wanderlust a review

Sun, 22 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It was quite hard going at first, Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust, A History of Walking. The first couple of chapters are specifically American but then the story wanders over to Europe and tackles the likes of Wordsworth and Jane Austen but quite simply, this book blows every modern outdoor writer out of the water. It’s so utterly refreshing to read about the outdoors from such a completely different perspective. When confronted with the purple flowery trash that pretends to be outdoors prose these days, terms such as “resonate”, “liminal”, “profound”, “beetling” and other such tripe just washes over me as it’s never, ever used in context. The context is all in the writer’s head and very rarely does it make it onto the page. So you’re left trying to decipher what the real meaning is. Noam Chomsky is one of the world’s best intellectuals but he’s an appalling communicator. You have to work in his field to understand him. Similarly, most outdoors writers these days expect you to follow along with the purple prose and if you don’t understand it, well, you’re not really one of the modern beat generation they’re trying to recreate.

Wanderlist on eBothy Blog

wanderlust a review