Refreshment - 2

    While I'm reading 'Kevin' - intense and compulsive and of the 'I almost can't bear to look' category as it is - I need a balancing book, something clear and calm and with a purity of prose and thought that lifts the spirit, and Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain is just that. Here's a typically refreshing passage:

    "The Cairngorm water is all clear. Flowing from granite, with no peat to darken it, it has never the golden amber, the 'horse-back brown' so often praised in Highland burns. When it has any colour at all, it is green, as in the Quoich near its linn. It is a green like the green of winter skies, but lucent, clear like aquamarines, without the vivid brilliance of glacier water... This water from the granite is cold. To drink it at the source makes the throat tingle. A sting of life is in its touch... The sound of all this moving water is as integral to the mountain as pollen to the flower. One hears it without listening as one breathes without thinking. But to a listening ear the sound disintegrates into many different notes - the slow slap of a loch, the high clear trill of a rivulet, the roar of spate. On one short stretch of burn the ear may distinguish a dozen different notes at once."

Comments

[Marianne Wheelaghan]

Look forward to hearing how you find "Kevin". I read it a while ago and have mixed feelings about it. The Living Mountain sounds very "refreshing" in comparison :o)

[LizF]

I have just read The Living Mountain and thought it was a joy. Her writing and descriptions were so beautiful and vivid that I half expected to see a mountain burn and heather outside the window and not the office car park when I looked up!
The copy I read came from the library but I am definitely going to buy my own as I am certain to want to revisit The Living Mountain again.

[oxslip]

I read the review of this in The Guardian, it sounded really wonderful and you've convinced me I should get it. A good antidote to the Kevin

[Georgina]

The latest Toast catalogue has an extract from The Living Mountain in it. As I am devoted to Toast stuff I'm sure I would like the book too. I don't think I could cope with Kevin, though.