What do you think?
Rate this book
The Flitting: A Memoir of Fathers, Sons, and Butterflies
A deeply felt and moving memoir about how butterflies become a vital connection between a son and his dying father.
The Flitting: A Memoir of Fathers, Sons, and Butterflies is a masterful and touching memoir blending natural history, pop culture, and literary biography―delivering a richly layered and nuanced portrait of a son’s attempt, after years of stubborn resistance, to take on his dying father’s love of the natural world. With his father unable to leave the house and follow the butterfly cycle for the first time since he was a child, Masters endeavors to become his connection to the outdoors and his treasured butterflies, reporting back with stories of beloved species―Purple Emperors, Lulworth Skippers, Wood Whites and Silver-studded Blues―and with stories of the woods and meadows that are their habitats and once were his. Structured around a series of exchanges and remembrances, butterflies become a way of talking about masculinity, memory, generational differences, and ultimately loss and continuation. Masters takes readers on an unlikely journey where Luther Vandross and The Sopranos rub shoulders with the likes of Angela Carter and Virginia Woolf on butterflies and gender; the metamorphoses of Prince; Zadie Smith on Joni Mitchell and how sensibilities evolve; and the lives and works of Vladimir Nabokov and other literary lepidopterists.
In this beautiful debut memoir, Ben Masters offers an intensely authentic, unforgettable portrait of a father and son sharing passions, lessons, and regrets before they run out of time.
The Flitting: A Memoir of Fathers, Sons, and Butterflies is a masterful and touching memoir blending natural history, pop culture, and literary biography―delivering a richly layered and nuanced portrait of a son’s attempt, after years of stubborn resistance, to take on his dying father’s love of the natural world. With his father unable to leave the house and follow the butterfly cycle for the first time since he was a child, Masters endeavors to become his connection to the outdoors and his treasured butterflies, reporting back with stories of beloved species―Purple Emperors, Lulworth Skippers, Wood Whites and Silver-studded Blues―and with stories of the woods and meadows that are their habitats and once were his. Structured around a series of exchanges and remembrances, butterflies become a way of talking about masculinity, memory, generational differences, and ultimately loss and continuation. Masters takes readers on an unlikely journey where Luther Vandross and The Sopranos rub shoulders with the likes of Angela Carter and Virginia Woolf on butterflies and gender; the metamorphoses of Prince; Zadie Smith on Joni Mitchell and how sensibilities evolve; and the lives and works of Vladimir Nabokov and other literary lepidopterists.
In this beautiful debut memoir, Ben Masters offers an intensely authentic, unforgettable portrait of a father and son sharing passions, lessons, and regrets before they run out of time.
352 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2024
10 people are currently reading
2619 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
March 9, 2025
I enjoyed The Flitting most when Ben Masters explored his personal life, specifically his reflections on fatherhood and grief were moving and made me think about my own relationships with my father and son. However, the sections on other authors felt less engaging, and I often found myself eager to return to his own story.
While the literary analysis didn’t resonate with me, The Flitting is a thoughtful story on memory, loss, and the way the past lingers in the present. A compelling read for those interested in fatherhood and personal reflection.
While the literary analysis didn’t resonate with me, The Flitting is a thoughtful story on memory, loss, and the way the past lingers in the present. A compelling read for those interested in fatherhood and personal reflection.
October 1, 2024
Ben Masters book is holding such a special place in my heart. It’s just such a really beautiful memoir about a relationship between a son and his dying father. Butterflies become a connection that bonds them in a way they haven’t previously been able to.
I think I related to the book taking place for the most part during Covid restrictions. Having lost my grandfather during that time, who I was so very close to, this one hit home for me. Not just the grief of what’s happened, but also the weirdness of the restricted access at the hospital, the way the funeral service was so different without being able to be as close to people, or to limit how many could be there. What a time that was that feels so, otherworldly and of a different life.
