetlong and more than 50 pounds. They live to be about 4 years old.
- They are generally reddish-brown but, like other members of the octopus family, they use special pigment in their skin to change colors and textures to blend in with their surroundings: corals, plants and rocks.
- Because an octopus is about 90% muscle and their bodies contain no bones, they can fit into and through very small spaces.
- Octopuses have three functioning hearts. Two work exclusively to move blood to the gills, while the third concentrates on pumping blood through the rest of the body. n Octopus blood is copper-based, which is more efficient than iron-based blood at transporting oxygen at low temperatures. It makes their blood blue in color.
- Octopuses move using jet propulsion. They suck water into their mantle cavity and then contract their muscles to force the water back out through a narrow opening. They can also use this to steer.
- All octopuses and cuttlefish are venomous. They inject their venom into prey using their sharp beaks.
- Those eight appendages are properly called “arms,” not “tentacles.”
- Is it driving you crazy that we’re using the plural “octopuses” instead of “octopi”? Researchers at the Library of Congress say that because “Octopus” comes from the Greek word “pous,” meaning foot — not from Latin — “octopuses” is correct. You could also call them “octopodes,” they say.
Raise your hand if you saw this art and immediately thought: “Ha! That’s not an octopus! Squidward (from ‘Spongebob Squarepants’) is a squid!”
Before the show’s creator, Steve Hillenburg, became an animator, he was a marine science educator. So he knows his stuff.
Hillenburg made the character an octopus because, he said, “they have such a bulbous head.” Squidward has only six legs instead of the eight a real octopus has, simply to makehim faster — and, therefore, cheaper — to animate.
So then why did Hillenburg name his attitude-laden octopus “Squidward”? Squidward’s voice actor, Rodger Bumpass, explains that the name “Octoward” simply didn’t work.
Ocean Conservancy
More Than 64 Weeks On The NYT Bestseller List
“Remarkably Bright Creatures” was published on May 3, 2022, and was named a Best Book of Summer by the Chicago Tribune, Southern Living and USA Today. Readers reportedly walked into bookstores asking for “that octopus book.”
The book is “an ultimately feel-good but deceptively sensitive debut about what it feels like to have love taken from you, only to find it again in the most unexpected places,” wrote the Washington Post. “The best books about grief find a way to illuminate the darkness of loss,” wrote Marie Claire, “and ‘Remarkably Bright Creatures’ offers a master class.”
The book has sold more than 2 million copies and has gone through 30 reprintings. It earned Van Pelt, a former financial consultant, the McLaughlin-Esstman-Steams First Novel Prize from the Writer’s Center.
Ecco Press
ShelbyVanFelt.com
Van Pelt will be in conversation with Spokesman-Review managing editor Lindsey Treffry at an event by the paper’s Northwest Passages book club 7 p.m. Tuesday in the Coughlin Theater of Gonzaga University’s Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center.
For more information onthe sold-out event, visit: