What do you think?
Rate this book
Resistance
From the National Book Award-winning author of Arctic Dreams, a highly charged, stunningly original work of fiction–a passionate response to the changes shaping our country today. In nine fictional testimonies, men and women who have resisted the mainstream and who are now suddenly “parties of interest” to the government tell their stories. A young woman in Buenos Aires watches bitterly as her family dissolves in betrayal and illness, but chooses to seek a new understanding of compassion rather than revenge. A carpenter traveling in India changes his life when he explodes in an act of violence out of proportion to its cause. The beginning of the end of a man’s lifelong search for coherence is sparked by a Montana grizzly. A man blinded in the war in Vietnam wrestles with the implications of his actions as a soldier–and with innocence, both lost and regained.
Punctuated with haunting images by acclaimed artist Alan Magee, Resistance is powerful fiction with enormous significance for our times.
Punctuated with haunting images by acclaimed artist Alan Magee, Resistance is powerful fiction with enormous significance for our times.
178 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2004
25 people are currently reading
504 people want to read
About the author
Barry Lopez
104 books913 followersBarry Holstun Lopez is an American author, essayist, and fiction writer whose work is known for its environmental and social concerns.
Lopez has been described as "the nation's premier nature writer" by the San Francisco Chronicle. In his non-fiction, he frequently examines the relationship between human culture and physical landscape, while in his fiction he addresses issues of intimacy, ethics and identity.
Lopez has been described as "the nation's premier nature writer" by the San Francisco Chronicle. In his non-fiction, he frequently examines the relationship between human culture and physical landscape, while in his fiction he addresses issues of intimacy, ethics and identity.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 85 reviews
November 16, 2011
Kyle Allen
Book Review
Resistance by Barry Lopez
Resistance has a mission: What’s yours?
Barry Lopez’ Resistance is a unique blend of Essay and fiction. The plot is the setting in which Lopez spills his innermost belief on his life’s goals, political action, love, success, meaning, the why, the purpose. Resistance strays far from the traditional plot structure of fiction.
Each piece begins like a traditional piece of Short Fiction. Lopez uses the First Person Point of View. He describes the setting. The characters are introduced. And then he dives into the main character’s mind and weaves his own ideologies into the characters. For instance, from the viewpoint that Resistance is a set of short stories, most of the piece Apocalypse is the main character thinking while merely standing in the kitchen of his apartment. But the thinking is the story, not the plot. Plot becomes Setting. This is important to understand because as a series of short stories, Resistance falls short. The fiction is Slice-of-Life, or Man-versus-Himself, or rather Man Thinking. As an Essay, Resistance brings goose bumps to my neck and sparks the activist nature inside me, with elegance. I chose this book to review based on my research of the author, particularly this book. A collection of passionate responses “to the changes shaping our country today” through the eyes and minds of “men and women who have resisted the mainstream” sounded intriguing to my own ideologies. Resistance succeeded.
The Bear in the Road had has more traditional plot elements than Apocalypse. The setting is an extraordinary depiction of nature in the beautiful, albeit dwindling landscape of Montana where “fox, jackrabbit, badger” and “golden eagle” make their home. The narrator of the story, Edward, is pestered by a Grizzly Bear. More than this, Edward’s friend Virgil believes the bear is trying to get Edward’s attention. Edward doesn’t want to care about this or really deal with this fact. He says to himself: “I felt no burning need to rearrange my life to accommodate the bear.” Edward wants to move on with his successful life. But then he begins to question what it means to truly be successful, and Virgil helps guide him to understanding.
By contrast, Nitch’i has no traditional story or plot. It is purely Reminiscence and the search for love and purpose, for satisfaction. “I can’t be satisfied at this juncture of my life” he says at the end of the story. Apocalypse and The Bear in the Road were about self, society, and government, while Nitch’i was more about family and love. Because of this and lack of plot, Nitch’i was not as enjoyable as those other stories.
Apocalypse felt like a call to arms. It is something I’d make required reading if I were a leader in the Occupy Wall Street movement today. Occupy has no leader, no art of war. Apocalypse seeks to “spring our culture out of its adolescence… to incite courage… protest that by their physical voices alone will stir the hurricane” of real change. Lopez then describes the government’s ideology, their view of how society should be. As I read this piece, about a character merely standing in his apartment kitchen thinking about changing the world, I want to change the world. This feeling persists through each story. I believe Lopez was trying to get his most passionate, well-intentioned thoughts across to me, to reach out even though in Nitch’i he tried with his own father “a hundred unsuccessful times.” Resistance is all about finding one’s place in the world, and changing the world for the better, whether it is on a familial, political, or personal level. I applaud it in the highest for it.
Book Review
Resistance by Barry Lopez
Resistance has a mission: What’s yours?
Barry Lopez’ Resistance is a unique blend of Essay and fiction. The plot is the setting in which Lopez spills his innermost belief on his life’s goals, political action, love, success, meaning, the why, the purpose. Resistance strays far from the traditional plot structure of fiction.
Each piece begins like a traditional piece of Short Fiction. Lopez uses the First Person Point of View. He describes the setting. The characters are introduced. And then he dives into the main character’s mind and weaves his own ideologies into the characters. For instance, from the viewpoint that Resistance is a set of short stories, most of the piece Apocalypse is the main character thinking while merely standing in the kitchen of his apartment. But the thinking is the story, not the plot. Plot becomes Setting. This is important to understand because as a series of short stories, Resistance falls short. The fiction is Slice-of-Life, or Man-versus-Himself, or rather Man Thinking. As an Essay, Resistance brings goose bumps to my neck and sparks the activist nature inside me, with elegance. I chose this book to review based on my research of the author, particularly this book. A collection of passionate responses “to the changes shaping our country today” through the eyes and minds of “men and women who have resisted the mainstream” sounded intriguing to my own ideologies. Resistance succeeded.
