From Death unto Death

The Snow Leopard By Peter Matthiessen Viking, 338 pp., $12.95 Peter Matthiessen’s novels include At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Far Tortuga-, his nonfiction, The Cloud Forest and The Tree Where Man Was Born. For a long time, his writing has been vigorous, metaphoric, exact, luminous, coherent, and resolved. If one sensed that something was lacking, one did not know what to call it. In The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen’s newest and best book, he tells us: “Not so long ago I could say truthfully that I had not shed a tear in twenty years.” When I read this sentence, I suddenly knew: his older books—for all their elegance, for all their correct passion for land and wilderness, for all their steady intelligence—lacked the tribute of Matthiessen’s tears.

In The Snow Leopard Matthiessen narrates a two months’ journey through the Himalayas in Nepal, where he accompanied a field biologist in pursuit of the blue sheep; both men hoped as well to observe the rare snow leopard which preys upon the sheep. Matthiessen’s narrative follows the painful trail with agonizing precision; his descriptive passages render mountain, animal, child, bird, and plant with scrupulous richness. One senses cold, fatigue, eye-pain, relief, danger, ecstasy, discomfort, warmth. Every sentence seems sentient.

The Snow Leopard By Peter Matthiessen Viking, 338 pp., $12.95 Peter Matthiessen’s novels include At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Far Tortuga-, his nonfiction, The Cloud Forest and The Tree Where Man Was Born. For a long time, his writing has been vigorous, metaphoric, exact, luminous, coherent, and resolved. If one sensed that something was lacking, one did not know what to call it. In The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen’s newest and best book, he tells us: “Not so long ago I could say truthfully that I had not shed a tear in twenty years.” When I read this sentence, I suddenly knew: his older books—for all their elegance, for all their correct passion for land and wilderness, for all their steady intelligence—lacked the tribute of Matthiessen’s tears.

In The Snow Leopard Matthiessen narrates a two months’ journey through the Himalayas in Nepal, where he accompanied a field biologist in pursuit of the blue sheep; both men hoped as well to observe the rare snow leopard which preys upon the sheep. Matthiessen’s narrative follows the painful trail with agonizing precision; his descriptive passages render mountain, animal, child, bird, and plant with scrupulous richness. One senses cold, fatigue, eye-pain, relief, danger, ecstasy, discomfort, warmth. Every sentence seems sentient.