I wasn't quite sure how to do this review job - to do several book reviews in one post and then do nothing for months on end; to try to plough through all the reviews and post them one by one, or by far the most useful idea - to tackle the reviews thematically.
Or to just not do anything and blog about something totally pointless.
However, I'm home alone during a big snow storm so there ain't nuttin' else to do today, work being completed.
I'm thinking maybe I'll tackle a theme.
My themes are: Travel Literature, Non-fiction, CanLit, Literary Fiction.
I know, I know, my originality is stunning.
I may as well start with travel literature, as they are my favourite types of book now that I'm getting old and bored with fiction, and I'm too poor to actually travel anywhere anymore.
Having said that, I only read four TL books last year, for a variety of reasons.
Firstly, the genre is getting squeezed by the useful but not literature Lonely Planet type missives that everyone seems to want to buy now, and consequently, there aren't that many new titles published every year.
Secondly, I have read many, many of the existing travel books, as the Queen Dad has bought extensively in the genre over the years.
Thirdly, I am done with grumpy men who have a cynical attitude to life, especially since Inspectors Morse and Taggart left this world. So, I can't face reading Bill Bryson, or any more Theroux, or anything in that style anymore, and that's what's mostly available.
Fourthly, it's getting more difficult to get copies of what's on my list of 'great travel literature I must read before I go blind or die.' There's one shelf in Chapters and one shelf in Doull's second hand store and that's it for perusal options in Halifax.
And of course I am not supposed to shop at Chapters now, because of the Palestinian conflict. Why I don't really understand.
Yes, yes, yes, I know I can buy books on Amazon and such sites and they have a wide selection of travel literature. Interestingly, there is a list on Amazon.com that contains many of the books I am planning to read: Interesting Amazon travel literature list.
But y'see, Doulls now give you an extra 10% off your books if you promise not to buy anything online for the rest of the day, and I always do and then forget to go shopping online after the 24 hour period is up.
I know, I am pathetic.
This year I will buy more travel books.
In particular, I will track down:
- Eric Newby's book about Ireland, which I only found out about when I opened The Big Red Train Ride the other day and saw it listed in his previous publications;
- William Dalrymple's From the Holy Mountain, A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East
- Freya Stark's A Winter in Arabia
- Something by Pico Iyer, who is supposed to be shit hot.
- Larry McMurty's Roads, which is supposed to be good on the States
So of course, if you have any of them in a pile marked Oxfam shop, put it in an envelope and send it to me and I will make a contribution to a similar charity!!!!
Back to the task in hand, last year's crop.
As I said, there were four.
There's a trio of older style travel writers - Thubron, Newby and Raban - whom I admire both in terms of their journeys and their ways of describing them. So I am trying to collect all their works. I was lucky last year - I got one from each of them.
And finally, I found Robert Carver's Paradise with Serpents, Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay. I couldn't believe it when I saw he had another book set in a country that LOVES DEH GUNS, because I own a copy of Carver's first travel book, The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania.
The premise of Accursed Mountains was, Carver gets into Albania after Hoxha falls and all hell is breaking loose. He spends much time in Tirana trying to get into the countryside while not really wanting to be in that much danger. Time passes, he gets to travel to the villages and he spends his time avoiding getting shot and being terrified. He finally leaves in a big relief and writes a book about it.
It was pretty diverting and had some interesting descriptions of Albania. And he had a quote from William Dalrymple on the inside cover. Which must be the Holy Grail of aspiring travel writers...
....Well, what do you know? Paradise with Serpents is the South American version of the same book.
Guess when you find your groove you should stick to it...
Despite that nasty comment, I'd still recommend the book if you are interested in reading about Paraguay.
Lucky for me, I read it shortly before the Paraguayan elections last year, and consequently was able to appear knowledgeable about Paraguayan politics in front of some people who are still gobsmacked at my worldliness.
The book has lots of side bars about La Lynch, the Irish-born concubine of Paraguayan Presidente Lopez, which may interest Irish or French readers.
Mainly though, the book has piles and piles of useful anecdotes on how people manage to live in a hyper-inflationary economy bankrupted by the usual troika of corrupt government, fraudulent banks and business, and of course, armies of lazy public servants grown fat on the backs of the bare-foot, illiterate workers.
When Carver gets there the middle classes, who encompass some of these groups and some other people, and with whom he mainly socialises, are watching with not a little fear and trepidation as the lower orders arm themselves with big guns paid for with drug profits.
It's all very interesting if you are interested in reading about such scenarios at the moment.
Which I suspect many people are.
I like Carver because his writing is very honest. He spends most of the book hiding in the Gran Hotel in Asuncion, terrified he's going to get shot. This is because when he does venture out of the hotel or even out of Asuncion, he usually nearly gets shot. His trips out of town are centred around finding a long lost uncle who vanished into the jungle many years previously.
This type of travel scenario makes Paradise with Serpents not really a travel book; so much of his journey is spent in one place, there's more of an extended journalistic feature feel to large parts of the book. But that is inherently interesting if you like reading about the politics and society of other places.
One other comment, one of the characters he hangs with, a terribly nice person called Gabrielle, tells Carver at some point that she has invested all her savings in an apartment in west London, to avoid losing money in dodgy Paraguay.... I'm wondering how that's going for her now...
Slowly down the Ganges is the story of a journey taken in the early sixties by Eric Newby and his wife Wanda (who saved his life during WWII, the story of which is recounted in one of his other books) down the Ganges from Hardawar to the Bay of Bengal.
I love Eric Newby even though all his trips have 'classics' which have been done to death. I love Eric because a) he did them first, and b) if I held a gun to Tony Wheeler's head he'd probably admit that Newby was one of his inspirations, but Newby chose not to destroy independent travel by enabling the hoi polloi to do it.
(I consider myself hoi polloi by the way).
If you don't already know, Eric Newby is the guy who gave up a shop job in Manchester in the late fifties to travel, went to tribal Pakistan during the winter, and subsequently wrote A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, which is one of the greats.
Slowly down the Ganges is a book that brilliantly describes how important it is to have moments, when your romantic illusions about travel are being systematically destroyed by petty beauracrats.
As opposed to corrupt cops with big guns.
Newby and his glorious Wanda don't just get a bus down the length of the Ganges, he proposes to do the trip by boat. Unfortunately, boats come, boats go, boats are not suitable for the depth of the Ganges, or the tide, or whatever, and the author, his wife and their trusty crew have to beg, borrow, bribe, steal and swap craft at every staging post on the journey. Plus haul his considerable luggage on and off boats and swamps and sand pits, and cliffs and sink holes etc at all hours of the day and night.
Wanda is the woman who can feed 100 sailors with two fish, some daal, and the light of the Indian moon. Newby spends much of the book amazed that such an extraordinary woman could love him (which is the other reason why I love his writing).
If you've been to India you will appreciate the vast chunks of this book that deal with lying around waiting for somewhere to open or lunch to finish or 'payment' to be made or whatever.
Slowly is the key word in this particular title.
Mirror to Damascus, by Colin Thubron is the description of a year the author spent in the Syrian capital. It is very early Thubron, and he starts to pick at many of the themes he deals with in his later writing - theories of migration and nomadic culture, the spread of Islam, the great trade routes of Asia and their impact on history. Much of what he discusses in this book is returned to in his brilliant quartet of books about Asia.
It is really interesting, when you read a lot of travel literature, you start to encounter varied descriptions of the same place. It can be quite disconcerting.
Currently I am reading a book about the Queen of Sheba written by a Californian documentary maker with a writing style that is hampered by the lens he uses instead of a pen. The writer, whose name I am too lazy to go to the sitting room to look up, describes Damascus as a Russian engineered concrete monstrosity that surrounds an impressive mosque.
It is itself an impressive description. Memorable. If surrounded by a mass of visual concrete that would be great on a storyboard but is not so good in a book format.
It also destroys the heart of Thubron's description of the same city.
Thubron's description of the city is magical. His Damascus is layered from the inside out, from the bottom up, from the outside in, from the ceiling to the ground, from the sepulchre to the minaret. There is not a layer or cross hatch of the city that he doesn't turn his attention to during his year.
The blurb on the back describes it as a 'work of love' and it is definitely a paeon. But Thubron's style is so classical and clear that the love doesn't ever veer the prose near the colour purple.
Mirror to Damascus was published in 1967, a couple of years after Newby's Ganges adventure.
