![]() ![]() Together, they raise that age-old question of how we are supposed to relate to nature. Within the field of nature writing, Matthiessen works primarily in the tradition of the spiritual pilgrim, while Tesson writes in the tradition of the disgruntled misanthrope. Finally, Tesson’s interest in the snow leopard, like Matthiessen’s, is tangled up, in troubling ways, with grief and women.Įven where these books diverge, the effect is less to set this new one apart than to create a study in contrasts. Like Matthiessen, he is a kind of Watson figure, sidekick throughout his adventure to a savvier character: in his case, Vincent Munier, a French wildlife photographer for Matthiessen, George Schaller, one of the world’s preëminent field biologists. Like Matthiessen, he hopes his journey will help him settle into a new way of being-Zen, in the original book the more secular “art of patience” in this one. Like Matthiessen, Tesson is facing the far side of his forties, feeling his age and his physical limitations. Yet this new book echoes the earlier one in countless ways. One understands why Tesson wants to put some distance between himself and Matthiessen, whose book looms over much of nature writing, enormous and immovable as Annapurna. “The Art of Patience,” which was ably translated by Frank Wynne, is not an homage to its precursor, to put it mildly. But now comes the Parisian writer Sylvain Tesson with “The Art of Patience,” its title a necessary accommodation to an apparently unwelcome predecessor: in French, the language in which it was written, Tesson’s book, like Matthiessen’s, is simply named for the animal. Even scholars writing about snow leopards routinely cite Matthiessen’s book, while general-interest authors, perhaps recognizing that a flag had been planted in particularly high and difficult terrain, have mostly looked elsewhere for their stories. ![]() Matthiessen dedicates roughly as many paragraphs to it as to the yeti, and of those two mysterious alpine animals he thinks he catches a glimpse of only the imaginary one.Īnd yet “The Snow Leopard” manages to convey the impression of being subtly yet fundamentally about its stated subject matter, albeit in some chimeric way-part literal, part figurative, like a creature turning midway through into a thought. Despite the book’s title, the snow leopard is almost entirely absent from its pages, faint and fleeting as a pawprint in the snow. But he sealed his connection to one of nature’s most elusive animals in 1978, with the publication of “The Snow Leopard,” which first appeared in part in this magazine and went on to win two National Book Awards, one for the now defunct category of contemporary thought, one for general nonfiction. Matthiessen, who died in 2014, was a man of many other associations as well: novelist, travel writer, environmentalist, co-founder of The Paris Review, Zen Buddhist, undercover agent for the C.I.A. In this sense, the snow leopard, which clearly belongs to no one, belongs to Peter Matthiessen. Thus it could be said that the mongoose belongs to Rudyard Kipling, the mockingbird to Harper Lee, the lobster to David Foster Wallace, the cockroach to Kafka, the spider to E. B. White, and the snake to whoever wrote Genesis. Certain other authors of both fiction and nonfiction have achieved a feat like his, forging an alternative taxonomy whereby they become permanently associated with a particular creature. As a literary matter, however, it belongs, indisputably, to Herman Melville. Biologically speaking, the sperm whale belongs to the genus Physeter, to the family Physeteridae, and to that magnificent group of aquatic mammals properly called Cetacea.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |