A Book of Migrations

This is a very nice book I am reading full of reflections on landscape, identity, migration, belonging and exile. It intertwines these musings in amongst accounts of Solnit's journey along the west coast of Ireland, in a narrative that is almost as winding and unhurried as the country tracks that this landscape itself contains. Strangely, although I was aware that Solnit is a good writer, this is one of those books that has been sat on a shelf for ages, ever since I picked it up cheap at a festival a two or three years ago. I'm glad I finally delved in. What follows, for example, is one intriguing reflection on home and attachment that she offers whilst discussing the rather ordinary and faceless suburb in which she grew up and the wild and beautiful Californian landscape that surrounded it:


"Home, the site of all childhood's revelations and sufferings, changes irrevocably, so that we are all in some sense refugees from a lost world. But you can't ever leave home either; it takes root inside you and the very idea of self as an entity bounded by the borders of the skin is a fiction disguising the vast geographies contained under the skin that will never let you go. It is, if nothing else, the first ruler by which everything else will be measured, the place by which other places will be found hot or cold, bustling or serene, lush or stark. When I think back to my formation, it seems that landscape shaped me, made a home in the truer sense than the centerless house in the subdivision and an identity surer than the vague hints of familial and ethic history that came my way. I am even literally made of the California landscape, of all the produce, water, wine I have been devouring since I was four." (from pages 66-67)

Over nostalgic? I'll leave that for you to decide. However, the sentiment is one I am sure that we can all identity with to a greater or lesser extent, even if we are sceptical about landscape's purported power to shape us. Take a look at the publisher's website if you want to find out more about this thought-provoking and well researched book.