The Bear in the Road had has more traditional plot elements than Apocalypse. The setting is an extraordinary depiction of nature in the beautiful, albeit dwindling landscape of Montana where “fox, jackrabbit, badger” and “golden eagle” make their home. The narrator of the story, Edward, is pestered by a Grizzly Bear. More than this, Edward’s friend Virgil believes the bear is trying to get Edward’s attention. Edward doesn’t want to care about this or really deal with this fact. He says to himself: “I felt no burning need to rearrange my life to accommodate the bear.” Edward wants to move on with his successful life. But then he begins to question what it means to truly be successful, and Virgil helps guide him to understanding.
By contrast, Nitch’i has no traditional story or plot. It is purely Reminiscence and the search for love and purpose, for satisfaction. “I can’t be satisfied at this juncture of my life” he says at the end of the story. Apocalypse and The Bear in the Road were about self, society, and government, while Nitch’i was more about family and love. Because of this and lack of plot, Nitch’i was not as enjoyable as those other stories.
Apocalypse felt like a call to arms. It is something I’d make required reading if I were a leader in the Occupy Wall Street movement today. Occupy has no leader, no art of war. Apocalypse seeks to “spring our culture out of its adolescence… to incite courage… protest that by their physical voices alone will stir the hurricane” of real change. Lopez then describes the government’s ideology, their view of how society should be. As I read this piece, about a character merely standing in his apartment kitchen thinking about changing the world, I want to change the world. This feeling persists through each story. I believe Lopez was trying to get his most passionate, well-intentioned thoughts across to me, to reach out even though in Nitch’i he tried with his own father “a hundred unsuccessful times.” Resistance is all about finding one’s place in the world, and changing the world for the better, whether it is on a familial, political, or personal level. I applaud it in the highest for it.
January 31, 2011
It's a bit unfortunate, maybe, that this collection of vignettes opens with a story set against the background of the war on terrorism. That seems to have created the suggestion that the whole book is about positioning oneself with respect to this insidious conflict. That's not the way I read the book. And I don't think it is necessary to do it justice. Quite to the contrary. The resistance that Lopez refracts through the prism of various personalities is a refusal of all kinds of `dictatorial powers': the numbing traumas of loss and conflict, the trap of overrationalization, our quest for control, a deceptive belief in moral superiority, the curse of greed, and even simply our craving for our peers' acceptance and recognition. Some of these forces have been so long part of our lifeworld that we simply take them for granted. Others, such as the war on terror, present us with fresh dilemmas of citizenship. The protagonists of these stories try to extricate themselves from the debilitating grasp of these forces through acts of resistance, some heroic, others tentative. This is not a book about bravery, however, but about a clenched-teeth kind of vigilance for the capillary mechanisms of control and regimentation that are buried in our early-21st century, technocratic, capitalist and monomaniac society. "When you are worn out, dictatorial powers - it makes no difference whether you are the victim or a perpetrator - exert an attraction. Giving in so much more appealing than going on" (p. 152). Lopez' "Resistance" is about going on, about being on the move in an attempt to avoid being crushed by the juggernaut, to keep away from the temptation to sell out and give in. The critique that all the voices in the book are in some way recognisably the same voice, is not totally unjustified. But how could it be otherwise? Furthermore, Lopez' sophisticated prose and uncanny psychological perspicacity manage to keep these these stories from turning into bland stereotypes. This is a book to read in a single sitting, and then to keep dipping into, confronting ourselves with our predicament and acknowledging our vulnerability.
October 23, 2016
Gorgeous, intimate vignettes of people whose devotion to knowledge and beauty lead them on a path toward love, finding the courage to face up to the darkness within their own culture and themselves along the way. A resistance toward a very specific political agenda expressed through globalization and the advance of global markets, but also a resistance toward that which weakens our ability to live life with awareness and grace, and suggestions for how the two may be intertwined.
January 13, 2010
This is one I would recommend to anyone. For some it supports their desire for original thought and beauty and for others it can open their eyes to the possibilities and responsibilities that come with looking beyond the norm for values and fulfillment.
March 6, 2011
After finishing the first four pieces of Barry Lopez’s Resistance, I would say the greatest, most comprehensive form of resistance is simply to love. Of course, loving manifests itself in all sorts of particularities which could be speculated and explored—and should be and will be and have been—but for now arriving at this simple yet demanding answer is a good beginning.
Another note: in each of Lopez’s stories so far, resistance does not take the traditional forms we expect: protest, investigation, rallying or overt mobilizing. These are powerful things, but also in some ways limiting. In fact, Lopez’s fictional introduction-writer, Owen Daniels, in the opening piece, “Apocalypse,” writes that these artists of the resistance will not offer “another map to the kingdom of your frauds,” and that “no hierarchy is worth figuring out.” Rather, Daniels writes, “We believe in the divinity of life, in all its human variety [. . .] that anyone can be redeemed,” and that “we will champion what is beautiful, and so finally make our opponents irrelevant.” Ultimately of course, the most intense and disruptive beauty is that of love being enacted, and the majority of these stories find their denouement in some form—direct or indirect—of love finally being understood, received, and embraced.
And upon having completed this edifying work: The stories in this fictional collection are told by a variety of individuals, dispersed around the globe and committed to sharing voices that contrast sharply with the values of the ruling hegemony. Little imagination is needed to consider the current United States (now or eventually) as this controlling empire. Each of these stories is told in such a way that the reader feels a secret is being revealed. This may be some previously unrevealed aspect of a character’s interior life or may hint at some overlooked aspect of what it means to exist—fully alive—in perpetual and keen awareness of the wells of blessing we pass by each day. I can’t claim to have understood fully what the “secret” was at the conclusion of each piece, but this sense of confidentiality lends a kind of suspense and tension that kept me curious and gratefully delighted as each individual story unfolded.
Finally, in a work of 163 pages, I wrote down 143 vocabulary words, many of which I had never seen before and many of which I needed to confirm or clarify meanings. Worthy of deliberate and contemplative reading. Thank you, Barry Lopez, and I look forward to more of your words and stories.
