My grandfather's logbook

Forty-one years of weather, cargo and initials. No feelings anywhere in it. I have read it more times than any novel I own.

Every entry is the same shape — date, wind, sea state, cargo, hours — and the initials at the bottom pressed hard enough to emboss the page underneath. He wrote the way he talked, which is to say barely, and only about conditions.

That silence is the thing I have spent a book trying to translate.