Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods , 2017. New York: Alfred P. Knopf. Book Review by Myna german “Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition,” wrote the Mexican poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz. (p. 190, Finkel) All the time alone is feeling like solitude to me, a retreat being cut off from the world. Not being able to have my normal routines and see friends and colleagues feels like a form of torture. In “The Stranger in the Woods,” a 20-year-old from Massachusetts drives up to where his family summered in Maine, stakes out a hidden property and pitches his tent. What he thought would be an adolescent stunt of defiance and withdrawal turns out to be his life for thirty years. It is a Thoreau-type experiment, but as the author points out, even Thoreau held dinner parties and was seen strolling around Concord downtown now and then. Finkel, the author himself, lives in sparsely-settled western Montana, but once the hermit is caught (he ...
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