Another note: in each of Lopez’s stories so far, resistance does not take the traditional forms we expect: protest, investigation, rallying or overt mobilizing. These are powerful things, but also in some ways limiting. In fact, Lopez’s fictional introduction-writer, Owen Daniels, in the opening piece, “Apocalypse,” writes that these artists of the resistance will not offer “another map to the kingdom of your frauds,” and that “no hierarchy is worth figuring out.” Rather, Daniels writes, “We believe in the divinity of life, in all its human variety [. . .] that anyone can be redeemed,” and that “we will champion what is beautiful, and so finally make our opponents irrelevant.” Ultimately of course, the most intense and disruptive beauty is that of love being enacted, and the majority of these stories find their denouement in some form—direct or indirect—of love finally being understood, received, and embraced.
And upon having completed this edifying work: The stories in this fictional collection are told by a variety of individuals, dispersed around the globe and committed to sharing voices that contrast sharply with the values of the ruling hegemony. Little imagination is needed to consider the current United States (now or eventually) as this controlling empire. Each of these stories is told in such a way that the reader feels a secret is being revealed. This may be some previously unrevealed aspect of a character’s interior life or may hint at some overlooked aspect of what it means to exist—fully alive—in perpetual and keen awareness of the wells of blessing we pass by each day. I can’t claim to have understood fully what the “secret” was at the conclusion of each piece, but this sense of confidentiality lends a kind of suspense and tension that kept me curious and gratefully delighted as each individual story unfolded.
Finally, in a work of 163 pages, I wrote down 143 vocabulary words, many of which I had never seen before and many of which I needed to confirm or clarify meanings. Worthy of deliberate and contemplative reading. Thank you, Barry Lopez, and I look forward to more of your words and stories.
May 18, 2017
Barry Lopez’s prose collection is a singular work, serene yet powerful, deeply personal yet political, direct yet not simplistic. The prose is exquisite, each narrator’s situation is complex and moving. Although a response to W’s first administration, it has sadly lost little of its timeliness. I highly recommend it.
December 27, 2020
This is a book I read several years ago. Today, Barry Lopez, passed away. I remember this book as a unique reading experience. Linked stories of individuals who are struggling to be whole. It speaks to the resistance to power, expectations and conformity. A book, now, I plan to revisit.
December 18, 2016
A group of fascinating and powerful stories by prize winning author Barry Lopez. The stories focus on how to live in a world gone wrong and the struggle to find yourself and peace in the world.
December 5, 2024
I would recommend this to anyone who has ever felt disenchanted with our society, or has had to forge their own path in life - perhaps considered themselves a rogue or a revolutionary in a sea of complacency and accpentace. By no means is this a war cry, or a radical manifesto. These short fictional stories cut straight to the heart of what it feels like to look around at the world in confusion and concern about the direction we humans are headed. Yet the stories act as a sort of reassurance, a salve for the broken hearted and the hopeless or just the mildly frustrated among us. The writing itself, the proclamations of where joy and beauty can be found among the chaos, give the whole book a feeling of buoyancy rather than an edge of disdain.
I would actually say this could be a good one to start with if you hadn’t read any Lopez before.
I would actually say this could be a good one to start with if you hadn’t read any Lopez before.
November 15, 2011
Resistance
by Barry Lopez
Published: 2004
Resistance, by Barry Holstun Lopez, is a work of fiction which tells the stories of nine unique individuals, all who have resisted mainstream culture. In some instances this resistance leads Lopez's characters to be of government interest. In others, the characters are simply described as outsiders and embark on a journey of self discovery.
Throughout the novel, Lopez does an exceptional job of creating a distinct voice for each character that is introduced. He does this by writing each chapter from a new characters perspective. The entire book is told in first person, through the eyes of the new person speaking. In addition to each character speaking from first person, Lopez has also created each character with a voice to speak about very different life experiences. Gary Sinclair, a traveling cabinetmaker, describes pouring himself into work as an escape from his painful memories of child molestation by saying,
"I perceived myself, accurately I thought, as a young man with only a slight limp, a defect noticed by few and one that did not slow me down. As my working years began to accumulate- work in many different circumstances on four continents...I moved between furnished room and furnished flat, first in my own country and then in the countries of other cultures, carrying my tools and making things I believed were beautiful: armoires, dining tables with matching chairs..."
A very different character, Harvey Fleming, a blind man married to a blind woman, explains his relationship with his wife, as he says, "we were working on the long pattern of our life, drawing out what lay buried deep in each other, things that wouldn't have emerged, we believed, unless they expected to survive."
As made evident by these two quotes, each character was able to relate to readers about very different real life issues in their own distinct voice.
I found it particularly interesting that Lopez waits until the end of each chapter to name which character was writing, what their job title or accomplishments were, and where they were leaving. What I mean is that each chapter starts out completely different. Lopez tells the story as if the readers know who is speaking. In actuality, he only allows readers to get to know each character, as he plows onward with their story, revealing only a little information as he goes. At the end of each chapter, the story comes "full circle" when readers are able to see who was writing. For example, the second chapter, about an unsatisfied architect who tries to find meaning in family, signs the end of her story with "Lisa Meyer, installation artist, landscape architect, the Arabella Memorial, Minneapolis, the Damien Monument, Damascus, Jordan, on leaving La Plata, Argentina." I suspect Lopez's reason for doing this was to eliminate any reader bias as they began a new chapter. By waiting to the end to fully know who the speaker is, readers simply receive the knowledge Lopez wishes to disclose on his terms, a little at a time.
I will close by saying this book was a fast and easy read, that will make all audiences feel more in tune with different cultures. Also, this book may tug on readers' hearts, since it is focused on humanizing individuals who seem to be "resisting." Lopez teaches us, that maybe it is us who are giving them reason to resist.
by Barry Lopez
Published: 2004
Resistance, by Barry Holstun Lopez, is a work of fiction which tells the stories of nine unique individuals, all who have resisted mainstream culture. In some instances this resistance leads Lopez's characters to be of government interest. In others, the characters are simply described as outsiders and embark on a journey of self discovery.
