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Leap

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Terry Tempest Williams begins this book with a brief artistic description of her Mormon upbringing in Northern Utah (something I can relate with), then a confession of an obsession with a painting--a secret she had kept "for fear of seeming mad." From this point on she touched just about every emotion that I have felt in my own "Paradise" (oh the security of "knowing" that you belong to a church that has all the answers), my "Hell" (very traumatic to ask the hard questions concerning one's faith and emerge in a world of total uncertainty), my "Earthly Delights" (to find the middle ground between Heaven & Hell, good & bad, do's & don'ts; to find the present--the beauty of where I stand), and my "Restoration" (to try to piece it all together without losing the roots of who I am).

T.T.W. assisted me in coming out of my hell and finding earthly delights when I first read her book "Refuge" several years ago; I have personally thanked her for this. Now she writes a book with the final chapter titled "Restoration." After reading this beautiful, rambling, amazing, disjointed, wonderful collections of words, I may seem mad in saying this, but she is inside my head. I loved this book.

When do we ever take the time to stop and smell the roses, or to indulge our obsessions, or to give our inner voice the time it deserves? This author did all those things, and then went a step further in getting her observations and insights down. She's a smart and introspective writer and my mind is whirling from her journey with the painting. This is a risky book... she admits we may find her crazy, and I did at times. But being in her wild, cerebral, artistic zone was not boring or banal... this book is not a superficial beach read. It made me want to look harder and deeper at the world around me and to listen with attentive ears. Bravo! Bravo!

Terry Tempest Williams. A new author for me. Because of my fascination for the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch I entered the door of this book much the way I'd join a lively discussion of a favorite topic. GOOD choice. This book is a very successful diversion that touches on so many viable excursions that it holds the reader in awe.

Williams is a terrific observor. Her extended encounter with Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights is at once genuinely academic while acting as a springboard for stream of consciousness poetic and spiritual ramblings. What a word smith she is! The Prado Museum in Madrid, where the painting dwells, is a delicious maze of antiquity with all coridors leading to the kaleidoscopic joys of the Garden. She studies each panel of the famous altarpiece and shares her fears, vulnerabilities, and passions willingly. I felt at times I was in the darker side of a confessional booth, so personal is her communication. But aside from the luxuriant entertainment of her transmongrification of a painting, Williams also shares with us a strange journey through the history and philosophy of the Mormon Church - a fascinating subject I've never encountered in novel form.

Williams in the end has provided us with an uncommonly entertaining, even picaresque, journey through asethetics, art history, religion, and spiritualism, sharing with us the fact that Heaven, Hell, and especially our individual time on planet earth are creations of our own making. And all this from the meticulous study of a well known painting.......what a delightful feat!

You need not being a devoted fan of Terry Tempest Williams or Bosch, but you must abandon all thoughts of literary "tradition" while you read this. She's breaking tradition, linear thought, and countless other rules we associate with great writing. But if you open yourself--there is pure brilliance behind those pages. Passion behind her words.

Leap places a powerful grip on the reader as Williams takes you through the panels of the triptic, through her life and the life of the painting. What does it mean to surrender to your passions? An inquisitive look at at painting that will turn you inside out, take you in circles, through heaven and hell and somewhere along the way, you'll find restoration.

I finished LEAP in two sittings. As an avid Terry Tempest Williams reader, I was amazed and confused by her newest book. She becomes completely immersed in a painting first seen in her childhood. This obsession leads her to spending many weeks in Spain studying it. The images in the painting bring to life her own struggle and maturation of faith. As parts of the painting come to life, it calls forth from her poetry and streams of consciousness which I liked and disliked. At some point, I wanted more concrete writing about her struggle of faith.

At the end of the book, I was filled with the power of her written word...her Leap into an authentic life...her personal struggle. This book is very different from Refuge, but it is truly her work. If you read it, you will feel Terry Tempest Williams' command of nature and writing.

Terry Tempest Williams begins this book with a brief artistic description of her Mormon upbringing in Northern Utah (something I can relate with), then a confession of an obsession with a painting, a secret she had kept "for fear of seeming mad." From this point on she touched just about every emotion that I have felt in my own "Paradise" (oh the security of "knowing" that you belong to a church that has all the answers), my "Hell" (very traumatic to ask the hard questions concerning one's faith and emerge in a world of total uncertainty), my "Earthly Delights" (to find the middle ground between Heaven & Hell, good & bad, do's & don'ts; to find the present--the beauty of where I stand), and my "Restoration" (to try to piece it all together without losing the roots of who I am).

T.T.W. assisted me in coming out of my hell and finding earthly delights when I first read her book "Refuge" several years ago; I have personally thanked her for this. Now she writes a book with the final chapter titled "Restoration." After reading this beautiful, rambling, amazing, disjointed, wonderful collections of words, I may seem mad in saying this, but she is inside my head. I loved this book.

