About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory, by Barry Lopez (Harvill, £12 in UK) The difficulty of categorising Barry Lopez is laid amusingly bare on the cover of this handsome large-format paperback. "Nature," it begins, adding despairingly, "landscape/travel/literature." It's amusing because it suggests vagueness, a certain wooliness around the edges; yet Barry Lopez is one of the most precise writers you will ever read. If you have never read him, you should begin with the exquisite Arctic IT]Dreams, published simultaneously with this volume as a Panther paperback, in which he ranges across the northernmost places of the planet, bringing the perilous tundra, past and present, to life in prose of shimmering translucence. In Of Wolves and Men he does the same thing for our lupine brothers. He is, in both books, in control of his subject without being in any sense an interfering presence; which, naturally, makes the reader avid for personal details. Who is this man?
What made him curious about birds and insects and the strange, lonely places of the earth? About This Life fills in some of the gaps. In the introduction he explains how his family's moves from New York to California and back again stimulated his love of landscape; the book itself opens with five essays on far-flung places, culminating in a piece which, with typical thoughtfulness, investigates the mechanics of the long distance freight business; these are followed by five chapters devoted to American topics, including a marvellously vivid evocation of the workings of a wood-fired kiln in Oregon and an elegiac road movie - a description of a journey, or series of journeys, in the course of which he picks up various injured or dead animals from the highway and places their broken bodies carefully into the ditch - whose profound simplicity is a marvel to behold. The concluding seven "memory pieces" that linger in the mind like a complex musical chord that strikes both major and minor at once, and demand that "autobiography" be added to the aforementioned attempt at categorisation.
Arminta Wallace