Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan review – a memoir of an obsession

For the New Yorker writer, chasing waves was far more than a sport. It was a calling, a means of working out his place in the world

Surfing appears to get you nowhere. You paddle out, you sprint for a wave, you ride it shorewards … and repeat. The sessions last hours; the rides, seconds. At the end of your time in the water, you’re in the same position that you were when you began – only more exhausted and with seawater in your nostrils. It is an exercise in running to stand still.

Near the end of Barbarian Days, William Finnegan’s luscious memoir about his life-long infatuation with surfing, the author describes a wave of huge power in which this tension becomes manifest. In “dead-clear water” off the coast of Madeira, he can see the rocks on the bottom of the sea, and begins to notice something weird about the wave he’s riding.

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