The best places are not on any map, or so Melville once remarked, and Peter Matthiessen would surely agree…. Most of his work has grown from first-hand experience in distant places…. To judge from references in his work, there seems no place on earth Matthiessen has not at least passed through.
From journeying of this kind have come marvelous books, Under the Mountain Wall and The Cloud Forest for example, but so too have come the "worlds" of his fiction, At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Far Tortuga in particular, novels which more than deserve the praise they have received (the latter is an outright masterpiece), but which could not have been written without Matthiessen's uncanny talent for at-homeness in cultures other than his own, and his rare ability to command what anthropologist Clifford Geertz has called "thick description," meaning the dense texturing of detail, the build-up of a world's essential presence through masses of particulars, which can come only from living in what one might then hope to record.
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