Interesting stories, each told in first person by a different narrator, each relating somehow to this theme of "resistance". Made me think of the little books put out by the Orion Society on what true patriotism is all about. ( )

Well written work of fiction by a great writer, but his efforts at fabulous realism applied to the politics of ecology and culture sounds paranoid and strange.

(First reviewed at Blogcritics at http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/07/06/084745.php)

Barry Lopez was honoured for his nature writing with an American National Book Award for "Arctic Dreams" in 1986 and a nomination for "Of Wolves and Men". His talent and power are undisputable. He captures nature scenes with visual and sensory precision, and sheer beauty. His essays, collected in books like "About This Life," explore the beauty and complexity of living in the natural world.

He takes nature writing very seriously. In an online essay at http://www.lopezbooks.com/articles/lopez.html he wrote that nature writing is the "... strain of American literature that, more than others now, is pursuing the ancient discourse on human fate".

A Google search brings up articles in which deep ecologists claim Lopez as a living saint of their movement. In published interviews, he suggests that he does not see himself as a Green evangelist, and explains his abiding belief in the power of story - narrative and imagination - to communicate the meaning of living, as a thinking and spiritual person, in the natural world.

He writes with a conscience, examining the impact nature on human life, and the impact of human activity on wilderness. He also drifts into a kind of dreamy post-modern mysticism. There is a definite philosophical slant towards the natural and the primitive in his writing, accompanied by post-modernist snobbery against American culture.

While some people take that kind of thing seriously, I find it to be elitist and condescending.

"Resistance" is presented as a work of fiction, in nine short stories. In the first story, titled "Resistance", the narrator Owen Daniels is a curator and writer, part of a loose international group of writers, artists, and scholars. They receive letter from an agency called the Office of Inland Security denouncing for terrorizing the imaginations of their fellow citizens. While Lopez doesn't mention Senator Joe McCarthy, he invokes an atmosphere of cultural war by American corporate interests against art, nature, history, and indigenous cultures, in the name of safety, profit, and progress.

The members of the group all decide to disappear before they are arrested. Each leaves behind an autobiographical story to explain what led them to resist the conventional and the comfortable. The eight stories that follow "Resistance" are polished meditations on interesting lives, in strange and wonderful places, filled with a a sense of mission and purpose, written with erudition and elegance.

The idea that naturalists, nature writers, artisans, architects, culture critics would be considered as subversives or terrorists - seems more bizarre than many SF premises. It's hard to say if Lopez believes that free speech and personal freedom are seriously threatened by America's war on terrorism. He is however clearly upset by fact that his vision of nature and reality is a minority vision, and perhaps a marginal vision.

Each story an argument for the values that Lopez and other post-modern culture critics and nature writers take seriously. There is no story or plot. The narrative voices of the characters are indistinguishable from one another. All the characters are introspective, self-centered, self-righteous and bitter.

The members of Lopez's fictional band of Rainbow warriors opted out of the conventional life, and led the lives they wanted, but are upset that they aren't being applauded for it. As lead narrator Owen Daniels explains, he and his friends "cannot tell our people a story that sticks." He attributes the indifference of America to his kind of story to a mass addiction to mediated entertainments and pop culture. Lopez inadvertently illustrates the ponderous self-importance of the American New Left, its contempt for the good judgment of ordinary people, and its well-founded frustration at being on the margins of real life.

"Resistance" is worthwhile. Lopez is a wonderful writer, He challenges his readers, and while he may not have made his point decisively, he presented it gracefully.

At the same time, I would say that writers like Wendell Berry and Barbara Kingsolver have also made the same points gracefully, and in a more constructive and realistic way.

(A short version of this review was published in the Winnipeg Free Press on Sunday July 4, 2004). ( )

one of the best books i've read in the last 2 years. A small masterpiece. An intertwined set of stories about individuals living in our times who are searching for meaning in life. they all seem to live on the edge, non-conformists. this is a somewhat mysterious tale which suits me fine. ( )

Barry Lopez is a voice crying in the wilderness.

