Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan

It’s a skilful, masterful memoir: tracing one man’s obsession with surfing that takes him from teenage years in Hawaii to adulthood spent on far-flung coastlines, chasing waves. It’s a book about surfing, of course, but it’s not just for surfers. Finnegan’s skill, honed as a staff writer for the New Yorker, sees him trace memories and emotions with honesty. Enough to win him the Pulitzer Prize. Like all good memoirs, the subject doesn’t always come out well – as when he’s being drubbed by a monstrous wave, or looking back with semi-solid regret at the headstrong choices of his younger self.

Finnegan expertly dissects the choices he made, the priorities that took him through a decade of bumming around in different bits of ocean. The way he describes waves is electrifying – riding inside a barrel is like a camera iris opening, then closing, then opening again. The ocean has endless combinations of conditions and Finnegan seems to have an endless vocabulary with which to capture them. And so there are moments of hyperclarity and dreamlike perfection, then churning surf and great slabs of water, full of immense power.  

But it’s not all about waves. He glides over the emotional, political, human backdrop of his life with all the captivating skill of the surfers he describes. There is the making of a war correspondent in here too: his time spent in teaching in South Africa during apartheid comes as a turning point, a political awakening. The sharp focus on surfing allows him to reflect everything through a single lens, without drifting course, or floating out to sea.