Nature Studies

John Ryskamp's Nature Studies is a long postmodern kiss goodbye to modernity. Ostensibly about the strange abduction of a small body by an eagle in a remote area of Michigan, this brilliant novel is as digressive as Sterne, as impromptu as Chopin, as expansive as Melville, and as encyclopaedic as Thomas Mann. It is a book for people who still find the whole, wide, complex amazing fabric of our intellectual past absorbing.

At once ecological parable, political critique, and compendium of 20th century history, Nature Studies is populated by Einstein, Mondrian, Jung, Godel, Sraffa, and - everywhere - the irrepressible Ryskamp himself.

Ryskamp brilliantly rediscovers that digression is the desire for all experience (especially cultural experience) to be present at once (and isn't that a funny desire and a funnier experience!)