Much like Ben’s father had his love of butterflies and nature that Ben didn’t quite feel he could relate to, my grandfather had his love of working on cars that, well, isn’t quite my thing. But that openness, when we allow room for it, can create a space where we can come to an understanding and closeness. It just requires some work to lower those walls of doubt.
Ultimately, this one also comes down to the understanding that our parents aren’t just our parents. They are their own multifaceted people with as many sides to them and hobbies as we have. Not always the easiest thing for some of us to learn or accept.
You’ll learn some things along the way in this memoir, about butterflies for sure, but also about yourself and connections, and just how to be more thoughtful of our surroundings.
Thank you, Ben Masters for writing this, I needed it, so many people do.
I think I related to the book taking place for the most part during Covid restrictions. Having lost my grandfather during that time, who I was so very close to, this one hit home for me. Not just the grief of what’s happened, but also the weirdness of the restricted access at the hospital, the way the funeral service was so different without being able to be as close to people, or to limit how many could be there. What a time that was that feels so, otherworldly and of a different life.
Much like Ben’s father had his love of butterflies and nature that Ben didn’t quite feel he could relate to, my grandfather had his love of working on cars that, well, isn’t quite my thing. But that openness, when we allow room for it, can create a space where we can come to an understanding and closeness. It just requires some work to lower those walls of doubt.
Ultimately, this one also comes down to the understanding that our parents aren’t just our parents. They are their own multifaceted people with as many sides to them and hobbies as we have. Not always the easiest thing for some of us to learn or accept.
You’ll learn some things along the way in this memoir, about butterflies for sure, but also about yourself and connections, and just how to be more thoughtful of our surroundings.
Thank you, Ben Masters for writing this, I needed it, so many people do.
October 21, 2024
The metamorphosis of a grieving son informed by butterflies and literature (Dorset, southwest coast of England; 2019 to present-day): The Flitting is a great memoir. A son’s “mass of love” tribute to his dad that shows how “life and art are inseparable” in multiple ways.
Great because of a son’s bear-his-soul awakening to his devoted father’s obsession with Britain’s butterfly species (fifty-nine) during his last year of life, emotionally intense in his final months. Written three years after his death, Ben Masters looks back at his memories, regrets of lost quality time “butterflying” together, and reaches deep into his feelings of being unable to measure up to a great man of “integrity,” “strength and courage.”
Great because Masters is a British English Professor at the University of Nottingham who uses great literature as a way of understanding themes of manhood, masculinity, fatherhood, and feminist thinking, coming at a particularly vulnerable time as a new father to two boys, questioning what kind of father he wants to be. Examined personally and through the lens of writers and poets, many British. A noteworthy exception is Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov whose literary work Speak, Memory may have inspired this greatly hybrid memoir, tweaking the title to “speak of memory,” describing memories that speak to what it means when a greatly protective father is no longer there for you. Nabokov was, like Masters’ father, a lepidopterist – passionate about butterflies.
Look for how Nabokov’s son Dmitri is woven into the storytelling, catching your attention since it’s not the author speaking but one of the writers he draws from. Masters also switches the audience he’s speaking to, periodically writing directly to his father. It’s not lost on him that Nabokov and his father as well as Nabokov and his son shared an infectious enthusiasm for butterflies whereas Masters is remorseful he didn’t, explaining, “If the countryside and nature belong to dad, literature belongs to me.” Despite his saying, “You can’t reverse a lifetime of indifferences,” they did enjoy common interests together like music and sports, but they don’t rise to the emotional and healing heights of experiencing the beauty and science of butterflies in the wild together.
Great in introducing the central theme: a “shift in my own sensibility, from butterfly-ignorer to butterfly-obsessive.” The transformation symbolic of the stages of a butterfly’s life. Borrowing Zadie Smith’s thinking in “Some Notes on Attunement” he writes about his “change in sensibilities,” which he defines as an “emotional and aesthetic experience, our perception of things, our receptiveness to that which is other.”