Throughout the novel, Lopez does an exceptional job of creating a distinct voice for each character that is introduced. He does this by writing each chapter from a new characters perspective. The entire book is told in first person, through the eyes of the new person speaking. In addition to each character speaking from first person, Lopez has also created each character with a voice to speak about very different life experiences. Gary Sinclair, a traveling cabinetmaker, describes pouring himself into work as an escape from his painful memories of child molestation by saying,
"I perceived myself, accurately I thought, as a young man with only a slight limp, a defect noticed by few and one that did not slow me down. As my working years began to accumulate- work in many different circumstances on four continents...I moved between furnished room and furnished flat, first in my own country and then in the countries of other cultures, carrying my tools and making things I believed were beautiful: armoires, dining tables with matching chairs..."
A very different character, Harvey Fleming, a blind man married to a blind woman, explains his relationship with his wife, as he says, "we were working on the long pattern of our life, drawing out what lay buried deep in each other, things that wouldn't have emerged, we believed, unless they expected to survive."
As made evident by these two quotes, each character was able to relate to readers about very different real life issues in their own distinct voice.
I found it particularly interesting that Lopez waits until the end of each chapter to name which character was writing, what their job title or accomplishments were, and where they were leaving. What I mean is that each chapter starts out completely different. Lopez tells the story as if the readers know who is speaking. In actuality, he only allows readers to get to know each character, as he plows onward with their story, revealing only a little information as he goes. At the end of each chapter, the story comes "full circle" when readers are able to see who was writing. For example, the second chapter, about an unsatisfied architect who tries to find meaning in family, signs the end of her story with "Lisa Meyer, installation artist, landscape architect, the Arabella Memorial, Minneapolis, the Damien Monument, Damascus, Jordan, on leaving La Plata, Argentina." I suspect Lopez's reason for doing this was to eliminate any reader bias as they began a new chapter. By waiting to the end to fully know who the speaker is, readers simply receive the knowledge Lopez wishes to disclose on his terms, a little at a time.
I will close by saying this book was a fast and easy read, that will make all audiences feel more in tune with different cultures. Also, this book may tug on readers' hearts, since it is focused on humanizing individuals who seem to be "resisting." Lopez teaches us, that maybe it is us who are giving them reason to resist.
August 12, 2010
The reviews of this book are quite varied. My reaction also spanned quite a range. I was feeling it was pretty violent and depressing when suddenly in the middle of the fifth letter, Bear in the Road, I had a question, I turned back to the first section and re-read it and boom, I was blown away. The whole meaning and impact of the book changed for me. I will quote some of the passages since Barry Lopez can surely state his point better than I can.
"The human imagination, the letter speculated, was a problematic force, its use best left to experts. An imagination in the wrong hands, missing the guidance of democratic reasoning and fed the wrong ideas, an imagination with no measure of economic awareness, was a loose cannon."
"We are not to be found now. We have unraveled ourselves from our residences, our situations. But like a bulb in a basement, suddenly somewhere we will turn on again in darkness. We will carry what we know - what it can mean to have your country under you like a hammock, what it is to take part in the world instead of using your people as fodder in a war to control the world's meaning and expression - we'll carry all of this into other countries. It will be hidden in our individual skills, in our dress, our speech and manner, in the memory of each one of us. The memory of one will kindle the memory of another, a burst of electricity across a chasm. We will disrupt through witness, remembrance, and the courtship of the imagination. We will escort children past the darkest warrens of the forest. We will construct kites that stay aloft in the rain. We will champion what is beautiful, and so finally make our opponents irrelevant."
This book is fiction, but the points made certainly aren't. I realized that Wendell Berry's book written in 1993, "Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community" was a clarion call for the Resistance needed in these times. Lopez's book was written inn 2004. In the amazing synchronicity of reading, I just finished an article in the current edition of "Ode Magazine" entitled "In Praise of Dissent".
My hope is that more readers and thinkers will discover this book and be stopped in their tracks as I was. It is a book that matters.
"The human imagination, the letter speculated, was a problematic force, its use best left to experts. An imagination in the wrong hands, missing the guidance of democratic reasoning and fed the wrong ideas, an imagination with no measure of economic awareness, was a loose cannon."
"We are not to be found now. We have unraveled ourselves from our residences, our situations. But like a bulb in a basement, suddenly somewhere we will turn on again in darkness. We will carry what we know - what it can mean to have your country under you like a hammock, what it is to take part in the world instead of using your people as fodder in a war to control the world's meaning and expression - we'll carry all of this into other countries. It will be hidden in our individual skills, in our dress, our speech and manner, in the memory of each one of us. The memory of one will kindle the memory of another, a burst of electricity across a chasm. We will disrupt through witness, remembrance, and the courtship of the imagination. We will escort children past the darkest warrens of the forest. We will construct kites that stay aloft in the rain. We will champion what is beautiful, and so finally make our opponents irrelevant."
This book is fiction, but the points made certainly aren't. I realized that Wendell Berry's book written in 1993, "Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community" was a clarion call for the Resistance needed in these times. Lopez's book was written inn 2004. In the amazing synchronicity of reading, I just finished an article in the current edition of "Ode Magazine" entitled "In Praise of Dissent".
My hope is that more readers and thinkers will discover this book and be stopped in their tracks as I was. It is a book that matters.
