“ This is the roof of the world. An immense, sequestered place, the highest of the high plateaus, many times the size of the Reich. I’m still sick. The porters still gesticulate and exchange private jokes when they assume my attention is elsewhere. Beger’s bad ankle is still swollen. Somewhere I’ve misplaced my certainty. ”
So opens “Ancestral Legacies,” with Shepard’s trademark sucker punches displayed to full effect: an attention-getting opening sentence (nicked from Mingtao Zhang’s “Roof of the World,” and 10 bucks for anybody who knew that already), a sneaky reference (“the Reich”) that slips in a setting and a point of view while ostensibly describing the scenery, the establishment of internal and external conflict in a few short phrases — we’ve met several other characters and learned that the narrator is both watchful and ill — and a paragraph closer that works in a lovely turn of phrase while establishing our hero’s state of mind, then and now. All this in the tale of two Nazi scientists trekking through Tibet on a search for the yeti as a way of proving racial theories beloved by Himmler. I can think of six writers offhand, myself included, who might drag that idea through a 400-page first draft tentatively titled “Misplaced Certainty.” Shepard gets the job done in 15 pages, tipping his hat to H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James and still coming out ahead.
The above is from Daniel Handler (yes, Lemony Snicket)’s New York Times review of Like You’d Understand, Anyway.
Hat tip to friend Ben for tipping me off to this review last year. (This is one of the reviews I’ll use to show my students what a good review can do.) In Ben’s case, he attests that it “forever changed the way [he thinks] about first lines.” That’s a pretty badass thing for a book review to do. I’m in the market for another great (film or book) review or two. Particularly something that uses a mediocre product as a great jumping-in point.
