A different, more expansive way to conceive of the physical act of writing; understanding the process allows you to imagine what’s been cut out, rearranged, and, most interestingly, what inspired the work ... Reading The Nature Book alongside a more traditional novel (in this case, any novel concerned with people) cultivates a kinship between the wild and the societal. Nature in Comitta’s novel is sinister, joyful, cruel, clumsy, and daring ... Comitta’s nature contains multitudes; it is mercurial and mysterious ... Comitta centers you in the reading experience, not just demanding your labor of comprehension at the languorous, long sentence level, but also requiring your attention and patience to stay with writing that doesn’t hurry, and characters...whose rich interiority and nuanced observations replace a rapid plot ... The Nature Book is littered with shiny facts nestled in tender anecdotes on the subject of nature. It’s informative as much as it is entertaining ... Poets and prose writers will find the novel instructive from a craft perspective. The language constructs a voice and tone that are consistently lush and inspiring, imagistic and lyrical ... You’ll be hard-pressed to find another book with as verdant an archive of beautiful descriptive sentences as the one contained in The Nature Book.

An epic journey — visual, textural and musical — that illustrates the vastness of our environment and its representation in literature ... The Nature Book is so much more than a simple catalog. Despite its formal challenges — no human actors, strict adherence to direct quotation — it reads just as a novel should ... What makes the novel truly original is how it imagines a world in which we, homo sapiens, are irrelevant.

The Nature Book sits at the crossroads of two innovative traditions: collage texts and posthuman fiction ... The book feels, at its best, symphonic, both in its structure—four movements, the third of which is the most distinct and the last of which references the first and goes out in a brilliant burst—and in the way language echoes, builds, works its accretive magic ... The Nature Book is, at times, maddening; I wanted it to be more slender, more controlled, less... wild. I missed people; I missed our stories. But I came to feel that time spent wandering in the book, even when I felt frustrated or lost, was of value; it was like time spent wandering through unfamiliar terrain ... In other ways, The Nature Book isn’t like a wilderness at all. Posthuman fiction can show us a lot of things, but what it can’t show us is a world without us. Comitta allows concrete traces of human presence to remain in the book’s metaphors and similes ... But we’re also there in the very fact of language. We’re there in the syntax itself. What we see in the book is not nature but a reflection of ourselves looking at nature and superimposed upon the view.

Venturesome ... Mr. Comitta has assembled this book by suturing together hundreds of passages of natural description found in canonical, or at least well-known, works of English-language literature. He has edited these citations only insofar as to excise any mention of humans. The result is a sweeping drama of thunderstorms and seasonal changes and animal interactions composed of excerpts ... It’s remarkable how coherently the narrative reads, despite its countless patchwork pieces, a testament not only to Mr. Comitta’s diligence but to the likeminded ways that novelists have tended to write about natural phenomena like snowfall or sunrise ... Even more striking, however, is the extent to which Mr. Comitta’s experiment undercuts his premise. Because what one quickly realizes is that, though humans may have been removed from the scenes, they are still present in every single sentence, infusing the descriptions with their own emotions and interpretations ... Throughout this impressive but frustrating book, one wonders what clouds might actually do if some lovesick poet weren’t making them brood. To try to portray the natural world neutrally would constitute a truly radical experiment, but someone is going to have to write it on his or her own.

Initially, the descriptions of the natural world read like a kind of Creation story ... This is also, notably, a landscape without humans. The narrative voice is both omniscient and prone to metaphor ... This novel sometimes feels like a work of installation art, and Comitta’s author’s note describing their methodology in assembling it is fascinating, revealing the patterns and processes underlying the book.