The Rebecca Solnit I really want to read is Wanderlust: A History of Walking, (because I’m finally entering my psychogeography era), but when I was in Waterstones the other day and had cash in my pocket I saw A Field Guide to Getting Lost and couldn’t leave it there. What a title, for a start.
(The first Solnit I’d read was her piece about autonomous cars and San Francisco in the LRB, which I thought was great.)
I’m not sure how to talk about A Field Guide, which is fitting with its theme, I think. There are through lines but it mostly functions as a mood piece and a meditation. Solnit is wonderfully multidisciplinary; she uses memories to prise open and examine history, and history to unearth and interrogate memory. All of it is within her scope. She talks about lost tribes, lost people, lost objects, lost relationships. She talks about actually being lost, and the difficulty of finding yourself.
In structure it’s a series of essays; some of them on more specific things like the history of European settlers integrating with Indigenous cultures in America, or a dear friend’s passing (the chapter on Marine is a beautiful portrait and heartbreaking), and sometimes they are interstitial, The Blue of Distance, a talking over and around the theme. It’s a good rhythm that, ironically, stops you getting too lost in the text. She always knows when to bring you back, when to talk about something concrete.
The vibe was at once strange and familiar and I spent a lot of the book trying to place where I’d felt it before, a feeling that meant this book absolutely succeeded, and I realised it was in reading some of Roland Barthes’ more personal works, like Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, and, A Lover’s Discourse. That’s a great mood to be able to evoke. If I could do that I’d never do anything else.
I can only do this book an injury by trying to describe it any further. It’s about 200 pages, the perfect length for something like this. If you’re reading this review you’ll already know whether you’ll dig it or not. If you haven’t read it, just go do it.
James Farson 