A review by shimmer
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde

3.0

There are some absolute gems in the course of the book, some passages and ideas I read several times over because they were so compelling and offered so much creative potential. But there were also long sections that felt repetitive and disconnected — sometimes because I wasn't familiar with a story being taken for granted as common knowledge among readers, but other times because new directions were suddenly taken without clear transitions or context. The book often felt more like a notebook than a text meant for readers beyond the author. In part I think I was a bit frustrated because I read this as research, hoping to learn more about traditional trickster figures and tales — especially coyote — and those turned out to be a very small part of Hyde's concern. The book is much more about his own projections of the trickster onto other figures, and as he keeps going to be Hermes as his foundational example I didn't learn as much as I'd hoped to about the social, historical, and cultural contexts in which trickster stories arise, or about the stories themselves.