The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
★★★★☆ | Travel Writing | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
In 1972, Peter Matthiessen lost his wife to cancer. The following September, he embarked on a quixotic trek across the Himalayas to catch a glimpse of the elusive Snow Leopard. At one level, this book is a day-by-day account of that journey written feverishly within his tent each night, amidst rain and mud, ice and snow. We soon understand this is ultimately a spiritual quest for Matthiessen as he processes his grief. He relates lessons of Zen Buddhism and shares flashbacks to the time leading up to his wife’s death that I found both instructive and moving.
This is a difficult book to read on a couple of levels. There is a lot of unfamiliar vocabulary for places and plants and animals that I could never quite penetrate even after three hundred pages of practice. The journey itself is a slog, with either waiting for weather or supplies, or feeling utterly exhausted while hiking. And Matthiessen himself isn’t very likable. He often complains about the porters and sherpas who carry his supplies, or the ignorance of the local people he meets. He left his eight-year-old son behind, who must have been awash in grief for his dead mother (what kind of father does that?). He is so caught up with capturing everything he experiences in his journal, then complains of the elusiveness of enlightenment.
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