Nonfiction Readers' Advisory Matrix

The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

A well-read friend recommended this book to me a few years ago. Unfortunately I got a copy the same year I started this degree, so it's just been sitting on my shelf, waiting for me. I completed the matrix based on what I gleaned from skimming a few sections. Hopefully I get to read it soon!

Where is the book on the narrative continuum?
This book is a mix of narrative and fact-based prose.

What is the subject of the book?
By examining the matsutake mushroom's place in global commerce and the reasons why various groups treasure it, Tsing also considers the relationship between "capitalist destruction and collaborative survival."

What type of book is it?
 I would consider this a book of interconnected essays about a shared topic. In the prologue, the author states that this will be the first book in the "Matsutake Worlds" mini-series, with the three volumes each authored by a different expert. Tsing is a professor of anthropology.

Articulate Appeal
Pace
Winding, expansive, unexpected. Tsing is speaking from a place that is very familiar in this time of global pandemic--precarity is unavoidable, but there are existing tools to help humanity thrive in the space of instability and lessons we can learn from nature. One review compared the short chapters to "flushes of mushrooms that come up after rain." I think they also help keep this book readable for the layperson.

Characterization
The central character is the mushroom itself. Throughout our journey to understand the mushroom, we meet many secondary characters like Dr. Ogawa, a retired academic who longs for the days when the mushroom was plentiful and believes it to be a valuable ecological tool for teaching people how to repair their relationship to nature. We are introduced to Sai, a Lao picker, who compares work (obeying your boss) to picking (searching for your fortune). We hear a ghost story about Southeast Asian pickers in the national parks of Oregon. Locations also become characters. The fifth chapter opens with mention of an "aspiring matsutake town" in Finland with the official slogan "In the middle of nowhere."

Story LineThere are many threads of narrative interwoven to give the reader a feel for the general history of the mushroom over centuries and continents. It is more of a patchwork of story-lines than one general narrative arc. I believe the author has a few intentions--to educate, to entertain, but also to urgently persuade us to consider what gifts nature provides us and to use our imaginations to make a better life in the future that does not exploit the environment until there is nothing left to salvage.

Language
Informative, evocative, poetic, scientific. Interspersed between quotes from primary sources and experts, travelogues and scientific pondering, there are beautiful phrases that speak to Tsing's loving obsession with the mushroom. For example, " The smell of matsutake wraps and tangles memory and history--and not just for humans. It assembles many ways of being in an affect-laden knot that packs its own punch. Emerging from encounter, it shows us history-in-the-making. Smell it." The caption of a photo of a forest reads, "Sometimes the life of the forest is most evident as it bursts through obstacles." And yet, in the same book, we get phrases that would be at home in a college economics or ecology textbook.

Setting
Local, global. Rural, urban. Past, present, future. This book takes readers on a tour with multiple stops spanning geography and time. The mushroom itself is found mostly in Japan, but it is prized by cultures the world over.

Detail
Some threads are deep dives, while others seem more like rumors or tall tales. In one chapter we learn the exact scientific conditions it takes for a forest of pines to thrive (a companion plant to many mushrooms). In another, an elderly picker remembers deceased friends by referring to parts of his matsutake hunting grounds as "Henry's special spot" and "Roy's hunting place," blending mushroom and memory in one map. It's clear that Tsing has spent years interviewing people close to this mushroom.

Learning/Understanding/Experience
Some authors, like Rebecca Traister or Barbara Kingsolver, traffic in realistic hope. I think Tsing is attempting that here. It's right there in the subtitle: "On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins." However, you can't talk about your dreams for the future without examining the destructive tendencies of man that created current unsustainable conditions. One curious feature of the matsutake is that it only seems to grow in forests that have been disturbed by humans. Tsing isn't educating us so we walk away knowing something new, although that is a happy byproduct. Rather, she is hoping that this knowledge will be the spore of curiosity necessary to imagine the world anew and take necessary action to make it a reality. To some readers this might feel preachy....but I think they will self-select out before they get past the front cover, if that's the case!

Rank Appeal
1. Learning/Understanding/Experience
2. Detail
3. Characterization