The Wild Silence: A Memoir by Raynor Winn
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I requested both of Raynor Winn’s books at the same time from my library system; this one came first. Maybe I’d have liked it better if I had read The Salt Path first.
This is a genre I am always interested in: intimate, knowledgeable, loving studies of nature, wilderness, or farm life. But my bar is pretty high, having been set by Aldo Leopold, Henry Beston, Helen MacDonald (with some reservations), Jon Dunn, James Rebanks, et al. Clearly Winn’s heart is full, earnest and in the right place. I might still like The Salt Path, but… not this one. Overwritten, overwrought, repetitive, and then… it starts to turn into writing about her writing. When she completes her labor of love, the manuscript of The Salt Path, her daughter says, wow, mom, you should get this published. So she picks out an agent, sends it off, and bingo – she’s on her way to best-sellerdom. At which point my grapes went sour and I quit.
No quarrel with Winn’s character (I quite identify with her anti-social tendencies, and this last year and a half hasn’t helped), her sincerity, her passion for the natural world, and driving desire to describe and share it with her readers (and her beloved husband). She has been amazingly staunch and courageous in the face of her family misfortunes, and how she has clung to what the world can give her in joy and awe. I just didn’t care for how she writes about them. I am – like her, in a way – more interested in the woods, the prairies, the badgers, and foxes than I am in human travails, and so want to read more about them, themselves, than how they make a particular human feel or what she thinks about them. So this one just wasn’t for me.
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