Review: A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

How do you review a melancholy book of essays by a gifted, world-weary writer like Rebecca Solnit? By impressions...

In "A Field Guide To Getting Lost" Rebecca Solnit has given us a wide ranging series of essays that begin by getting lost and end up in far flung realms of introverted ruminations ranging from the mundane to the brilliant. Four chapters are titled The Blue of Distance, "the color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go." This longing is a major theme of the book, the longing of Spanish Conquistadors looking for gold in the New World, of whom she writes "no one will ever be as lost as those conquistadors ever again". She tells many little stories of loss and finding in this Field Guide, of her grandmother, having lost her mind in mental hospitals after the wrenching horrors of war and being a refugee from the Pale, appearing from a hospital to give her a lipsticked kiss that made her mother scream in terror, thinking she saw blood; of making a film in an abandoned hospital called "The Cure For Living" inspired by a dream of Joy Division; of her dazzling meteoric girlfriend Marine who was in a punk rock band and shared countless adventures with her in California before succumbing to the numbing allure of deadly street drugs... but what ties these essays together is the constant authorial voice, intense and focused even when examining the most rambling subjects, sharing nostalgic whispers from a time and space shared with so many of our generation, the lost suburbs of the '70s or the nostalgia of finding and reading essays like this in The Atlantic or Harpers or The Nation; and finding so many other treasures of history to share and personal stories to relate. Solnit has given us all a wonderful book to lose ourselves in, or find our inner introvert in.