The Nature Book
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Part sweeping evocation of Earth’s rhythms, part literary archive, part post-human novel, The Nature Book collages descriptions of the natural world into a singular symphonic paean to the planet.
What does our nature writing say about us, and more urgently, what would it say without us? Tom Comitta investigates these questions and more in The Nature Book, a “literary supercut” that arranges writing about the natural world from three hundred works of fiction into a provocative re-envisioning of the novel. With fiction’s traditional background of flora and fauna brought to the fore, people and their structures disappear, giving center stage to animals, landforms, and weather patterns—honored in their own right rather than for their ambient role in human drama. The Nature Book challenges the confines of anthropocentrism with sublime artistic vision, traversing mountains, forests, oceans, and space to shift our attention toward the magnificently complex and interconnected world around us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Using a collage of passages from hundreds of English-language novels, Comitta (Airport Novella) assembles an immersive exhibition of nature writing. A Genesis-like opening sets the tone: "Since the beginning, time was a form of sustenance," where "seasons passed with dream-like slowness." Soon, nonhuman characters emerge, with narratives of horses, a beaver, birds, and a mountain lion. There are exhausting storms, briny lightless depths, the cold of outer space, steaming jungles, massive mountain ranges, and burning deserts. Comitta's "literary supercut," as they call their project in a preface, encourages readers to meditate on the relationship between the English language and the natural world—night is "gloomy," an owl is "sobbing," there is "no way to draw any beauty" from a storm, and the howling of wolves is "cold and beggarly." Though none of the passages are directly attributed, some are so recognizable they break the spell, as in the many lines from Moby-Dick ("The whale broke water within two ship's lengths.... Shrouded in a thin, drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rain- bowed air"), while others feel anachronistic ("The moon came back white as cocaine"). Overall, though, Comitta's literary experiment pulls the reader along with gorgeous language and animal protagonists worth rooting for.
Customer Reviews
A million stars
The Nature Book is both a meditative and exciting tribute to the non-human world, through the lens of gorgeous and strange (and human) language. An ideal day to me would be to read this book on the beach, or in a jungle, or on a glacier. Comitta’s fascinating collage process generates a beautiful journey through weather and land and oceans and animals, providing us with the etherial utterances of frogs, waves and more. Humans are pretty over-rated (though their language can be pretty weird and great). Thank you Tom for this book, it’s one I’ll revisit over and over again. Please check out this book and their other work as well.