It is an altogether different type of adventure, more Victorian in its style and length. Colin Thubron takes rooms in the city for a year and burrows down through the history, geography, archaeology and other aspects of this ancient city and culture, trying to pin down the city's soul, and by doing so, perhaps the soul of Middle Eastern Islam.
If we want to figure out the dichotomy in architectural descriptions, maybe it's time-bound.
Perhaps the mid-sixties was a halcyon period before the advent of the Soviet engineers that seem to have destroyed all of Thubron's travel adventures ever since.
In summation, you need to be a Thubron fan, or an Orientalist, or a fan of esoteric musings grouped around a single theme (I am trying to be all of these things) to like this book.
Ideally, you should read it in Damascus.
Finally, my travel literature collection expanded by one more book in 2008. This time it was an early publication by my beloved Jonathan Raban. I chanced upon his Hunting Mr. Heartbreak one day in Doull's, to my great joy.
Hunting Mr. Heartbreak is Raban's take on the States. The eponymous Mr. Heartbreak is Hector St. John de Crevecouer, a fellow emigrant who wrote about how wonderful it was to move to the newly formed United States.
All the great writers have to do the States. All of them have to do it their way. Raban, being Raban, has to approach it from the sea. He leaves England on a ro-ro called The Atlantic Conveyor. Because of this, and because of his tracing of a previous emigrant, the opening sentence is a reworking of the classic, 'having arrived in Liverpool, I took passage for the New World.
Happily for Queenie, The Atlantic Conveyor stops in Halifax port before it heads to New York (oh, why don't more of them do that!!), so she has the wonderful surprise of having her favourite travel writer describe the city in which she lives as he found it in 1990.
He ends up at the Split Crow, of course, that bastion of bad behaviour beloved of visiting crews. Later on he says:
In my shore-going tie, I was overdressed for the town. Everyone else appeared to have just come in from an afternoon's duck shooting. They dressed, not to stand out, but to blend in, in muddy browns, greens, beiges, and plaids, as if the height of Haligonian fashion was perfect camouflage. There was an above average incidence of beards, a below average incidence of jewellry. That cardinal provincial sin, of 'getting above yourself', was not a Nova Scotia weakness; the people of Halifax had carried unshowiness to such a point of fine moral principle that I felt my striped Italian tie was standing out among them as an act of insufferable urban arrogance.
Where they were rich, and showily rich, was in body space. Everyone carried at least 300 cubic feet of the stuff round with them on the streets. Life on a sidewalk in Halifax was a lonely business, with people swerving aside to give you a wide berth, as if you had a contagious social disease.
I nearly laughed myself sick when I read this. Nineteen years on, little has changed. Maybe a few more people on the streets, but not many.
Raban gets to New York and spends some time with the rich people who inhabit the rarified atmosphere of the condos high above Central Park. He doesn't think much of them of course and calls them the Air People. He sublets an apartment from 'Alice' and snoops into her life as much as he can and rips her to shreds in his book - I pity the poor girl, who was probably just trying to keep the apartment for her return to the city.
After a sojourn closer to the streets of New York (this book was written before zero tolerance and the peace that brought) and some encounters with the Street People of Mayor Koch's era, Raban has had enough of both crime and shallowness, and heads out into the heartland of America. The rest of the book deals with time spent in Alabama, Seattle, and the Florida Keys.
The section on Florida in particular is fabulous. Obsessed with boats and the water, Raban charters a fishing boat and heads into the Keys. He becomes enamoured with the idea of the Keys as the traditional piracy hiding grounds. His repeated attempts to get the Coast Guard and various other law-protection agencies to tell him the best way to hide in the Everglades are hilarious and really ironic when you read them with the impact of 9-11 still reverberating throughout North America.
How must Raban feel when he thinks back on the innocence of this time.... how must we all feel. I remember feeling we had hit the absolute bottom of the pits of corruption, cynicism and despair. Compared to now, the early 90s were a Disney movie...
I highly recommend this book for a glimpse of the USA that we all learned to love through MTV USA and the tv shows of the early nineties. It's a USA that has since disappeared, but Raban nails it. And like the rest of us, he liked it so much he moved there (he settled in Seattle).
There. That was a very convoluted way of reviewing four books. I will have to undertake a review redux on the rest, or I'll never get finished.
It has stopped snowing. Would winter be drawing to a close?
Don't get your hopes up Queenie, there's always one more storm...!