Great in how Masters also looks to the music of Joni Mitchell, “an artist whose music means so much to me,” and is the subject of Smith’s above-cited essay. Mitchell’s Blue Period echoes Masters’ melancholy tone, and seems to suggest that, like the legendary American singer-songwriter’s blue era some consider almost too intimate, his innermost outpouring of love, grief, longing may be too revealing. Or, perhaps, that this book will be his most deeply openhearted?
Without trying to be facetious, it’s important to note this isn’t a book to read flitting to and fro, considering all the unfamiliar or read-a-while-ago literary references. To guide us, there’s a dozen detailed pages of Endnotes. At first you may not notice the tiny numbered footnotes corresponding to these notes; I didn’t so returned to the beginning to see what I missed: the scholarship that went into this endeavor, questioning and appreciating what a life well-lived means.
Masters wrote this book while struggling with writing a novel; he writes of other novelistic failings. There’s no failure here, rather triumph seen as a “gift” from his father. Yet “the gifts that have been an offer for thirty years, the gifts I have consistently rejected are no longer available.” The Gift another Nabokov novel discussed (also Ali Smith’s Artful). It “vibrates with sentiment.” Sentimentality a quality also seen in Masters’ exceptional prose, such as recognizing the “true gift” his father has left him: the “yet-unseen butterflies, the butterflies of my future.”
There’s also a second son, Matt, but he lives in Japan and can’t get out of the country, depicting the cruel timing of a father’s terminal illness during the early days of COVID in 2020 when countries were on lockdown. For the most part, the author steers away from how his mother is holding up, sensitive, we assume, to protecting her privacy as well as emphasizing the father-son bond.
You may also want to slow down your reading to google the butterfly stars. Found mostly in this out-of-this-world UK southern coastal rocky landscape, a wet and chalky cliffs and sand from limestone habitat that has enabled the survival of species. Some only exist here, some more common, others rare and endangered.
A prolific British children’s author and naturalist had a great influence on Masters’ father’s love for butterflies: Denys Watkins-Pitchford, or BB, his pseudonym. Described with great affection, you can’t help but wonder what most Americans have missed out on.
Virginia Woolf makes her presence here. “A keen entomologist who enjoyed collecting butterflies throughout her childhood, and butterflies and moths flutter in and out of her writing doing graceful symbolic work.” For instance, in To the Lighthouse, she writes of “the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral.”
Butterflies are exalted. When a son spots and photographs them for his dad and himself he tells us, “We behold something far more than a butterfly. It is the tangle of personal associations it weaves around each of us.” For Masters, butterflies will always personalize a tangle of emotions around his father.
The gift Masters has given us are new ways of seeing how art informs life.
Great because of a son’s bear-his-soul awakening to his devoted father’s obsession with Britain’s butterfly species (fifty-nine) during his last year of life, emotionally intense in his final months. Written three years after his death, Ben Masters looks back at his memories, regrets of lost quality time “butterflying” together, and reaches deep into his feelings of being unable to measure up to a great man of “integrity,” “strength and courage.”
Great because Masters is a British English Professor at the University of Nottingham who uses great literature as a way of understanding themes of manhood, masculinity, fatherhood, and feminist thinking, coming at a particularly vulnerable time as a new father to two boys, questioning what kind of father he wants to be. Examined personally and through the lens of writers and poets, many British. A noteworthy exception is Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov whose literary work Speak, Memory may have inspired this greatly hybrid memoir, tweaking the title to “speak of memory,” describing memories that speak to what it means when a greatly protective father is no longer there for you. Nabokov was, like Masters’ father, a lepidopterist – passionate about butterflies.
