Friday Reads: A FIELD GUIDE TO GETTING LOST

I first came across Rebecca Solnit when I read Wanderlust, her rambling, round-about social, political, cultural and personal history of walking. It was a book that took in everything from Wordsworth, to mass trespass, to flaneurs and prostitutes. You never quite get the book you think you’re going to get with Solnit. Her mind is so restless, so wide-ranging, that anything she writes quickly crosses predictable boundaries. This could be terribly undisciplined and distracting but her passions are so heartfelt, her ideas so bewitching and her prose so lovely that you tend to forgive her the diversions and set off happily in pursuit.

So I really don’t know why I was surprised when I didn’t get what I thought I was going to get with A Field Guide to Getting Lost. This will be a book about the desirability of not knowing where you are, the thrill of being off the beaten track, it’ll be about the edge you feel when you realize that you are in a strange city and have taken a wrong turning, I thought. It’ll be geographical. Well yes. But so much more. Enough to make it it an emphatic ‘No’! to that narrow definition.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost is also about being lost in time, lost in the secrets of your family, lost in the received wisdom of history. And it’s about loss. What that does to us, why it’s important. One of the book’s most affecting and extraordinary sequences is a quite unheralded and hugely passionate love letter to a lost friend that springs from an account of making a film in an abandoned hospital. A woman who Solnit grew up with, shared adventures and traumas with, and who was eventually lost to a drugs overdose in her early twenties. It’s a beautiful, shocking and profoundly sad cry of abject loss. But there’s no self pity, just a clear-eyed, big hearted assessment of what this woman meant to Solnit. It’s one of those moments when you put a book down and stare into space for a while trying to work out how to encompass what you’ve just read.

So that’s one part of the book. Then there’s the disquisition on maps. What maps show, what they choose not to show, what they hide, what they reveal. To maps with ‘here be monsters’ on them, to 1:1 scale maps via maps from the 19th century that still had mythical islands on them. For anyone who’s thought about maps in fantasy novels, debated the need for them (not that I ever have of course HAHAHAHAHAHAHAA) it’s a fascinating perspective.

Or the bit about her love affair with the man in the desert, or the bit about Yves Klein and the colour blue or the settlers who were ‘lost’ when they went to live with the Native Americans or… or all the other sections, all the other perspectives. But I’ll leave you to discover those for yourself if you so choose. Go on, get lost