MixedThe Brooklyn RailBen Ehrenreich’s new book, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time, is no doubt lively and expansive ... To describe it results in a hodgepodge of terms, since it has a magpie’s sensibility, collecting everything from the suppressed origins of the goddess Athena to the death of Walter Benjamin ... Ehrenreich is at his most compelling when he links historiographical arguments like these with the specific histories of his own desert setting ... If all of this sounds ambitiously far-flung, it is. Ehrenreich’s conversational tone belies the real demands he makes of the reader. As it proceeds, his text hops around through space and time, employing a weaver’s technique that asks us to track many things simultaneously, each in turn receiving its brief moment in the spotlight before the book abruptly puts it back down ... It’s a familiar essayistic method, lyrical, clever, and often satisfying. Ehrenreich deploys it well, and many readers will be perfectly well-equipped to manage it ... It’s as though Ehrenreich thinks the rest of us—his readers—aren’t already involved in our own relationships with the horrors of our time, aren’t already grappling with our own dread ... Since Ehrenreich himself raises the meta-question of what writing is good for, it seems fair to ask what this writing is good for. What effect does it have in the world? The answer for this reader, at least, is that it prompted a mini-cycle of apocalyptic dread (since Ehrenreich is nothing if not a forceful stylist) followed by inurement ... During pandemic times especially—when we’re all doing our best to maintain our humanity and sanity—Desert Notebooks may not be the friend we need.
Bathsheba Demuth
MixedThe Los Angeles Review of Books... we taste the perspective of someone who’s personally experienced the Arctic as an enfolding abundance, a dynamic system occupied by humans and fluctuating populations of animals ... This is a complex story, seesawing back and forth across the strait. It’s enlivened by sometimes cinematic detail ... In terms of natural processes, [Demuth] is convincing ... Demuth’s treatment of indigenous accounts is a bit too sparse to accomplish something similar. She often uses a sort of cold open technique to introduce Beringian characters ... The man and his biography deserve our attention, yet Demuth makes his story hard to follow, presenting it with clinical remove. Unfamiliar place names, given without context, do little to anchor us in the text. Overly condensed prose prevents us from sensing indigenous life or history deeply enough to change our minds about it ... This is a missed opportunity. For several generations now we have clung to, and been repulsed by, the narrative of invasive humanity. Indigenous peoples have been seen as part of the nature that modern societies have plundered. A kind of defeatedness attends this story line — the last thing we need now. Instead, we have to develop more flexible and hopeful understandings ... In looking to Demuth to enrich my own view of the Arctic, I find myself wishing for more of her own experience there, written in the poetic language of which she’s clearly capable.
