Where to Start with Peter Matthiessen: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Peter Matthiessen — how to approach The Snow Leopard, his National Book Award-winning account of a Himalayan journey that becomes a sustained inquiry into grief, presence, and Zen practice. A complete reading guide.
By Natalie Osei
Peter Matthiessen (1927–2014) was an American novelist, naturalist, and co-founder of The Paris Review who had been practising Zen Buddhism for several years when he joined his friend the field biologist George Schaller on an expedition to the Crystal Mountain region of Nepal in 1973. The purpose of the expedition was scientific: to study bharal (Himalayan blue sheep) in their remote habitat and, possibly, to observe the snow leopard — one of the most elusive animals in Asia — preying on them. Matthiessen’s wife, Deborah Love, had died of cancer the previous year. The Snow Leopard (1978), which won the National Book Award, is the account of the six-week journey that resulted.
Where to Start: The Snow Leopard (1978)
The essential Peter Matthiessen — and one of the great American books of the twentieth century. The Snow Leopard describes a physical journey with almost novelistic precision: the 250-mile trek from Pokhara to the Crystal Mountain, the specific quality of light at altitude, the ecology and natural history of the high Himalayas, the particularities of Sherpa culture and the villages along the route. George Schaller’s scientific work — the behavioural observations of bharal, the ecological relationships in this remote ecosystem — is present throughout and rendered with genuine scientific respect.
But the book’s real subject is interior. Matthiessen had been practising Zen for several years before the expedition, and the journey to the Crystal Mountain functions as a test: can he apply the practice in conditions — physical discomfort, cold, illness, uncertainty, grief — that are precisely the conditions the practice claims to address? The answer the journal records is honest to the point of self-indictment. He is frequently irritable. He is impatient with his own progress. He is still, months after his wife’s death, not present with the loss in the way the practice would require. He is reaching toward something that keeps receding as he reaches.
The snow leopard itself functions as a Zen koan throughout the book. A koan is a question or statement used in Zen practice to focus and frustrate the rational mind — designed to be unanswerable by conventional thinking. The snow leopard is the most elusive animal in the Himalayas; most people who search for it never see one. The expedition’s scientific purpose is partly dependent on its appearance. And yet Matthiessen, through the course of the journey, arrives at a position about the sighting that is the central spiritual insight of the book: the seeking is the obstacle. The animal exists. Whether it appears to him or not is not a measure of the journey’s success or his own worthiness. The desire to see it is the very thing that prevents the quality of attention that might allow seeing.
This is the classic Zen inversion: the answer to the koan is that the koan is wrongly framed. You seek what you already have. The presence you are reaching toward is available only by stopping the reaching. Matthiessen knows this intellectually from years of practice. Actualising it in the field is a different matter.
The grief is present throughout without ever becoming the book’s explicit subject. Deborah Love appears in the journal in references and memories — her illness, her death, the quality of their relationship — and the grief is the heaviness beneath the expedition that Matthiessen cannot put down. In Zen terms, grief and spiritual longing are related: both involve reaching toward what cannot be held. The mountain is the right place to work with this, not because it provides resolution but because it provides, at sufficient altitude and distance from ordinary life, the conditions in which the reaching cannot be avoided.
The prose is what distinguishes The Snow Leopard from the genre of spiritual travel writing and places it in the company of major literature. Matthiessen’s sentences are precise, unhurried, and luminous in the way that the best natural history writing achieves: specific enough to place you in the landscape but unencumbered by documentation. A snow finch in the morning light, the specific blue of a glacial lake, the sound of a monastery bell arriving across a valley — each rendered with the precision of a poet who has also studied the ecology.
Reading Peter Matthiessen
The Snow Leopard is Matthiessen’s most widely read and most essential work for general readers. It stands alone and requires no prior familiarity with Zen or Himalayan natural history.
For the full Peter Matthiessen bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Peter Matthiessen author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Peter Matthiessen?
The Snow Leopard (1978) is Matthiessen's essential book — a National Book Award-winning account of a 250-mile trek into northwestern Nepal with biologist George Schaller, written in the form of a journal that is simultaneously a work of natural history, a memoir of grief for his recently deceased wife, and a meditation on Zen Buddhist practice. One of the great books of the twentieth century, and the most serious American treatment of what it means to be genuinely present.
What is The Snow Leopard about?
The Snow Leopard describes Matthiessen's 1973 journey to the Crystal Mountain region of Nepal with the field biologist George Schaller, ostensibly to study Himalayan blue sheep (bharal) and search for the nearly mythical snow leopard. The search for the snow leopard functions as a Zen koan throughout: the animal that may or may not be sighted is the book's organizing symbol, and whether it is seen matters far less than what the seeking reveals. The book is equally about grief, spiritual practice, landscape, and the difficulty of achieving genuine presence.
Do I need to know Zen Buddhism to appreciate The Snow Leopard?
Some prior familiarity with Zen practice enriches the Buddhist passages, but the book is accessible to readers without Buddhist background. Matthiessen explains the concepts he uses with enough context that a patient reader can follow the argument. More importantly, the book's core teaching — that the impulse to seek what you already have is itself the obstacle — is communicable through the narrative without requiring formal Buddhist training. The landscape and the grief are universally accessible even when the framework is unfamiliar.
What should I read after The Snow Leopard?
After The Snow Leopard, Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia offers a different mode of literary travel — more external, more elliptical, less spiritual — that reads interestingly alongside Matthiessen's inward journey. Pema Chödrön's When Things Fall Apart covers the Buddhist teaching on grief and groundlessness that Matthiessen is practicing in the Himalayas, in a more accessible and direct form. Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild examines wilderness and transcendence with a darker account of what seeking without understanding costs.