Over the course of six non-fiction books (including 1986's National Book Award-winning Arctic Dreams) and eight works of fiction, Lopez has served as a literary activist, raising his voice in a crowded room to tell those around him that something's not right, that all is not well with the world. In Arctic Dreams, pristine landscapes of blue ice and crystalline snow are threatened by economic development and global warming. In an earlier collection of short stories, Winter Count, a flock of herons descends on the streets of New York, a herd of white buffalo sings like heavenly guides, and desert stones form mystical constellations—the weird, wonderful beauty of nature reminds us to slow down and contemplate the uncomplicated self.

Lopez's writing is serene but powerful. You can sense something exciting and maybe a bit deadly working below the surface of the words, like the thrumming buzz you hear when standing near power lines.

In his latest collection of fiction, Resistance, that power line snaps and the live wires go everywhere, shooting off sparks with white-hot fury. Here, Lopez lets loose with a wilderness-splitting howl, the sound ricocheting from tree to tree.

In the opening story of Resistance, an art curator living in Paris receives a disturbing letter from home, sent by the "Office of Inland Security," which informs him that his activities have raised suspicions in the homeland agency and that he's to be picked up and brought in for questioning. He gets in touch with his friends by e-mail—a circle of fellow writers, scholars, and artists determined to dismantle government tyranny—only to find out they've all received the same letter. Since graduating from college together, they've been crying in their own private wildernesses—"We chip away like coolies at the omnipotent and righteous façade"—and now the paranoid, post-9/11 government has caught up with them, labeling the members as "parties of interest."

We had come to regard the work of writers and artists in our country as too compliant, as failing to expose or indict the escalating nerve of corporate institutions, the increasing connivance of government with business, or the cowardice of those reporting the news.

They decide to melt into the underground, but not before leaving a written record of testimonies—nose-thumbing good-bye notes to their busybody government agency. The remainder of this slim, trim collection is devoted to their tales of defiance and, ultimately, healing.

We meet a Buenos Aires restaurateur who learns how to overcome her bitter resentment of her philandering father; a carpenter who survives horrific childhood abuse; a wounded veteran ("a blind eunuch with a face of melted wax") who returns to Vietnam to reconcile his loss of innocence; a translator who crosses a Chinese desert by camel, turning her back on complacent materialism.

Nearly all of the stories are told by men and women wounded, physically and emotionally, by evil in the world. Angry at what they've witnessed in their lives, they retreat to jungles, deserts and mountains, hoping to escape from all the bad baggage of civilization. Here, in the wilderness, many of them find the balm that heals.

In "The Bear in the Road," the rare sight of a grizzly in the plains of northern Montana helps guide the narrator toward enlightenment: "At twenty-nine I continued to experience what I once named the Great Burden, the weird combination of oppression and challenge which grows out of knowing the incompetence of the powerful."
Two paragraphs later, he adds: "I was an angry bystander. I'd no power to intervene, and had no intention of dropping the work I was already committed to, not in order to raise someone else's awareness, promote greater indignation, or organize opposition." The bear, "a shadow in the lesser darkness with his shoulders against the sky," helps him to see beyond the boundaries of his own difficulties.

Resistance reads less like a book of short stories than it does a series of passionate essays—the kind Lopez is famous for in his works of non-fiction. Constructed and conceived as personal testimonies against corruption and tyranny, the stories get bogged down in exposition and many of them end too abruptly with calculated artifice.

Still, it's hard to ignore Lopez's voice calling us to action. It's also nearly impossible to read this book and not feel like you need to dislodge your butt from the recliner and get out there and do something: carry a sign, write your congressman, boycott Wal-Mart. Reading Lopez might just make you a better person.

Thematically, Resistance boils down to three sentences in a story called "Nilch'i" (the Navaho word for divine wind): "The world is beautiful and we are a part of it. That's all. Our work is not to improve, it is to participate."

Though it often falls short as compelling fiction, Resistance is not futile. It has a dangerous vibrancy, like a dancing live wire, which demands we pay attention. Polemically-driven, Lopez's fiction asks us not to be angry bystanders, but to resist totalitarianism at all levels, starting with the grassroots. It's a call to raise our collective voice in the wilderness, while there's still wilderness left in which to cry. ( )