This is a great short read to appreciate how most of the concepts around nature and the wilderness are constructed in western thought and culture. Photograph: John Angelillo/UPI/Rex/Shutterstock The house defies logic and physics through its constant expansion, which, on another level, becomes an almost unmanageable mass of text in which we, as readers, might also become lost.Ī model of the ancient shark Megalodon at the American Museum of Natural History. Those who venture in do so as explorers would, with rope, supplies, torches and cameras. In it, endless corridors and grey stairs howl and change constantly, even treacherously, with the ultimate intention of misleading you.
On Ash Tree Lane there is a house that is bigger on the inside than the outside. Here is another out-of-the-box wilderness story. As Piranesi, its ever-cheerful main character, writes: “May your Paths be safe, your Floors unbroken and may the House fill your eyes with Beauty”. As with The Vorrh, a prolonged stay in the halls seems to have a crippling psychological effect on humans. Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi summons a world of endless interior halls filled with sculptures, with an open sky and tidal floods. Moving to impossible wildernesses, here is an architectural one. This forest is in itself an entity that has sentience and perhaps even a will, and it rejects the presence of humans by driving them insane. The vorrh, in Catling’s The Vorrh trilogy, is a very ancient forest, so old that it’s thought of as being home to the garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve roam along with cyclops and anthropophagi (cannibal rogues that attract humans deep into the forest with pails of water and food). The surroundings of this village are merciless, but such ferocity seems a trifle compared to human cruelty. The townsfolk are ruled by primeval and nightmarish laws and rituals.
Mercè Rodoreda’s darkest novel takes place in an unspecified time and is set in an isolated and unnamed mountainous region, where a village is surrounded by dangers the “caramens” – creatures that no one has ever seen – or the battering of a fierce river which threatens to sweep away the houses. The wilderness here, becomes Bjartur’s nemesis and the book focuses on what this violent struggle for survival and sanity in an inhospitable and cruel landscape can inflict on the human soul. Laxness’ novel focuses on Bjartur of Summerhouses, a poor Icelandic farmer of the early 20th century who maintains an isolated croft at the edge of a loosely habitable world and one which is not. Peskov recounts their struggle to survive in the taiga’s extreme conditions, which often contrasts with the cheerful merriness they feel when going about their daily routine, despite the doubt that the disparity between their life choices and the direction of civilisation awakens in them. This book chronicles the relationship the author established with the Lykovs, a family who had survived in complete isolation in the depths of the Russian taiga for more than 40 years.