March 7, 2017
Fortune dropped Barry Lopez's “Resistance” into my hands at precisely the right moment. Each of Lopez's characters is leaving a place where strange landscapes, peoples, and individuals have provided a lesson, a story, to the pursuit of some ineffable idea. It's always some ineffable idea, something that will make life sensible or fill some ambiguous gap. The characters are united, more explicitly (and frankly in a way that is unusually unsubtle for Lopez) by a framing story and a counterhegemonic politics, never stated but by implication radical-leftist. But what the politics is doesn't matter so much as the feeling underlying it. It could be said that these are the stories of people realizing their souls are more eloquent than their words, that they shouldn't cherish their ideology at face value but instead hold to the motive principles directing it: or, going even further, to move beyond the need to rationalize or conceptualize the way life is lived, to stop viewing oneself as an instrument, a means to anything, but being oneself in the Universe. As Lopez puts it: “The world is beautiful and we are a part of it. That's all. Our work is not to improve it, it is to participate.”
The stories all have that crystalline quality unique to Lopez's writing, a successful expression of certain ineffable aspects of life that are nonetheless vital. The way he weaves reflections on living one's own life and navigating a satisfactory path in with natural history, language, the feeling of places, resonance with history, craftsmanship, etc, is masterful. He's simply the best there is.
The stories all have that crystalline quality unique to Lopez's writing, a successful expression of certain ineffable aspects of life that are nonetheless vital. The way he weaves reflections on living one's own life and navigating a satisfactory path in with natural history, language, the feeling of places, resonance with history, craftsmanship, etc, is masterful. He's simply the best there is.
July 14, 2021
"Things fell apart that shouldn't - buildings, atrplanes, human lives - and no one was to blame."
Unlike what most books with 'resistance' on the title would likely talk about, this book is not only about the resistance you expected; belligerents, guerilla war, coups. This book talks about "resistance" in a very vast understanding in which almost everyone could relate to at least one of the stories.
There's a story about the resistance against one's childhood trauma.
There's a story about the resistance against a father's betrayal.
There's a story about the resistance against one's inner spirit.
And, of course, there's a story about the resistance against a country's policies.
I personally like how these fictions are written in the form of essays, or letters. It's more intriguing, more captivating...
Unfortunately, however, it's a bit of a pity that the book is started by a story about terrorism, thus tend to shape the expectation of "Well, here comes yet another political-fiction!"
I think it would be more interesting if it was started by that one story of an Indian man and the bear. Or perhaps that one story about the story about a carpenter trying to heal from his past traumas.
After all, there are so much more in life to resist and to fight for other than governments' greeds and ego.
"Evil - it's in the DNA, man. We dig it."
Unlike what most books with 'resistance' on the title would likely talk about, this book is not only about the resistance you expected; belligerents, guerilla war, coups. This book talks about "resistance" in a very vast understanding in which almost everyone could relate to at least one of the stories.
There's a story about the resistance against one's childhood trauma.
There's a story about the resistance against a father's betrayal.
There's a story about the resistance against one's inner spirit.
And, of course, there's a story about the resistance against a country's policies.
I personally like how these fictions are written in the form of essays, or letters. It's more intriguing, more captivating...
Unfortunately, however, it's a bit of a pity that the book is started by a story about terrorism, thus tend to shape the expectation of "Well, here comes yet another political-fiction!"
I think it would be more interesting if it was started by that one story of an Indian man and the bear. Or perhaps that one story about the story about a carpenter trying to heal from his past traumas.
After all, there are so much more in life to resist and to fight for other than governments' greeds and ego.
"Evil - it's in the DNA, man. We dig it."
December 31, 2013
I refer friends to the quite concise and accurate review of my friend Kevin Spicer. Excellent collection of narratives.
Edit: I will quote this passage, one of my favorites from a chapter titled, "Laguna de Bay in A-sharp."
"There was something else I had thought about, too, ever since Minty and I went to Paris. It was the way that music broke you up and held you, how it tripped up fear's great authority over your life, how it put you back in the world you were sometimes so desperate to leave. From those days on I traveled with the tapes of Hubert Laws Chick Corea Jaco Pastorius and the others. I listened in my room on W. 89th St. when I was in the seminary and on the ships and on night shift at the hospital. And then I took what was for me a bold step. I had some limitations to contend with at my age but I learned to play the tenor sax..."
For me, as a musician, this phrase speaks powerfully to me, as it gets at the core of what I love about music: it trips up fear's great authority over my life
Edit: I will quote this passage, one of my favorites from a chapter titled, "Laguna de Bay in A-sharp."
"There was something else I had thought about, too, ever since Minty and I went to Paris. It was the way that music broke you up and held you, how it tripped up fear's great authority over your life, how it put you back in the world you were sometimes so desperate to leave. From those days on I traveled with the tapes of Hubert Laws Chick Corea Jaco Pastorius and the others. I listened in my room on W. 89th St. when I was in the seminary and on the ships and on night shift at the hospital. And then I took what was for me a bold step. I had some limitations to contend with at my age but I learned to play the tenor sax..."
For me, as a musician, this phrase speaks powerfully to me, as it gets at the core of what I love about music: it trips up fear's great authority over my life
November 29, 2020
Lopez is an exceptionally powerful writer and an extraordinary chooser of words. This work of fiction is built of separate stories of separate individuals. Other reviews praise the distinct voices developed for each story's main character. What makes my review four instead of five stars is that I heard Barry Lopez in each character. Just goes to show, different readers read and hear words differently. As with much of Lopez's stand-out body of work, there is an underlying sadness, a sense of not being at home in the world, or, no, let me revise that; I think this is more accurate: there is an underlying sense of loving the world but not being at home boxed into the various contexts of control that humans have created for themselves, and that we find ourselves powerless to demolish so that we may be free in a real, not artificial, world where the human spirit might flourish in dignity.
July 2, 2014
In his older collections of short stories Lopez often concentrated outward, on experiencing the surrealness of the natural world. In Resistance, he takes this idea and points it inward. His characters' chief struggles are often how to live at peace with themselves, how to live a quiet life when all around you is loud.
August 29, 2016
Each of us has problems we fight and interests we pursue. This book has nine stories that epitomize these fights and interests from beautifully varied perspectives. The first chapter of the book introduces these stories by describing how our paranoid government is threatened by rugged individualism. The prose is sparse and the stories enlightening. Lopez consistently delivers.