Terry Tempest Williams is first and foremost a naturalist. I say this not out of some secret biological knowledge of her, but simply as an extrapolation from her own writings. In her book REFUGE, she focuses on birds and the wild life preserve around the Great Salt Lake. The personal life bleeds out of the story of the natural in a way as to make the two seamless... and they are. In LEAP, Williams focuses her attention on the great triptych by Heronymous Bosch (El Bosco) - 'The Garden of Delights'. The triptych represents the three states of human (animal) existence as dictated by early Christian doctrine: Eden, Earth, and Hell. In each, human forms are involved - with an assortment of nearly unrecognizable creatures - in all manner of lewd, sensate, or holy activities. The painting perhaps is - for a naturalist like Williams - an unignorable bridge to a sort of philosophical incantation of one's own personal life.

Though the book is told in four distinct parts, there is little cohesion. Each of the first holds some resemblance to the corresponding frame of the triptych it is supposed to represent, but not effectively enough to be truly meaningful. Essentially, I detected three distinct modes of writing scattered unpredictably throughout the book: an anecdotal style dedicated to Bosch and 'el Prado' (the museum in which it is housed) related activities, confessionals of the author's past and experiences, and an unexpurgated glut of rambling free-style writing that I guess is supposed to be philosophical or poetic, but is just sophomoric. It isn't difficult to find TTW's strengths. When speaking of nature - real nature, not the nature of the painting - her talents soar. Sadly, these moments are few and far between. The anecdotes of both TTW's life and others around her are fun, but not really enough to warrant more than a quick aside. The bulk of the book is in fact made up of those aforementioned stream-of-consciousness writing exercises that read like a teenagers angst-ridden journal more than the thoughtful prose of a serious adult writer. While Williams' attempts here are magnificent... she gets an A+ on concept (and what a truly excellent concept) the book fails in her lack of confidence. There is a clear insecurity here. TTW is best when at her calmest, but she wants to beef it all up, to be a serious writer, a stirring writer, a philosophical and educated writer; she so desperately wants everyone to be wowed by what she is saying that the result is a bunch of nonsense that doesn't amount to anything. With all said and done, there is no revelation about the painting, no revelation about Mrs. Williams and her relationships: to her father, her husband, and her religion (Mormon), and no real revelation about what we are supposed to think about all this writing. It all ads up to a boring bit of artistic voyeurism.

Reading and re-reading Terry Tempest Williams over the past three decades has been to journey from the American west into landscapes of the heart, from the political into the personal and around to activism again, from a naturalist's cool sensibilities into the sizzling passions of a visionary. In LEAP that trajectory continues. Williams' edgy artistry -- heretofore offered most tellingly in the title essay in the collection AN UNSPOKEN HUNGER (Pantheon, 1994) -- has consistently infused her writing, but with this sojourn she has taken full flight. The unifying story here is that of a painting, the masterpiece by Hieronymus Bosch ("El Bosco") known today as "The Garden of Delights." The author enters fully into the work, announcing from the outset that she has moved because of a painting, moved from Salt Lake City (her home of many decades) to the Paradox Basin (no more apt name is possible, and yet, it is in fact the name of the geologic locus of her new home). And we learn that she moved there after seven years travel in a canvas, through Paradise, Hell, Earthly Delights and Restoration, and moved on from her natal Mormonism. This book is a journal and a poem, a paean and a polemic. This book is brilliant. Tripping from the Reformation and Counter-Reformation to the tribulations of Joseph Smith, clipping newspaper accounts of genetically modified headless frogs and children fallen to convulsions while viewing Japanese cartoons, caroming from Czech poetry to Blake to Joan Miro, back to the wetlands rimming the Great Salt Lake, and forth to Madrid's Prado and the presence of Bosch once more, Williams compasses whole galaxies. Visiting La Albufera de Valencia, one of the largest freshwater lakes in Spain, the author writes, "Walking around the shoreline, stepping over heaps of garbage braided into the bulrushes, the familiar grief I know at home returns. I came to Spain to get away from my torn heart ripped open every time I see the landscapes I love ravaged, lost, and opened for development. "There are too many of us, six billion strong and rising, our collective impact on fragile communities is deadly. "No wonder El Bosco's birds torture us in Hell." Later, she recounts a wilderness rite in which she and her husband sever their marriage from Mormon orthodoxy, and exposes her heart at the moment when she realizes that she has outgrown her heritage, weeping in a crowded Salt Lake City stadium, knowing that ties no longer bind. Further on, into the personal and painterly Restoration, Williams asserts, "This is my living faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek. "To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers." A seeker's tale, LEAP conveys the reader into and out of dark corners and glimmering fountains, to the embrace of wilderness and high culture, and to dare to act from conviction. Terry Tempest Williams has herewith delivered a powerful testament to life and love and intellect, LEAP is a work of terrible beauty and exquisite craft.

and this book has imspired me so much - What a wonderful depiction of eternal life or in other words - the eternal struggle - lived in modern times by a modern woman

Terry Tempest Williams has a lovely writing style, and she needs it to pull off the extreme abstractions she writes about. I couldn't finish the book because the subject was way too contemplative. It is only engaging because of her amazing ability to compose one beautiful sentence after another, a work of art in itself.

If you enjoy going places deep in your mind, you may enjoy this book. I thought that was me, but it kept me wondering--is this going anywhere? After a while it was just tiresome.