An Independent Book Review Best Book We Read in 2023
“Symphonic, both in its structure. . . and in the way language echoes, builds, works its accretive magic. . . . Seeing the world like this, without us, traversed in a way we could never traverse it in our human bodies, is a powerful and exhilarating experience.”
—Cara Blue Adams, The New Yorker
“A marvel of textual collation on a par with Christian Marclay’s supercut film 'The Clock.’ It’s remarkable how coherently the narrative reads, despite its countless patchwork pieces, a testament not only to Comitta’s diligence but to the likeminded ways that novelists have tended to write about natural phenomena like snowfall or sunrise.”
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“A meditative, lush narrative on the relationship between time and nature. . . . You’ll be hard-pressed to find another book with as verdant an archive of beautiful descriptive sentences as the one contained in The Nature Book.”
—Darina Sikmashvili, Los Angeles Review of Books
“With long asides alongside neat rhymes, with ponderous thoughts on the nature of time near light scenes showing time’s mysterious passing, with ‘a great nest of angry snakes’ and still green apple trees, Comitta has created something a lot like an ecosystem.”
—Madeleine Crum, The Baffler
“An epic journey—visual, textural and musical—that illustrates the vastness of our environment and its representation in literature.”
—Joseph Holt, The Star Tribune
“Their authorial vision weaves together a wild variety of styles with a steady eye on the land, sky, and water, as well as on the plants and animals living in each. The novel flows beautifully. . . . An optimistic critique of the form, made entirely of the form.”
—Crow Jonah Norlander, BOMB Magazine
“A magnum opus about the planet using only found text. . . . A dynamic and singular reading experience.”
—Kirkus, starred review
“In this seamless anthology, we forget that the experience of reading about nature is mediated by human voices and, when suspended in the text, succumb to the magical illusion that we are perceiving the world in itself.”
—Will Chancellor, The Brooklyn Rail
“It’s all this different, beautiful language synthesized into one narrative that mostly describes the environments you’re passing through. I think it’s amazing.”
—Jeff Tweedy of Wilco
“This is a novel to dwarf all others.”
—Jonathan Lethem
“A feat of conceptual art, biblical in tone and panoramic in scope.”
—Kathryn Scanlan
“In The Nature Book, language denuded from its original context serves its own surprising ends. An astounding project.”
—Jarett Kobek
