DISCOVERIES

The Future of Ice

A Journey Into Cold

Gretel Ehrlich

Pantheon: 224 pp., $21.95

“What follows is both ode and lament, a wild-time song and elegy, and a cry for help -- not for me, but for the tern, the ice cap, the polar bear, and the lenga forest; for the river of weather and the ways it chooses to be born.” Ehrlich’s exploration of winter (inner and outer) is more like a song than a cry. She’s just one of those people who tries hard not to laugh out loud from sheer joy the farther north she goes.

People are wary of cold-lovers; they suspect us to be somehow impervious, plated, sinister. When Ehrlich’s cellphone rang in the tent she had been living in for six months on a glacial moraine in Wyoming (temperature 12 below zero) and her editor asked her to write a book on winter, well, what a scam!

In many ways, this book is a continuation of Ehrlich’s other books and explorations -- of loneliness, of longing, of her relationships to animals and, thank God, of language. Just how much can you stretch a bunch of brittle words to make them feel like ice, like whiteness? How to reveal what is beautiful and necessary about something people are so afraid of?

“By midcentury,” she writes (and there are some who disagree with her urgency), “it is predicted, there will be no more glaciers and a million species of living beings will become extinct.” Perhaps it is the severity, the immediacy of the situation that inspires Ehrlich to really let go: “White flakes fall past my eyes like tiny pages, each one flashing its redundant narrative. Or is it only ash from the spilled flame and blizzard of solstice?” Whatever the mix of joy and desperation, she’s close to the bone on this one; can’t get much closer with pencil and paper.

*

The Zigzag Way

A Novel

Anita Desai

Houghton Mifflin: 176 pp., $23

Eric: mild-mannered son of a Maine fisherman, wayward scholar, pushover. But the ancestors are restless; they beat the drums beneath his Boston apartment. When his girlfriend announces she’s going to Mexico to do field research, Eric tags along. He vaguely remembers stories his Cornish grandfather told him about the Mexican town where he worked as a gold miner.

The guides flow into his life as soon as he crosses the border. He wanders into a lecture given by Dona Vera, a cranky old woman, “Queen of the Sierra,” supposed expert on the Huichol Indians and the many uses of peyote, enemy of miners.

He visits her center for the study of the Indians, where he reads in a book from her library: The miners “walk in zigzag direction because they have found from long experience that their respiration is less impeded when they traverse obliquely the current of air which enters the pits from without.” Dona Vera sends him up the mountain to visit the town where his grandfather worked. He arrives there on Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead.

Desai’s novel proves that metaphor provides good, strong structure for a novel -- just as strong as your every- day, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other plot or story line. When the metaphor is played, as Desai plays hers, it also illuminates, as traditional novels so often do not, the certainty that we live on several planes, in several dimensions, all at once.

*

Anger

Robert A.F. Thurman

Oxford University Press: 112 pp., $17.95

Is anger necessary? Is it evil? Can it be eradicated? In the West, Robert A.F. Thurman writes, we consider anger a kind of “natural phenomenon, like a storm or a bolt of lightning,” while in the East, anger is considered a “root addiction,” like desire, born of the self-delusion that leads to suffering. Thurman, who has studied, practiced and written about Tibetan Buddhism for 30 years, admits to his own private struggles with anger and shares some of the tools he has learned in his Buddhist path. He takes the reader through steps of “anger transcendence”: “Tolerant Patience,” “Insightful Patience” and “Forgiving Patience.” From little books come great hopes for the future of mankind!