"Desert Solitaire" by Edward Abbey; 1/10

 

AAAAAARGH Fuck Edward Abbey!

Wooo boy did I hate this book.  I won't lay blame on the person who picked this one for our ill-fated book club, because he had never read Abbey before and nobody had a gun to my head when I was reading it, but let me again state that I found this book not enjoyable in the extreme.

I think no author I have ever read has succeeded so brilliantly in making him- or herself sound like a vacuous being, a waste of space, a complete asshole, and an utter douchebag in quite the way Edward Abbey did in "Desert Solitaire."  His rampages against anyone encroaching on nature, nay, anyone (himself excepted) venturing to see nature in its last refuges, read like an author trying to somehow pick a fight with his reader.

And yet, he himself seemed to frequently disregard his own precepts about the profundity and sacredness of the wilderness.  I think the rules he invented were mainly meant to apply to people other than himself.  Rather than writing a book full of love for the sights and sounds and inhabitants of the great ecosystem in which he lived and journeyed, his book twists into contempt for those who would experience it or mar it without the author's twisted say-so.   In the end all of this contempt manages to successfully make both the book and its author contemptible.


There are books and authors you dislike, and books and authors you hate.  I could never hate a James Patterson or a Dan Brown, they just don't rate that much emotion with me.  I don't find their work ambitious, interesting, or intelligent enough to waste my time with something like hatred. 

Edward Abbey is intelligent, he is experienced, and he is in a mid-20th century way the classic mold of a traveler and writer.  He is taken very seriously by highly literate people and by the literary establishment, and you have to actually use a brain to really evaluate that he is right or wrong. I hate his stuff.  There aren't many authors for whom I would make fandom a cause for suspecting someone's literary taste, but this guy is one.  STAY FAR AWAY!