Log of the S.S. the Mrs Unguentine

I remain intrigued that the same person wrote the plain-spoken farmer's memoir, A Garlic Testament, that was our January Phinney by Post pick this year and this brilliant piece of weirdo fiction, but I'm as much intrigued by the connections between them as by their differences. The Log was published in 1972, just when Crawford and his wife, Rosemary (to whom the book is dedicated), started their farm, and you can imagine he wrote it as a sort of fever dream (or nightmare) of what they had gotten themselves into, and perhaps of his own impulse to create and control. It's a tale, told by the Mrs of the title, of a grand folly and an often disastrous marriage, of a giant ocean-going barge that becomes an unmoored world unto itself, presided over by the bearded, often brutal Unguentine, who mutely fancies himself an Adam—or even a Yahweh—reigning over his isolated, chaotically self-sufficient garden. It's a short book, but a crazy trip.