The Nature Book

March 13, 2023
Using a collage of passages from hundreds of English-language novels, Comitta (Airport Novella) assembles an immersive exhibition of nature writing. A Genesis-like opening sets the tone: “Since the beginning, time was a form of sustenance,” where “seasons passed with dream-like slowness.” Soon, nonhuman characters emerge, with narratives of horses, a beaver, birds, and a mountain lion. There are exhausting storms, briny lightless depths, the cold of outer space, steaming jungles, massive mountain ranges, and burning deserts. Comitta’s “literary supercut,” as they call their project in a preface, encourages readers to meditate on the relationship between the English language and the natural world—night is “gloomy,” an owl is “sobbing,” there is “no way to draw any beauty” from a storm, and the howling of wolves is “cold and beggarly.” Though none of the passages are directly attributed, some are so recognizable they break the spell, as in the many lines from Moby-Dick (“The whale broke water within two ship’s lengths.... Shrouded in a thin, drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rain- bowed air”), while others feel anachronistic (“The moon came back white as cocaine”). Overall, though, Comitta’s literary experiment pulls the reader along with gorgeous language and animal protagonists worth rooting for.

Starred review from January 15, 2023
A magnum opus about the planet using only found text. In a preface, Comitta describes their methodology for creating this dizzying environmental collage: "I have gathered nature descriptions from three hundred novels and arranged them into a single novel." At the end, Comitta lists the 300 novels they scavenge, which range from Philip K. Dick's Maze of Death to William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! The book is divided into four parts along thematic lines--"The Four Seasons," "The Deep Blue Sea," "The Void," and "The Endless Summer." Initially, the descriptions of the natural world read like a kind of Creation story: "At about the same time, the days grew short and the nights grew long. The light a little less each time. Dark at half past seven. Dark at quarter past seven, dark at seven." Occasionally, these scenes of nature are punctuated by conflict: sometimes conflict between animals, such as a beaver and an otter, while at other times the environment itself turns hostile--an early sequence in which a storm leaves several pheasants injured or dead is especially haunting. This is also, notably, a landscape without humans. The narrative voice is both omniscient and prone to metaphor, as in this evocative description of the onset of winter: "It was happening again: the end of the world." Footnotes change the tone and allow for moments of wry humor: "The wolves were bad that winter, and everyone knew it." 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. A dynamic and singular reading experience.

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