March 6, 2011
Lopez's short stories capture the aesthetics of angst and hope. They offer beauty and energy. I find myself detained at times, ruminating on a single sentence or idea - like replaying a favorite part of a song.
April 24, 2009
this is an amazingly good read and particularly aligned with our times.
June 27, 2011
At first I felt... resistance to liking it. But once I was into the third voice (each chapter a different voice) I was hooked. Beautifully written. By then end, I too wanted to leave town.
August 4, 2011
Worth the read just for the first story and the rest are a wonderful bonus.
May 25, 2022
Finding another book by Lopez was like rediscovering an old friend. Liked Of Wolves and Men and also Arctic Dreams better, but this was good. Would have given 4 1/2 stars if that were possible.
June 10, 2011
I'm going to do something very unusual for me and write a review before giving a book its proper consideration. I've only read half the book at this point, the first four of the nine stories, and am debating whether I want to go on, so I thought processing my thoughts might help me come to a decision. This way I'll have them captured as either half a review (with more to follow upon completion) or a review of a half.
Here's my sticking point: Each story is meant to be by a different person telling his or her own tale--a very diverse group of globe-travelers from all walks of life, with different backgrounds and vastly different experiences--yet they monotonously share the same voice, perspective, values, and conclusions; Lopez doesn't even seem to attempt to differentiate the characters through his writing choices, so it's as though he's writing as himself just from different imagined circumstances that don't seem to have changed or impacted who he is. It's false, empty play-acting based on superficial cliches and stereotypes instead of real, multi-dimensional characters. So if I don't buy the people who are speaking to me as people, then what's the point in listening to them?
What makes it particularly frustrating is that I do appreciate what they have to say. The common theme behind the stories is that they are meant to be about "resistance." Resistance to what? From the opening story:
The human imagination, the letter speculated, was a problematic force, its use best left to experts. An imagination in the wrong hands, missing the guidance of democratic reasoning and fed the wrong ideas, an imagination with no measure of economic awareness, was a loose cannon.
Their responses are their stories of how they have come to resist. The ones I have read so far have all shared a similar pattern: each narrator was in some way scarred or traumatized and had to overcome his or her own resulting resistance to love, and only through learning to actually and fully love again were they able to move on to something creative and meaningful. It is through their personal journeys that they discovered stories that became political.
And therein lies my other quibble with Lopez's writing choices: these stories don't feel personal. Despite the countless blurbs and reviews praising the quality and beauty of his writing, it never feels confessional or intimate to me, but instead literary, remote, and analytical. I can't find a way to connect with these people, even when I can get past the sameness of their voices. And no matter how skillful, I can't consider writing beautiful or exemplary if it gets stuck being an intellectual exercise instead of communicating something that feels genuine and that draws me in.
So maybe I'll try one more story and go from there. We'll see.
UPDATE, upon completion of the book: What I really wish Lopez had done, instead of writing a collection of short stories himself, was edit a collection by different writers who could authentically be what he has attempted to create. I think that could have been much more powerful.
But, at the risk of repeating what I wrote earlier, I’ll expand a bit on my thoughts now that I’ve read the whole work. This is a fictional collection of epiphanal stories by an international diaspora of like-minded highly educated and sociologically and anthropologically literate Americans living abroad, critical of the hegemony of their country’s cultural imperialism and destructive economic values. From the initial story, which also serves as an introduction to the rest:
For the ordinary person, love is increasingly elusive, imagined as a strategy.
We believe [humans] are creatures in search of proportion in life, a pattern of grace. It is balance and beauty we believe people want, not triumph. The stories the earth’s peoples adhere to with greatest faith . . . are all well patterned. And these templates for the maintenance of vision, repeated continuously in wildly different idioms . . . these patterns from the artesian wells of artistic impulse, do not require updating. They require only repetition. Repetition, because just as murder and infidelity are within us, so, too, is forgetfulness. We forget what we want to mean.
And so we have a repetitive collection of stories from wildly different idioms, each making the same point in different ways. By coming at it from so many different cultures and perspectives, Lopez shows how vast the interconnected web of impact is that he would have us resist, economic, cultural, and environmental impoverishment on many levels. By reading more of the stories, I was able to gain a greater appreciation for the depth of what he is saying. And, I found, the stories I was able to better connect with myself came later in the book.
At the same time, my earlier criticisms hold, that there is an undermining tediousness in the repetitive singular voice of the supposedly diverse characters, characterized by a particular intellectual pretentiousness (e.g. Lebensraum was what I wanted, please forgive me, freedom from the suffocating interlock of venal desire, dire warning, Teutonic competition, extreme overreach, and sophisticated oblivion that had become, in the dim tunnels back home, everyday life).
The theme that is repeated throughout is that political resistance comes through personal wisdom; you have to figure yourself out, how to heal your wounds and make yourself healthy, before you can figure out how to do so for the world. One example, that I think might speak to some I know:
I was conscious of the emotions of love, so the necessary partings sometimes made me feel like a cracked vase, something from which the water had drained and in which the flowers had withered. It was a long while, of course, before I understood that my arduous efforts to be kind to each person, my expressions of compassion and acts of generosity, my will to accommodate were all a sort of mask. I could express love strongly, but I could not accept it, could not allow myself to be loved.
I could not, then, really claim to know love.
And another, that most spoke to me of all the stories:
In those cities I got to know some of the hospice workers and through them witnessed, once again, they physical damage caused by the humiliations of industrial manufacturing, the Western plan to create wealth.
I wished in my reveries to be like Minty, free of any need to judge, acting as a vessel of forgiveness and joy . . .
All I needed to do now was to reduce somewhat the level of suffering where I encountered it, to moderate the levels of cruelty to which so many remained inured. I still wanted such people--the indifferent--to be held accountable. I wanted someone to entreat with them and subject them to the spirit of the law. But mine was no longer the voice to do it. I had no more plans for reorganization and reconstruction. I had nothing, anymore, to sell.