Look for how Nabokov’s son Dmitri is woven into the storytelling, catching your attention since it’s not the author speaking but one of the writers he draws from. Masters also switches the audience he’s speaking to, periodically writing directly to his father. It’s not lost on him that Nabokov and his father as well as Nabokov and his son shared an infectious enthusiasm for butterflies whereas Masters is remorseful he didn’t, explaining, “If the countryside and nature belong to dad, literature belongs to me.” Despite his saying, “You can’t reverse a lifetime of indifferences,” they did enjoy common interests together like music and sports, but they don’t rise to the emotional and healing heights of experiencing the beauty and science of butterflies in the wild together.
Great in introducing the central theme: a “shift in my own sensibility, from butterfly-ignorer to butterfly-obsessive.” The transformation symbolic of the stages of a butterfly’s life. Borrowing Zadie Smith’s thinking in “Some Notes on Attunement” he writes about his “change in sensibilities,” which he defines as an “emotional and aesthetic experience, our perception of things, our receptiveness to that which is other.”
Great in how Masters also looks to the music of Joni Mitchell, “an artist whose music means so much to me,” and is the subject of Smith’s above-cited essay. Mitchell’s Blue Period echoes Masters’ melancholy tone, and seems to suggest that, like the legendary American singer-songwriter’s blue era some consider almost too intimate, his innermost outpouring of love, grief, longing may be too revealing. Or, perhaps, that this book will be his most deeply openhearted?
Without trying to be facetious, it’s important to note this isn’t a book to read flitting to and fro, considering all the unfamiliar or read-a-while-ago literary references. To guide us, there’s a dozen detailed pages of Endnotes. At first you may not notice the tiny numbered footnotes corresponding to these notes; I didn’t so returned to the beginning to see what I missed: the scholarship that went into this endeavor, questioning and appreciating what a life well-lived means.
Masters wrote this book while struggling with writing a novel; he writes of other novelistic failings. There’s no failure here, rather triumph seen as a “gift” from his father. Yet “the gifts that have been an offer for thirty years, the gifts I have consistently rejected are no longer available.” The Gift another Nabokov novel discussed (also Ali Smith’s Artful). It “vibrates with sentiment.” Sentimentality a quality also seen in Masters’ exceptional prose, such as recognizing the “true gift” his father has left him: the “yet-unseen butterflies, the butterflies of my future.”
There’s also a second son, Matt, but he lives in Japan and can’t get out of the country, depicting the cruel timing of a father’s terminal illness during the early days of COVID in 2020 when countries were on lockdown. For the most part, the author steers away from how his mother is holding up, sensitive, we assume, to protecting her privacy as well as emphasizing the father-son bond.
You may also want to slow down your reading to google the butterfly stars. Found mostly in this out-of-this-world UK southern coastal rocky landscape, a wet and chalky cliffs and sand from limestone habitat that has enabled the survival of species. Some only exist here, some more common, others rare and endangered.
A prolific British children’s author and naturalist had a great influence on Masters’ father’s love for butterflies: Denys Watkins-Pitchford, or BB, his pseudonym. Described with great affection, you can’t help but wonder what most Americans have missed out on.
Virginia Woolf makes her presence here. “A keen entomologist who enjoyed collecting butterflies throughout her childhood, and butterflies and moths flutter in and out of her writing doing graceful symbolic work.” For instance, in To the Lighthouse, she writes of “the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral.”
Butterflies are exalted. When a son spots and photographs them for his dad and himself he tells us, “We behold something far more than a butterfly. It is the tangle of personal associations it weaves around each of us.” For Masters, butterflies will always personalize a tangle of emotions around his father.
The gift Masters has given us are new ways of seeing how art informs life.
October 11, 2024
I was a little disappointed in this book. The bits with his father were good and the bits about butterflies were okay. At times the author seemed more interested in Vladimir Nabokov, Zadie Smith, Virginia Woolf, Luther Vandross, Joni Mitchell, Prince or the LA Lakers. I really didn’t enjoy the style of writing, not my cup of tea.
September 27, 2024
Thank you Tin House for the ARC.
