Last Wednesday was only our second dinner together since 2020 and, like our meal in May at Tom's, it was worth the wait. Mando served up a series of classically French dishes whose ingredients had the imprimatur of none other than Claude Monet and our very own Le Comptoir. From the opening cheese selection to the roast chicken, from the potato casserole to the apple pie, c'etait tout magnifique!
Our Discussion and Review of Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost is a collection of essays on a seemingly endless variety of topics—from the plot of Vertigo to the travails of Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca to a heroin overdose by a close friend—all connected (sometimes flimsily) by the notion that true self-discovery occurs only after one has lost one’s way.
When we picked A Field Guide from Mando’s list of titles last month, we naively thought that we were finally going to understand why it’s better to put away the map. We didn’t expect that Solnit’s path was going to be more metaphysical than literal. Yes, there were the obligatory references to Thoreau's road less traveled and to early explorers relying on maps with too little topography and too much terra incognita. But Solnit’s emphasis on geography was simply to get us in the mood for more serious soul-searching. And that’s where our problems began.
Most of us felt Solnit’s essays were, ahem, all over the map (thanks for the pun, Dan). Her ideas and associations move quickly and at times randomly. Some guys couldn’t follow the thread and others simply lost interest. Worse, her commentary is surprisingly uneven for such an accomplished writer, with trenchant observations and clever asides followed by more than a few clunkers. To paraphrase Paul, Solnit's ideas were fascinating and frustrating, erudite and interesting, but with no obvious lesson to be drawn from the collection. (I'm tempted to also paraphrase Dean, who characterized Solnit's stories as David Sedaris writ noir, but my notes don't do his wit justice!)
Rating A Field Guide to Getting Lost
With her intentionally discursive style, Solnit doesn’t make the reader’s task easy. And so we complained, predictably. But she earned our grudging admiration nonetheless. She provoked us with her impressive range, she made us consider our place and our potential, and (for most of us) she had us thinking long after we’d finished the book. So, despite our various disappointments, we gave her effort a respectable 6.1.
Next Up: Deacon King Kong by James McBride
An interesting choice for our group. Often, a book polarizes our group with some loving and some hating it. A Field Guide was different -- it polarized each of us on our own. I found things I really liked about it, and things that as Andrew put it frustrated me. The opening chapter pulled me in with its view of the importance of self-reliance and being willing to "get lost" in the real or imagined wilderness. The chapter that touched on Vertigo gave me a new and interesting perspective on the movie. The book was uniformly beautifully written. Yet at times it bogged down in stories that became so caught up in language and metaphor that it was hard to get through. Also Solnit seems to be unwilling to touch in any deep way on her love relationships -- her boyfriends (lovers? um friends?) in the book remain unnamed, not fleshed out, and more an excuse to connect her thoughts on other things than a reason for a story. How can a passionate, erudite author not get "lost" in a relationship that goes for years? Or is she unwilling to go into them, merely teasing us? Say so, then. In the end as with most of us, I was myself conflicted by the book and glad to have read it. I will see if/what from it stays with me over the years.
ReplyDeleteI was lost (in this book) and still not found. As someone who retired five years ago, one of the first things I found myself doing in retirement was getting on the internet and becoming enthralled with an esoteric subject (e.g. raising red worms) and realizing four hours later that I had just killed a half a day. That is how I felt about this book – each chapter had some nugget of interest but was it worth the time as I never felt a rhythm to the book.
ReplyDeleteIndeed each chapter felt like a separate essay – like reading a copy of the New Yorker magazine. And like the New Yorker, I found some chapters interesting (the experience of Search & Rescue teams, the color blue in 17th Century painting) and others self-absorbed (her relationship to the friend who commits suicide and making a movie at Letterman Hospital).
While Solnit has a great command of the language and links several esoteric pieces of philosophy and art spanning from the Greeks to Hitchcock into her chapters, what I missed was her personal sense of “Lost”. Perhaps it was having the fresh memory of our last book – A Cooks Tour – where Anthony Bourdain wrote us a diary of his travels, telling us his innermost thoughts about his passions and the devils that pervaded him as he struggled with a bi-polar disorder and addictions. It was this passion and emotion that I felt missing in Solnit’s book. Rebecca described her experiences in almost a clinical, third person retelling with little insight as to how it affected her emotionally. It left me lost -- informed but not knowing which way the author was headed.
I did not find myself "Getting Lost" in Solnit's work. She wanders through open spaces speaking to what they can reveal to the wanderer. That is all well and good, however, you do not need to state the same thing three or four (or more) ways. Solnit can turn a phrase, but often overworked her point. I do like getting lost in a good book, an excursion through the desert on my mountain bike, crossing the ocean in a small boat, or many other ways. It is a good way to understand more about yourself, and in turn learn more about the world. Besides overstating the why's and how's of getting lost, she might have added more telling information about what she personally learned from getting lost.
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