And, finally, a bit of a conclusion:
Whether I understand the stories in every particular or not, I regard them as a kind of protection against what menaces every person--despair, conceit, failure of imagination. It is this feeling I want to give back: not thank you or every blessing on you but I wish for my life to protect your life.
Here's my sticking point: Each story is meant to be by a different person telling his or her own tale--a very diverse group of globe-travelers from all walks of life, with different backgrounds and vastly different experiences--yet they monotonously share the same voice, perspective, values, and conclusions; Lopez doesn't even seem to attempt to differentiate the characters through his writing choices, so it's as though he's writing as himself just from different imagined circumstances that don't seem to have changed or impacted who he is. It's false, empty play-acting based on superficial cliches and stereotypes instead of real, multi-dimensional characters. So if I don't buy the people who are speaking to me as people, then what's the point in listening to them?
What makes it particularly frustrating is that I do appreciate what they have to say. The common theme behind the stories is that they are meant to be about "resistance." Resistance to what? From the opening story:
The human imagination, the letter speculated, was a problematic force, its use best left to experts. An imagination in the wrong hands, missing the guidance of democratic reasoning and fed the wrong ideas, an imagination with no measure of economic awareness, was a loose cannon.
Their responses are their stories of how they have come to resist. The ones I have read so far have all shared a similar pattern: each narrator was in some way scarred or traumatized and had to overcome his or her own resulting resistance to love, and only through learning to actually and fully love again were they able to move on to something creative and meaningful. It is through their personal journeys that they discovered stories that became political.
And therein lies my other quibble with Lopez's writing choices: these stories don't feel personal. Despite the countless blurbs and reviews praising the quality and beauty of his writing, it never feels confessional or intimate to me, but instead literary, remote, and analytical. I can't find a way to connect with these people, even when I can get past the sameness of their voices. And no matter how skillful, I can't consider writing beautiful or exemplary if it gets stuck being an intellectual exercise instead of communicating something that feels genuine and that draws me in.
So maybe I'll try one more story and go from there. We'll see.
UPDATE, upon completion of the book: What I really wish Lopez had done, instead of writing a collection of short stories himself, was edit a collection by different writers who could authentically be what he has attempted to create. I think that could have been much more powerful.
But, at the risk of repeating what I wrote earlier, I’ll expand a bit on my thoughts now that I’ve read the whole work. This is a fictional collection of epiphanal stories by an international diaspora of like-minded highly educated and sociologically and anthropologically literate Americans living abroad, critical of the hegemony of their country’s cultural imperialism and destructive economic values. From the initial story, which also serves as an introduction to the rest:
For the ordinary person, love is increasingly elusive, imagined as a strategy.
We believe [humans] are creatures in search of proportion in life, a pattern of grace. It is balance and beauty we believe people want, not triumph. The stories the earth’s peoples adhere to with greatest faith . . . are all well patterned. And these templates for the maintenance of vision, repeated continuously in wildly different idioms . . . these patterns from the artesian wells of artistic impulse, do not require updating. They require only repetition. Repetition, because just as murder and infidelity are within us, so, too, is forgetfulness. We forget what we want to mean.
And so we have a repetitive collection of stories from wildly different idioms, each making the same point in different ways. By coming at it from so many different cultures and perspectives, Lopez shows how vast the interconnected web of impact is that he would have us resist, economic, cultural, and environmental impoverishment on many levels. By reading more of the stories, I was able to gain a greater appreciation for the depth of what he is saying. And, I found, the stories I was able to better connect with myself came later in the book.
At the same time, my earlier criticisms hold, that there is an undermining tediousness in the repetitive singular voice of the supposedly diverse characters, characterized by a particular intellectual pretentiousness (e.g. Lebensraum was what I wanted, please forgive me, freedom from the suffocating interlock of venal desire, dire warning, Teutonic competition, extreme overreach, and sophisticated oblivion that had become, in the dim tunnels back home, everyday life).
The theme that is repeated throughout is that political resistance comes through personal wisdom; you have to figure yourself out, how to heal your wounds and make yourself healthy, before you can figure out how to do so for the world. One example, that I think might speak to some I know:
I was conscious of the emotions of love, so the necessary partings sometimes made me feel like a cracked vase, something from which the water had drained and in which the flowers had withered. It was a long while, of course, before I understood that my arduous efforts to be kind to each person, my expressions of compassion and acts of generosity, my will to accommodate were all a sort of mask. I could express love strongly, but I could not accept it, could not allow myself to be loved.
I could not, then, really claim to know love.
And another, that most spoke to me of all the stories:
In those cities I got to know some of the hospice workers and through them witnessed, once again, they physical damage caused by the humiliations of industrial manufacturing, the Western plan to create wealth.
I wished in my reveries to be like Minty, free of any need to judge, acting as a vessel of forgiveness and joy . . .
All I needed to do now was to reduce somewhat the level of suffering where I encountered it, to moderate the levels of cruelty to which so many remained inured. I still wanted such people--the indifferent--to be held accountable. I wanted someone to entreat with them and subject them to the spirit of the law. But mine was no longer the voice to do it. I had no more plans for reorganization and reconstruction. I had nothing, anymore, to sell.
And, finally, a bit of a conclusion:
Whether I understand the stories in every particular or not, I regard them as a kind of protection against what menaces every person--despair, conceit, failure of imagination. It is this feeling I want to give back: not thank you or every blessing on you but I wish for my life to protect your life.
