Leap: Amazon.ca: Terry Tempest Williams: Books

Product Description

From Amazon

The wonders of biology meet the mysteries of Mormonism in Terry Tempest Williams's spiritual evocation of Hieronymus Bosch's El Jardin de las Delicias. Williams is mesmerized by the painting, and there is much to be fascinated by, including her own stream-of-consciousness exploration of its images and symbolism.

The Garden of Earthly Delights, as it's known in English, is part of a triptych, surrounded by wings of paradise and hell. Williams visits the painting daily in the Prado Museum in Madrid, reveling in the gestalt and concentrating on the nuances in the elaborate and extraordinarily detailed masterpiece. One day she'll devote hours inspecting the cavorting, joyous figures, "the blue pool of bathers standing thigh-high in the middle of the triptych," the cherries "flying in the air, dangling from the poles, dropped into the mouths of lovers." Another day she's there with binoculars, cataloguing the birds Bosch chose to place in the garden of earthly delights (she finds 35 of them, including the gadwall, the wagtail, the great white egret, and Tengmalm's owl--a bird who sings "poo-poo-poo," which she considers a bit of prime Bosch paradise humor). Her insight, however, is not limited to the painting. She looks inward and outward, her probing artistic analysis inspiring childhood memories, worldly observations, and universal questions about love and faith.

Williams's leap into Bosch's garden is an unusual blend of academic rigor and unfettered artistic license, studying the painter's world with erudite discipline, then soaring into lyric associations that'll charm your poetic soul or curdle your objective sensibilities, depending on the latitude you grant in works that mix art history with personal memoir and spiritual exploration. --Stephanie Gold

From Publishers Weekly

When naturalist writer Williams was a child staying over at her grandmother's house, she would sleep beneath images of Paradise and Hell thumbtacked to the wall above her bed, symbols of the "oughts and shoulds and if you don'ts" of her Mormon upbringing. Years later, as an adult, Williams rediscovered those prints in Madrid's Prado Museum--they are the wings of Hieronymus Bosch's 15th-century triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights. But why had the erotic center panel been hidden from her childish eyes? The question leads Williams on a prolonged meditation contemplating the painting's meaning, her own childhood and the place of religion in life. In rich, poetic prose interspersed with scripture, news items and anecdotes, she builds a monument to the richness of Mormon culture in the life of a woman who is fiercely environmentalist, feminist, aware. But Williams also mixes her philosophical musings with the quotidian events of her trip to Spain and quotations from writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf and Charles Darwin, burdening her work at times with excessive detail. The hundreds of cherries in Bosch's garden remind Williams of picking cherries as a child in the orchards along the Wasatch Front. "What principle of the Gospel of Jesus Christ means the most to you?" asked her great-uncle as she and her cousin perched high on a ladder. "Obedience," the cousin replied. "Free agency," answered Williams, savoring a cherry. Her memoir searchingly explores the distance and tension between these answers. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Product Description

Inside This Book (Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.

First Sentence
I once lived near the shores of Great Salt Lake with no outlet to the sea. Read the first page

Explore More
Concordance

Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt

Tag this product

(What's this?)

Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items.

Customer Reviews

8 Reviews

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

Average Customer Review

3.9 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)

Share your thoughts with other customers:

Create your own review

Most helpful customer reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars Mormons, painters, and Hell: Oh MY!, Oct 3 2003

By

J. A. Bellamy "bluejaye" (Dallas, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Leap (Paperback)

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.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews

Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Report abuse

5.0 out of 5 stars Listen, Aug 11 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Leap (Hardcover)

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.

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews

Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Report abuse

5.0 out of 5 stars Intensely fascinating., Aug 2 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Leap (Hardcover)

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!

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews

Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Report abuse

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review

› See all 8 customer reviews on Amazon.ca

Want to see more reviews on this item?

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 10 reviews 4.3 out of 5 stars

Most recent customer reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars A disappointing digression
After recently reading the powerful memoir Refuge, I was eager to read Leap, but I was very disappointed. Read more

Published on July 28 2000

5.0 out of 5 stars She may seem mad, but she's inside my head.
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... Read more

Published on Jun 2 2000