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4.5 stars, books, first time read, Nan Shepherd, nature, nature writing, nonfiction, own book, read in 2020, reading, review, The Living Mountain
Title: The Living Mountain
Author: Nan Shepherd
First published: 1977
Dates read: 3.4. – 9.4.2020
Category: first time read, non-fiction, own book, nature writing
Rating: 4.5/5
The book in five words or less: beautifully observed, eloquently written
My thoughts:
I’m not really sure how I first came across Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. I think the book popped up in a recommended reads list after I read Olivia Laing’s To the River last year. That, or when I added Robert Macfarlane’s complete works to my wishlist on one of the better-known online book retailers’ websites. At any rate, it wasn’t until I read Macfarlane’s Landmarks that I fully considered picking up this somewhat lesser-known classic of British nature writing.
I think part of the reason why The Living Mountain flies under the radar (well, mine at the very least) might be that it was written by a woman, and one who did not publish a large, well-known or influential oevre that brought her lasting fame. Instead, Nan Shepherd spent most of her life teaching and walking the Cairngorm mountains, and The Living Mountain itself, written mostly during the 1940s, wasn’t published until 1977.
The Living Mountain is a short and unimposing book, but one that is well-observed, lucid, and skillfully written. Its twelve chapters each touch on a different sphere of mountain life – among them are air, water, light, flora and fauna, human influence, and the mountain’s geographic features – but the book’s main premise is interrelation. Just like the mountain landscape and the plants, animals, and humans that inhabit it are interconnected, so are the different chapters of Shepherd’s book, with her more general thoughts on perception, full-body experience, and meditation on landscape flowing through all of them.
Nan Shepherd’s great strength lies in her skill of observation and her ability to pin down her experiences – obtained through all five senses – adeptly and precisely, drawing on clear perception just as much as on an impressive vocabulary and a wide range of descriptions and comparisons. She is aided in this by her long familiarity with the Cairngorm mountains – a kind of knowledge that is deepened by repeated trips to the same places until it turns into an excavation, almost, a study of depth as well as time. Knowledge, both in Shepherd’s understanding and in her moutaineering practice, is the product of a process of living within a landscape, and in the end it is always only an approximation. The Living Mountain, then, is an attempt to capture this process of infinite approximation, a meditation on the mountain and life itself.
Read if you like: Robert Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind, Scottish 19th century landscape paintings and Caspar David Friedrich, the more metaphysical variations of Romantic poetry, and the way Virginia Woolf writes about landscapes