Every once in a while I read a book that just screams, if you like ____ then you will love this. The Flitting is one of those books. If you love Nabokov, or really any of the early to mid century cerebral male writers, who focus heavily on craft, you will like The Flitting. The influence is intentional and obvious. Masters weaves in the end of his father’s life, his father’s passion for nature and butterflies with the writing and experiences of Nabokov and his son Demetri.
The craft is high in this book. The sentences are all beautifully crafted and the weaving between subjects and experiences are artfully done.
With that said, this is not my style of art. I see the beauty and craft, but this book wasn’t really for me. There is a white-middle class-CIS-straight-able bodied-maleness that was off putting to me. A centering of self, that went a little too far into Masters, holding other characters, especially the women in his life at arms length. Something I find often in memoirs by men like Masters. It isn’t dismissive or bad, but it’s just a little too centralized for my own taste. I prefer memoirs that examine the self and the surroundings with equal clarity. Still, Masters knows what he is doing, and he wrote exactly what he meant to write with a very high level of craft.
Every once in a while I read a book that just screams, if you like ____ then you will love this. The Flitting is one of those books. If you love Nabokov, or really any of the early to mid century cerebral male writers, who focus heavily on craft, you will like The Flitting. The influence is intentional and obvious. Masters weaves in the end of his father’s life, his father’s passion for nature and butterflies with the writing and experiences of Nabokov and his son Demetri.
The craft is high in this book. The sentences are all beautifully crafted and the weaving between subjects and experiences are artfully done.
With that said, this is not my style of art. I see the beauty and craft, but this book wasn’t really for me. There is a white-middle class-CIS-straight-able bodied-maleness that was off putting to me. A centering of self, that went a little too far into Masters, holding other characters, especially the women in his life at arms length. Something I find often in memoirs by men like Masters. It isn’t dismissive or bad, but it’s just a little too centralized for my own taste. I prefer memoirs that examine the self and the surroundings with equal clarity. Still, Masters knows what he is doing, and he wrote exactly what he meant to write with a very high level of craft.
January 16, 2026
It is very hard for me to do this book justice. I liked the parts about the father-son relationship very much. They were tender, poetic, full of insight, and the ending almost moved me to tears.
I didn't like the parts about butterflies that much (since I am not particularly interested in the topic) but I absolutely understood their necessity here. Without Masters' father's love for butterflies, it would not have been the same book. I loved the way butterflies were used in a metaphorical sense throughout the whole book.
What I personally found unnecessary were all the parts about authors or artists. I understand that they were Masters' equivalent to his father's butterflies, something that was important to him and that he wanted to share. But for me as a reader, they were distracting me from the actual story. If I wanted to read about Nabokov or other artists, I would have bought a biography of them. So I started skipping those paragraphs or chapters altogether.
2 stars for the artists, 3 stars for the butterflies, 5 stars for the beautifully written memoir of his father.
I didn't like the parts about butterflies that much (since I am not particularly interested in the topic) but I absolutely understood their necessity here. Without Masters' father's love for butterflies, it would not have been the same book. I loved the way butterflies were used in a metaphorical sense throughout the whole book.
What I personally found unnecessary were all the parts about authors or artists. I understand that they were Masters' equivalent to his father's butterflies, something that was important to him and that he wanted to share. But for me as a reader, they were distracting me from the actual story. If I wanted to read about Nabokov or other artists, I would have bought a biography of them. So I started skipping those paragraphs or chapters altogether.
2 stars for the artists, 3 stars for the butterflies, 5 stars for the beautifully written memoir of his father.
October 1, 2024
Thank you Tin House for the gifted ARC book.
