Greta Shull from Open Road urged me to try this but I really don't like short fiction. I picked it up a few times but could not stick with it. Sorry.

Surreal to the point of trippiness,, beautiful and poetic, I adore every word that Lopez commits to the page. There's philosophical musings (and Lopez does not necessarily need 'an answer' to these) and at times his writings work as a nature diary too,.

More than any other writer, Lopez encourages me towards stillness, so much so that I find myself holding my breath as I turn the page.

Wonderful.

Desert Notes and River Notes were first published as two separate volumes in the late 1970s. now collected in one volume, described as fictions, these are unlike conventional short stories with plot and character. Instead these lyrical pieces fuse the best of Lopez’s nature writing with an element of fiction, and yet I’d have to say they are neither. Instead this is a genre-busting collection. I’d suggest putting aside expectations of a conventional read here, and give yourself over to the flow of images, thoughts, observations and dreams that fuse into the everyday. These are pieces rooted in the dryness of a desert, before moving on to the textures of the water in the rivers. A profound mediation on nature, time, life, healing and the simple process of nature helping us through it all.

On the desert: “I began each day like this, as though it were the last. I know the last days will be here, where the sun runs into the ocean, and that I will see in a movement of sea birds and hear in the sound of water beating against the earth what I now only imagine, that the ocean has a sadness beyond even the sadness of birds, that in the running into it of rivers is the weeping of the earth for what is lost.”

“Listen attentively. Just before dawn you will finally hear faint music. This is the sound of the loudest dreaming, the dreams of boulders. Continue to listen until the music isn’t there. What you thought about boulders will evaporate and what you know will become clear. Each night it will be harder. Listen until you can hear the dreams of the dust that settles on your head.

On the river: “One dream alone reveals your grief. The trees said you dreamed most often of the wind. You dreamed that you lived somewhere with the wind, with the wind rippling your feathers; and that children were born of this, that they are the movement of water in all the rivers. You wade, it is suggested, among your children, staring hard, pecking in that lightning way your life from the water that is your child; and sleeping in trees that do not hold you sacred.

You were young, you had also lost a wife, and you went down to the river and tore out your feathers and wept. The soundlessness of it was what you could not get over.”

At times I wasn’t sure what I was reading about as some of the writing didn’t seem to make much sense to me. This is imaginative writing describing the sensations evoked by the desert and the river but I was disoriented between the observation of nature and obsessive and passionate intensity of imagining being in/part of the places and creatures Lopez describes.

I was never sure who the narrator was, at times an unnamed ‘I’ and then a similarly unnamed ‘he’. At times I was thinking of abandoning the book and then a passage appealed to me and I read on. I preferred the stories in River Notes, of being by the river, observing the salmon for example returning to spawn, and the more straight-forward approach in Hanner’s Story, in which a river guide talks about the history of a community named Sheffield and the stories about the idyllic and far-fetched stories about these people. But overall I didn’t enjoy this book, and although I liked some of the descriptive writing, I was more baffled than enlightened.

I received a free electronic copy of this collection from Netgalley, Barry Holston Lopez, and Open Road Media in exchange for an honest review. This collection was originally published in 1979 by Andrews Mcmeel Publishing.

You cannot fully enjoy Barry Lopez unless you are willing to suspend reality. That said, I would follow him anywhere - and the microcosm of desert and river are my stomping grounds, as well. These writings lift you up and make your heart sing. And when they let you down - we all know you have to go there, eventually - it is with caring and eiderdown.

Lopez describes in almost fever-dream language the sensations of the river and desert. Many of these stories recalled sense-memories of camping in the desert, or rafting the Salmon River. “You can imagine what might be learned in a place like this if one took the time.” For this writer there is a very thin to non-existent line between man and animal, man and plant, or even man and rock. He observes carefully and deeply, and although he says, “I have in the past recounted these observations to audiences poorly chosen…” , this reader is a awed audience of one.