209 pages
English language
Published Feb. 11, 2006
Written as a series of autobiographical essays, A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Rebecca Solnit's life to explore issues of uncertainty, trust, loss, memory, desire, and place. Solnit is interested in the stories we use to navigate our way through the world, and the places we traverse, from wilderness to cities, in finding ourselves, or losing ourselves. While deeply personal, her own stories link up to larger stories, from captivity narratives of early Americans to the use of the color blue in Renaissance painting, not to mention encounters with tortoises, monks, punk rockers, mountains, deserts, and the movie Vertigo. The result is a distinctive, stimulating voyage of discovery.
Solnit is a great writer, but this book felt like it was forced and it just didn't do it for me. Where I should have been swept away by her prose and lush descriptions, I found myself skipping ahead because the writing felt gratuitous.
A contemplation of lost-ness of all kinds; indeterminacy, infinitude, distance and loss, told through art, history, philosophy, place and self. Appropriately, a book to get lost in.
