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A review by likecymbeline
The Night Country by Loren Eiseley
4.0
This is what I search for: a scientist who writes like a mystic. Loren is that old fantastical duke of dark corners, ruminating on life and death, time and eternity. A student of human nature, caught in the double-world of his sense of isolation and separateness, and yet highly attuned to the social history of humanity. His style is grand; some might call it over-written but if so it's in exactly the way that I like. He's a capital-R Romantic, the wanderer above the sea of fog, and if you have felt that then search for what Eiseley has to offer you.
Fisher's illustrations with each chapter are a perfect match for the tone and study of these essays, these shadowy images of the psyche that seem Jungian in nature, taken from a part of the mind that works in half-formed images and that mean beyond their meanings. In contrast, Eiseley creats richly-coloured scenes over and over, so that you hardly realise he's doing it. I have watched these episodes from his life, have actually stood there beside him.
Particular favourite essays were "The Places Below," that subterranean exploration of the underworld that seems unreal, like it could've been a dream, that the Rat could not have been a real boy, until Eiseley abruptly grounds us again in saying: "A few weeks later he was dead—dead of some casual childhood illness." That word, 'casual,' the stark materiality of death. Wonderfully rendered. And "The Relic Men" was another fantastic essay. I must read more.
Fisher's illustrations with each chapter are a perfect match for the tone and study of these essays, these shadowy images of the psyche that seem Jungian in nature, taken from a part of the mind that works in half-formed images and that mean beyond their meanings. In contrast, Eiseley creats richly-coloured scenes over and over, so that you hardly realise he's doing it. I have watched these episodes from his life, have actually stood there beside him.
Particular favourite essays were "The Places Below," that subterranean exploration of the underworld that seems unreal, like it could've been a dream, that the Rat could not have been a real boy, until Eiseley abruptly grounds us again in saying: "A few weeks later he was dead—dead of some casual childhood illness." That word, 'casual,' the stark materiality of death. Wonderfully rendered. And "The Relic Men" was another fantastic essay. I must read more.