March 1, 2025
Very breezy set of nine short stories, written like testimonies providing different takes on what it means to resist. Most of these stories I found very forgettable. My favourite one was definitely the opener. An American curator/author and his wife living in Paris go off-grid after receiving a threat from a US government agency with a dystopian name (“Inland Security”) unhappy with their criticism of the regime. Reading this after a few weeks of news about the Musk/Trump administration’s purging of the US civil service gave the story an uncanny resonance, both in subject matter and tone. It could have been written last week. Only then did I check to see the publication year, and saw that it was over two decades old. My surprise is, I think, a strong endorsement for any bit of speculative fiction, regardless of length. Unfortunately, this would remain the most memorable story from this collection. Others play with themes of rebellion against parents, social exclusion, spiritual journeys, and while they are well written, I don’t think all of them will resonate with every reader, let alone a reader like me.
This is my first Lopez book – I should try to get round to Arctic Dreams soon – so I didn’t have all the baggage yet of having read his other stuff. This book is an impressive achievement in itself, not so much in the breadth of its scope and ambition but rather the opposite. I've read articles that are longer than this. And yet for a short book with huge font/margins, the production is quite nice. The monotypes by Alan Magee are unsettling and tonally appropriate for the texts (but a little uncomfortable to study closely at night when I was reading).
This is my first Lopez book – I should try to get round to Arctic Dreams soon – so I didn’t have all the baggage yet of having read his other stuff. This book is an impressive achievement in itself, not so much in the breadth of its scope and ambition but rather the opposite. I've read articles that are longer than this. And yet for a short book with huge font/margins, the production is quite nice. The monotypes by Alan Magee are unsettling and tonally appropriate for the texts (but a little uncomfortable to study closely at night when I was reading).
September 22, 2021
I couldn't put this book down, even though I wasn't very interested in some of the stories. The author's descriptions of the feelings involved, were fantastic! I disliked the spooky pictures in it.
May 23, 2021
[rating = A-]
One of my: Best Books of the Year (for 2021)
Though known for his nonfiction, Barry Lopez is deft at the short story form as well. At first, I was not chiming with the flow of the prose (maybe it was because it was translated), but once I got into it, it fell into place nicely. The first story is almost an introduction, albeit fictitious. It sets up the idea that each story in the collection is a true story about resistance to society, to governments, to immorality, and so forth. A very creative, ingenious way to connect with a reader.
The first few stories and the last four stories were the strongest; they had a message, not always obvious, but worked into the plot effectively. Sometimes these stories seemed unfinished or rushed, especially the ones that skipped over a long period of time in the narrator's life in just a sentence or paragraph. That is the one major fault I found. Otherwise, I liked the diversity of the characters (based all over the world). However, saying that, there was also a lack of diversity in the narrators, too. They all seemed to be well-educated people who ran away from comfort to explore and interrogate societal norms. So. The settings were diverse, but the characters were all similarly aligned with the ideas of resistance and freedom from oppressive systems.
In all, I really enjoyed the ideas about belonging, about love, family, about community, about systems of government, systems of communication that were brought up. As a side note, the images that accompanied each story were very interesting in their stark, almost primitive features. A thoughtful addition to this collection about considering your place in society but also in your own mind.
One of my: Best Books of the Year (for 2021)
Though known for his nonfiction, Barry Lopez is deft at the short story form as well. At first, I was not chiming with the flow of the prose (maybe it was because it was translated), but once I got into it, it fell into place nicely. The first story is almost an introduction, albeit fictitious. It sets up the idea that each story in the collection is a true story about resistance to society, to governments, to immorality, and so forth. A very creative, ingenious way to connect with a reader.
The first few stories and the last four stories were the strongest; they had a message, not always obvious, but worked into the plot effectively. Sometimes these stories seemed unfinished or rushed, especially the ones that skipped over a long period of time in the narrator's life in just a sentence or paragraph. That is the one major fault I found. Otherwise, I liked the diversity of the characters (based all over the world). However, saying that, there was also a lack of diversity in the narrators, too. They all seemed to be well-educated people who ran away from comfort to explore and interrogate societal norms. So. The settings were diverse, but the characters were all similarly aligned with the ideas of resistance and freedom from oppressive systems.
In all, I really enjoyed the ideas about belonging, about love, family, about community, about systems of government, systems of communication that were brought up. As a side note, the images that accompanied each story were very interesting in their stark, almost primitive features. A thoughtful addition to this collection about considering your place in society but also in your own mind.
December 8, 2020
Barry Lopez is a man of incredible observation and intellect. I feel smarter after reading his books. He sees so much of the world, is so descriptive of not just the surface but also the hidden textures and meanings. These stories give such a sense of various places, operating at completely different paces from the world we're used to, and people separated from our culture by accepting other cultures. After reading Horizon, and hearing him speak of his experiences, I understand that these stories are informed by his extensive travels and learnings of the natural world and indigenous peoples. Arctic Dreams is next on my list from him. I'm eager to begin!
February 25, 2021
“Our strategy is this: we believe if we can say what many already know in such a way as to incite courage, if the image or the word or the act breaches the indifference by which people survive, day to day, enough will protest that by their physical voices alone they will still the hurricane.
We reject the assertion, promoted today by success-mongering bull terriers in business, in government, in religion, that humans are goal-seeking animals. We believe they are creatures in search of proportion in life, a pattern of grace. It is a balance and beauty we believe people want, not triumph.”
We reject the assertion, promoted today by success-mongering bull terriers in business, in government, in religion, that humans are goal-seeking animals. We believe they are creatures in search of proportion in life, a pattern of grace. It is a balance and beauty we believe people want, not triumph.”
January 22, 2021
My first taste of Barry Lopez' fiction. I am absolutely ready for more. The sheer amount of experience this man has of learning so many indigenous culture's beliefs and values is astonishing. He imparts glimpses into their wisdom and always gives them full credit. His characters may never be able to achieve full understanding, however you feel that seeking indigenous truths may be the ultimate answer to everything.
December 30, 2019
Not sure when I got this book or how I came about it, but I plucked it off my childhood bookshelf in Florida over Christmas and I'm so glad I did. Slim, elegant, thoughtful narratives about resistance and identity and the natural world. I could have read 500 pages more.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 85 reviews