THE FLITTING is a poignant memoir that explores how butterflies created connection between a dying father and his son. Masters offers glimpses of his personal growth and attempts at chasing butterflies within a tribute to his father – an attempt to make sense of the circumstances of his death, the circumstances of their relationship. There is a tenderness with which he speaks of his father, what they had and lost, what they will never be able to obtain. I did feel a bit lost regarding some of the references and questioned whether Masters was writing for himself, an academic audience, or the general reader. It seemed to be a mix. Overall, this was moving. I especially enjoyed his father’s passion for nature conservancy and the dedication he gave to studying butterflies.
THE FLITTING is a poignant memoir that explores how butterflies created connection between a dying father and his son. Masters offers glimpses of his personal growth and attempts at chasing butterflies within a tribute to his father – an attempt to make sense of the circumstances of his death, the circumstances of their relationship. There is a tenderness with which he speaks of his father, what they had and lost, what they will never be able to obtain. I did feel a bit lost regarding some of the references and questioned whether Masters was writing for himself, an academic audience, or the general reader. It seemed to be a mix. Overall, this was moving. I especially enjoyed his father’s passion for nature conservancy and the dedication he gave to studying butterflies.
September 12, 2024
Thank you to Tin House for the ARC.
I found this book incredibly soulful and heart rendering. Even though I am not so intimately acquainted with some of the authors Masters pulls into the narrative, I found those portions engaging and hope to read more of their works. I felt too that this was an avenue which led him in developing the connection with his father. Granted, his seeking the butterflies for his father was the main impetus in this moving connection and I can't think of a more poignant path.
Masters doesn't shy away from the emotions of dealing with the pending and eventual death of his father. I found his writing lovely and lyrical.
I found this book incredibly soulful and heart rendering. Even though I am not so intimately acquainted with some of the authors Masters pulls into the narrative, I found those portions engaging and hope to read more of their works. I felt too that this was an avenue which led him in developing the connection with his father. Granted, his seeking the butterflies for his father was the main impetus in this moving connection and I can't think of a more poignant path.
Masters doesn't shy away from the emotions of dealing with the pending and eventual death of his father. I found his writing lovely and lyrical.
January 10, 2025
This is a wonderful book about life, loss, relationships and nature, and it is very obviously written by someone for whom words are a living. I hugely enjoyed it. The only reason it didn't get a fifth star was that I think he went a bit too long and hard on Nabukov, Woolf etc, and that this detracted a little bit from the flow of an excellent story. Highly recommended.
February 16, 2025
A touching memoir of the death of a father, told by the son. Although the son had spent his life dismissing his father's passion for the natural world, he suddenly sees the beauty of the environment around him just as his father's cancer is eradicating his ability to experience. He begins to pursue nature - especially butterflies - on his father's behalf. Moving, heart-wrenching, beautiful!
October 16, 2025
Easy max rating on this book. It was letter-perfect. Touching, witty, and beautifully thought out, it is a moving exploration of grief and also how to create a touchstone that allows you to move on without letting go. I loved it. The nature writing was top notch, too.
July 16, 2024
Very relatable and moving book. Recommend
August 7, 2024
This was a beautiful book on so many levels, I was sad to have come to the end of it. 10/10 would recommend
January 2, 2025
Lovely father and son story. Almost a 5 star review for me. It was a favorite memoir of 2024. As a woman, I find it especially poignant to read about fathers and sons.
April 9, 2025
I won this book from a Goodreads giveaway. It was written beautifully. I skipped through a lot of pages because i was really only interested in the father/son aspect.
April 27, 2025
Nature has a way of telling us time must pass. Are you seeing this?
December 27, 2025
A Flitting Ben Masters
A Flitting describes the flittering and fluttering of a Butterfly. It also describes transformational change from one state to another. Ben Masters is a young writer and a father whose own Dad has terminal cancer and he himself is being transformed from an active outdoor naturalist whose passion is Butterflies to being confined to his home by his illness and Covid restrictions. Ben sees himself as a lost and confused son attempting to come to terms with his dying Father and at the same time supporting his Mum, work, he is a writer and look after his young family. Ben has been previously uninterested in Butterflies in particular he had misgivings about his Dad’s collections of dead Butterflies and Moths. However as his Father becomes increasingly frail he gradually decides that trying to see all the Butterflies he can in 1 year will help connect with his dad and distract him.
