Winter Count

Winter Count, like other works by Barry Lopez, presents crisp, tight writing. No word wasted. And, like other pieces, Lopez has an eye for the subtle-mystical, and the material interface between person and environment, whatever each may be. He provides us glimpses of the sparks, or mystery, or wonder, or tragedies that are present at those instances of contact that happen as human beings move through time and space. Finding a book binder out among the antelope; wild birds who visit both city and the most remote corners of the earth; rivers that disappear; peoples who do not comprehend one another in the midst of the same environment, all of these are real tensions and contrasts that are all around us, and taking time to live in the instances of contact may illuminate many eternal as well as idiosyncratic truths as yet undiscovered.

This collection of ten early short stories by Barry Lopez seems written more than a little under the influence of Borges. Elegantly told, they are designed to evoke a deep sense of wonder in the reader. The settings are often remote - the open prairie, the desert - and touch on what feel like the remote worlds of other cultures and other times, especially Native American. The title story refers to the Indian practice of keeping a record of tribal history by representing the one most significant event of each year as a picture on a buffalo robe. In this story, a modern-day scholar immersed in the subject of this lost tradition is himself lost and out of place at a conference of academics. One man becomes fascinated by a French mansion built on the Montana-North Dakota border in the 1860s. Another, an early explorer of the West, attempts to uncover the mystery of a disappearing river in 1840s Nebraska. Still another, in the 1960s - like a chapter out of Castaneda - finds an Indian in the Arizona desert, who conjures a vision of the universe from an arrangement of stones lying in the sand. In the small-scale domesticities of modern fiction, it's hard to find imaginative writing of this kind. I highly recommend these stories as an escape from the everyday and the ordinary.

This book will send you to the dictionary while taking your breath away. Other reviewers have mentioned the phrase, "If one is patient...if you are careful, I think there is probably nothing that cannot be retrieved" from the story, The Orrery. Later in the story, The Location of the River, Lopez recounts the belief that " the history of the earth was revealed anew each spring in the shapes of the towering cumulus clouds that moved over the country from the north and west". Powerful, glorious statements.The language in this book is so wonderful, I can only let Barry Lopez speak for himself. Two others. From ,The Woman Who Had Shells,"We carry such people with us in an imaginary way,proof against some undefined but irrefutable darkness in the world.".For the readers, from ,The Lover of Words, "He did not wish to be distracted from...sequence in a life of readings, whereby one book leads by diaphanous but ineluctable threads to the next".Let the thread of your reading lead you to this book.

It seems an earlier reviewer had the same feelings as I about this book; I would just say - buy it for 'The Woman Who Had Shells' and 'The Orrery'. Both are twists of simple, magical stuff.