Book Review: The Art of Patience by Sylvain Tesson

 

Let's take a look at this non-fiction book about snow leopards!

The author and four other people, among them a wildlife photographer, go to Tibet in hopes of being able to capture the elusive snow leopard on camera. This task soon proves to be much more difficult than they thought.

I wanted to like this book, but honestly I just...kind of don't now that I've read it. This is partially due to some (semi-)false advertising of the Dutch book, which has a title and look that makes it look more like this is a book with information about the snow leopard, rather than a book about a few people trying to find them in the wild.

The journey Tesson and his crew go on is still interesting and I like learning about the locals and the other animals they come across in their travels. But it's just not at all what I wanted. I also couldn't particularly get into the author's writing voice, though that might just have been the Dutch translation that's at fault.

The book is thankfully very short and I managed to get through it in two nights, but it still leaves me so much to be desired. Even the knowledge about snow leopards, the locals and other animals we do get are so very surface level.

Also, remember how the whole goal of this journey was to photograph the snow leopard? Well, guess how many of these pictures are in the book. A total of one, where the animal is almost completely hidden and we can only see the top half of its face. That just feels like a letdown. After this entire book documenting the great lengths Tesson and his friends go on to photograph this animal, we don't even get to see the pictures they took sans one, which hardly even shows the animal in question.

I get that the main photographer of their group wasn't Tesson, it was his friend Munier. But then just license some of the pictures? Because right now we're reading about this great journey these four people went on and we don't even really get to see any of the results. Which is just a shame.

So yeah, while decently written, I'm not a fan and it leaves too much to be desired. If the book hadn't been building up capturing the animal on camera so much and gone more in depth on the lives of the locals and snow leopard and other wild animals they came across, I might be more forgiving. It'd be a bit more in-depth and interesting rather than surface level. But now we get neither pictures nor any depth in what we're learning.

Rating: 3/5