2007 books

[peteryoung]

21) Barry Lopez, River Notes, 1979
One of a pair of books (the other being Desert Notes), this being a collection of short fictions that focus mostly on human events connected to the course of a river in the deep American wilderness. The writing is too often uncomfortably intense, such that Lopez seemed to be taking himself a tad too seriously in his desire to interpret nature in his own highly personal way and extract meaningful stories from the resulting communion. Nor is this the kind of writing that leaves room for much in the way of characterisation, and the solitude hinted at is youthfully self-conscious and confessional, though I imagine there were few American nature writers at the time who could match Lopez for speaking so eloquenty from the heart.