The book is much more than account of hunting Butterflies. Many issues are touched on with interesting literary references. He analyses the role and compares the paternal behaviour of his grandfather, his own father and wonders if by writing this account he is mythologizing the patriarchal line. On several occasions he compares the life cycle and the form and behaviour of Butterflies to individuals at different stages of their lives and as he watches his Father deteriorate he wonders how uncomfortable it is for his powerful Purple Emperor of a Dad to shed the armoury of the patriarchy. There are several references to Vladimir Nabokov, himself a lepidopterist who with his family fled from the Bolsheviks his own Dad was assassinated at the Berlin Philharmonic hall. Nabokov had an affinity with the Red Admiral previously known as the Red Admirable which travels continents - a migrant. Poets of course William Wordsworth and his poem ‘To a Butterfly’. Flitting also means the loss of one’s home and habitat. John Clare moved from his home because of the enclosure act and in his poem entitled the Flitting tells how he lost his essential landscape. Ben points out that getting access to private property was started following the Norman Conquest. The word forest – foris means “outside of” outside of the common law falling under royal jurisdiction. There are also nods to the metamorphoses of Joni Mitchell and Prince and the music of Luther Vandross.
Ben’s change from Butterfly ignorant to Butterfly obsessive is charming and amusing. He quotes Saul Bellow’s line “My ignorance is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything at all”. It is a wide ranging book which is informative, sensitive, honest, authentic, tender, engaging, powerful, self-doubting and quietly inspiring.
A Flitting describes the flittering and fluttering of a Butterfly. It also describes transformational change from one state to another. Ben Masters is a young writer and a father whose own Dad has terminal cancer and he himself is being transformed from an active outdoor naturalist whose passion is Butterflies to being confined to his home by his illness and Covid restrictions. Ben sees himself as a lost and confused son attempting to come to terms with his dying Father and at the same time supporting his Mum, work, he is a writer and look after his young family. Ben has been previously uninterested in Butterflies in particular he had misgivings about his Dad’s collections of dead Butterflies and Moths. However as his Father becomes increasingly frail he gradually decides that trying to see all the Butterflies he can in 1 year will help connect with his dad and distract him.
The book is much more than account of hunting Butterflies. Many issues are touched on with interesting literary references. He analyses the role and compares the paternal behaviour of his grandfather, his own father and wonders if by writing this account he is mythologizing the patriarchal line. On several occasions he compares the life cycle and the form and behaviour of Butterflies to individuals at different stages of their lives and as he watches his Father deteriorate he wonders how uncomfortable it is for his powerful Purple Emperor of a Dad to shed the armoury of the patriarchy. There are several references to Vladimir Nabokov, himself a lepidopterist who with his family fled from the Bolsheviks his own Dad was assassinated at the Berlin Philharmonic hall. Nabokov had an affinity with the Red Admiral previously known as the Red Admirable which travels continents - a migrant. Poets of course William Wordsworth and his poem ‘To a Butterfly’. Flitting also means the loss of one’s home and habitat. John Clare moved from his home because of the enclosure act and in his poem entitled the Flitting tells how he lost his essential landscape. Ben points out that getting access to private property was started following the Norman Conquest. The word forest – foris means “outside of” outside of the common law falling under royal jurisdiction. There are also nods to the metamorphoses of Joni Mitchell and Prince and the music of Luther Vandross.
Ben’s change from Butterfly ignorant to Butterfly obsessive is charming and amusing. He quotes Saul Bellow’s line “My ignorance is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything at all”. It is a wide ranging book which is informative, sensitive, honest, authentic, tender, engaging, powerful, self-doubting and quietly inspiring.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews