Review by New York Times Review
PAUL BOWLES OBSERVED that an important difference between a tourist and a traveler "is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking." This difference also separates writers about travels from "travel writers." Is the voyaging writer telling us canny stories from a romping trip or using his peregrinations to relocate his place in the world? Sometimes it's difficult to tell. D.H. Lawrence knocked off travel essays about places in which he had arrived only a few hours before, but he was writing about himself and his intuitions. Bowles, for his part, lived for years in Morocco but traveled through the desert with a suitcase filled with his favorite neckties. Do we read either man for profound and meticulously earned insights about Sardinia or the Sahara, or for their ability to convey something about themselves as they pass through those places? Most writers are "passing through," and we expect no more of them. It's part of their charm, if they have any. And part of the sometimes dubious premise of travel writing itself. In the director John Waters's amusing CARSICK (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26), he tells us up front and quite candidly that his idea to hitchhike from one of his homes in Baltimore to another of his homes in San Francisco was dreamed up as a stunt. What else would we expect from the creator of "Hairspray"? Of course, you have to be John Waters to pull this off. The celebrity hanging around rain-sodden truck stops sticking out his thumb is simultaneously the premise, the joke and the tale. So be it. The book is divided into "fiction" and "nonfiction" sections. Both relate Waters's sundry encounters with the people who give him lifts. The fictional tales are of course fantastical and plush, and when they end after 192 pages, one is slightly relieved, especially as the real tales take over with a more convincingly deadpan wit. "O.K., here's what really happened," Waters sighs, and exchanges his imaginary freaks, charlatans and drama queens for an African-American version of Tracy Turnblad, on her way to her daughter's day care. "John Waters!" she cries from the car and gives him a ride in exchange for an autograph. The next ride is offered by a middle-aged minister's wife. And so on. The transition is defter than I can describe, but did we need 192 pages to get there? In the end, "Carsick" becomes a portrait not just of America's desolate freeway nodes - though they're brilliantly evoked - but of American fame itself. It's a hoary subject, of course. Everywhere Waters goes there is either blank ignorance of his cultural status, which produces its own tart comedy, or a dividend of some kind, which he repays with a little card that reads THANKS FOR THE LIFT. (It can be autographed of course.) A sign bearing his hitchhiking plea reads MIDLIFE CRISIS. The secret of Waters's charm is the shamelessness with which he parades it, since in due course it naturally becomes its own kind of self-deprecation. As the book progresses, moreover, there's a sinister quality to the landscape's continual absence - we are in forward motion along interchangeable roads, hotels, downtowns, gas stations, inside both a writer's neurosis and his constant conversations with others. The narrative flags sometimes, but is then revived by Waters's own campily attractive tone. Is that what we want in a travel writer's voice? Not always. When I opened Iain Sinclair's AMERICAN SMOKE (Faber & Faber, $27) I felt something very different. Here is a style both measured and sumptuously wild - a beautiful, obsessive and individual style - and it's the right weapon for attacking a monumental task: visiting American towns and landscapes associated with the Beats and the writers and poets in their orbit. Sinclair begins with a small Dantean evocation: "A good step beyond midway through my dark wood of the world, I came to America, hoping to reconnect with the heroes of my youth." He does this both by launching into an idiosyncratic poetic language and by superimposing a vast and carefully plotted literary map upon an actual one, so that Lowell, Mass., say, or nearby Gloucester on its brooding sea are explored as both the mother-places of Jack Kerouac and Charles Olson and as places in and of themselves. Individuals met are rendered with humane exactitude. Here is John Sampas, Kerouac's brother-in-law, encountered in a Lowell restaurant ("Grape-bulb lights depending. Icy-white cloth. Pink napkins. Tall menus like Orders of Service at the crematorium"). "The first physical attribute that struck me about John, when he was led to our table, and after he had removed his cap, was the permanently raised eyebrows: lightly penciled accents. Punctuation marks signaling a certain fastidiousness of discourse. . . . Now he's like a senior Beat Generation diplomat, an ambassador with polished skull, silver half-moon mustache, dangling spectacles, freshly ironed shirt. A man for whom there will always be lunches." Sinclair redraws all the strange connections that once bound poets and writers across the Atlantic. Olson and his friend Ed Dorn were cherished correspondents of the extraordinary Cambridge poet J.H. Prynne, whom Sinclair fondly remembers for his funereal corduroys and austere manners. Marvelously, the man is perfectly recalled. I, too, remember the lofty, lisping Jeremy Prynne at a later time, striding about his cloisters at Gonville and Caius like a character out of Gormenghast. But who would have recalled his friendship with a man like Olson? Sinclair reconstructs whole lineages of influences and friendships, many of them conducted through small poetry magazines. His own journey becomes a collective biography of generations. Sinclair shows how they interweave in a hundred cities and places. The Americas wash up in England, just as Sinclair has now washed up in the Americas: "Certain figures, in transit," he writes, "between Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Havana, Mexico City, Rome, Athens, Johannesburg, fetch up on the fringes of Hampstead Heath: in Highgate, West Hampstead, even Kentish Town. And they stick, they nest. They like the cafes, the sad bookshops. The indifference of London suits them. Our nicely managed corruption. The potential for disappearance." Unexpectedly, this potentially dry exercise quickly becomes wonderfully gripping, a kind of Bolaño-esque kaleidoscope of mad poets colliding in space and time. And speaking of Bolaño, midway through his book Sinclair suddenly recalls that he had decided to put off his departure to America and visit the dead Chilean's last abode in Blanes, near Barcelona, a place that's "discounted, mythologized, less than itself." The banality of Blanes, with its hideous Paseo Marítimo and its "retail-park outskirts," is like the left-behind towns in the Americas graced by the memory of Beat eminence. But what do we expect from such places anyway? Writers leave few traces behind them. To wander through the places they haunted is merely to pursue their ghosts. The determination to find an individual's traces is, however, now a common motivation behind the travel narrative since it lends to any given voyage a surplus dimension, that of biography. We could call it the "in the footsteps" school, and it's the chosen method of Tim Butcher, The Daily Telegraph's former Africa bureau chief, in THE TRIGGER (Grove, $26). Butcher embarks on a walk across a mountainous area of Bosnia in the more or less exact footsteps of Gavrilo Princip, the man who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on that fateful day in June 1914, setting in motion the slaughter of World War I. Seven years earlier, in 1907, when he was 13, Princip had walked from his home village of Obljaj, in a remote area known as Herzegovina, to a town called Bugojno and from there traveled by rail to Sarajevo. Butcher decides to do the same. It's an elegant enough way of opening up the history of the Balkans and its conflicts, and of exploring the wider perspective. Butcher was a war correspondent in this region in the 1990s and saw much of the horror of that period firsthand; he is fascinated by the obscure origins of wars. Though he relies a bit too much, for my taste, on the journalist's habit of earnestly setting down interviews (his own voice is more interesting), his prose is kept afloat by carefully acquired knowledge and a reporter's quick eye. The fracture lines that run through the Balkans, between Roman Catholics and Orthodox believers, between Christians and Muslims, between Slavs and Ottomans, are parsed peripatetically as he wanders with backpack across the mountains, the follower not just of the rash and excitable Princip but also of Rebecca West, whose "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" is perhaps the greatest work on the Balkans the English language is likely to produce. His own book is an honorable follow-up, and contrast, to West's. This is not to say that Butcher doesn't sometimes mishandle small historical details. When "Turkish forces from Asia Minor" conquered the Balkans in the 15th century, he tells us, they were "outriders of the Ottoman Empire that replaced Byzantium, renaming as Istanbul the old Byzantine capital of Constantinople." In fact, the Turks had had a capital at Edirne in Europe since the 14th century, and they never renamed Istanbul. It was officially called Constantinople throughout the Ottoman period and was finally renamed Istanbul after the empire's dissolution and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey - in order, precisely, to emphasize a clean break with the Ottoman past. Does this matter? The Ottomans valued Roman imperial legitimacy and went to some lengths to obtain it. It was one of the reasons they ruled so successfully in the Balkans, and Butcher does a nice job of showing how later, in the 19th century, it was the conquering AustroHungarians who were the aliens in the Balkans when they finally displaced the Ottomans. Their overblown official buildings, their railway stations and theaters seemed and still seem out of place in a way the graceful, Byzantine-inspired Ottoman mosques do not. But more to Butcher's point are the places in Bosnia where recent mystical nationalism and violence converge - places like Srebrenica, which he visits in a fine chapter called "A Mystical Journey." (It was Princip, under police interrogation in 1914, who used the word to describe his own journey through the region.) Butcher joins the annual Mars Mira, or peace march, which takes him through landscapes that have - like the march itself - an "undertow of horror." And yet, "there were pastures where the grass had been scythed and gathered up into ricks as tall as houses. There were mountain streams where my fishing radar twitched, glistening reaches of clear water rich in the promise of wild trout. ... In one section of forest we passed a stecak, one of the medieval boxlike Bosnian tombstones that date from the era when the various eastern and western forms of Christianity struggled for supremacy among the south Slavs. ... The centuries had knocked it askew, but the surface of the gray rock bore circular repetitive carvings." Where the land is itself a kind of historical geology, the writer's eye merely has to notice such details to convey the irrational origins of war. The "in the footsteps" genre, however, can also take a lighter form, as Diccon Bewes shows in his SLOW TRAIN TO SWITZERLAND (Nicholas Brealey, cloth, $29.95; paper, $19.95), a retreading of a pioneering 1863 trip by a group called the Junior United Alpine Club - seven English men and women whisked through the snowy peaks by Thomas Cook's first organized tour of Helvetia. Bewes claims that this adventure marked the beginning of the modern tourism industry, and who are we to disagree? It's a more amusing book than I had expected, not least because the genteel comedy of manners of the English tourists of 1863 is an offshoot of the fact that Switzerland to the Victorians was as threateningly exotic as Irian Jaya is to us today. Those Continental skating practices! Hiking over the Mer de Glace with a black parasol! It appeared that the mid-19th-century Swiss had heated baths, and today, as Bewes reports, even rustic Unterseen has acquired a "Table Dance Night Club." Progress is inexorable. But not all journeys are. Some are perpetual digressions, as is the case with the travels of Philip Hoare in his fascinating travelogue, THE SEA INSIDE (Melville House, $27.99). Hoare has adopted the Sebald approach, complete with text-embedded photographs and artwork, as he wanders around and across a variety of seas from England to New Zealand in search of their tales, lore, history, ecology, biological complexity and elusive beauty. Each chapter is named for a sea, but not an actual one. There is a "wandering sea," a "silent sea," a "suburban sea" and finally a "sea in me." The mystical tone is deliberate, enabling Hoare to replace a linear narrative with a circuitous one. Here, it goes without saying, the digression is everything, and the tale is in the roundabout telling. The journey is in the digression. Occasionally, one feels lost in this maze - but does it matter? One of the better intellectual side trips is on ravens, and during its many pages I began to lay down my readerly objections as to why I was reading about ravens and quietly consented to learn all about the Corvus corax. It's the same with whales, dolphins, the naturalist T.H. White, the iconoclast theologian Thomas Merton (killed by an electric fan at a conference center not far from my own adopted city of Bangkok), the coasts of Sri Lanka and, of all things, thylacines - extinct Australian marsupials with the heads of dogs. This happy trade-off doesn't work throughout, though I'm inclined to admire the ambition and the generosity of spirit that's in play. Hoare continually reaches for the transcendent and often finds it. The digression-as-tale method, though, can sometimes feel curiously arch and self-conscious because it assumes the writer is assembling a gigantic thesaurus of exotica and wonders whose splendors will be obviously enthralling. Hoare is a good writer, so he can pull this off. But I sometimes wished he had tried his hand at some good old-fashioned linearity. That said, and on a side note, I also relished his command of and frequent resort to Anglo-Saxon (a language that should be quoted more often!). I, for one, did not know that our ancestors had a special and very beautiful word for the half-lit hour before dawn, as revealed by the anonymous writer of the poem "The Wanderer" (the ultimate traveler's poem): uhta. That gave me enough pleasure for a whole week. LAWRENCE OSBORNE'S most recent books are "The Wet and the Dry: A Drinker's Journey" and two novels, "The Ballad of a Small Player" and "The Forgiven."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 1, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* As Hoare (The Whale, 2010) states in the opening pages of this lyrical book, the sea defines us, connects us, and separates us. When Hoare sets out on a journey to rediscover the sea, he also meditates on the past, on the whales, birds, and other animals he encounters and on the people who had been there before him. Starting out in Southampton Water, his own suburban sea, he radiates out to the Isle of Wight (his white sea) and London with its underground rivers (the inland sea), never out of reach of the tidal surge. From there he travels to the Azores (the azure sea), where he dives with dolphins and sperm whales, then to Sri Lanka (the sea of serendipity) and an encounter with the sleek sensuality of the world's largest animal, the blue whale. Tasmania (the southern sea) brings more whales humpbacks this time and seabirds and the mythic Tasmanian tiger, while New Zealand (the wandering sea) offers encounters with an enormous bull sperm whale, and tiny Kapiti (the silent sea) presents a paean to the Maori. Literary history and natural history entwine so seamlessly in Hoare's narrative that the barrier between readers and the sea within all of us blurs and disappears.--Bent, Nancy Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Hoare (The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea) takes readers on a leisurely and lyrical tour of the world's waters and their inhabitants. A regular visitor to the sea near his home in England, Hoare shares his love and fascination for nature of all kinds, from the Eurasian oystercatcher and seals to the vestigial structures humans possess that provide evidence of ancestry. Hoare's writing reads like a postcard or journal demarcating his travels. On the Isle of Wight, he discusses ravens and the life of pilgrims. He encounters sperm whales around the Azores, sharing how they hear sound and make vibrations, and blue whales in the Indian Ocean, contemplating how near they came to extinction due to hunting. A journey to Tasmania reminds Hoare of his ancestors who landed there and brings to mind the haunting tale of the Tasmanian tiger, possibly hunted to extinction decades ago but with rumored sightings in recent years. Hoare swims with dolphins, observes a porpoise autopsy, and visits the island of Kapiti, an avian reserve. Hoare's writing awakens the senses with visions, sounds, and smells of the ocean; his delight and interest in nature will encourage readers to look around with new eyes. Agent: Gillon Aitken, Aitken Alexander Associates. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Do we come from the sea? Hoare's (The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea, 2010, etc.) absorbing book may well lead you to think so. Could not man have come from the sea in search of the bounty of tidal beaches? Anyone who has an affinity, indeed a need, for the water will understand the author's desire to swim every day near his home in Southampton, England, where "it is never not beautiful." "At low tide," he writes, "the beach is an indecent expanse laid bare by retreat, more like farmland than anything of the sea: an inundated field, almost peaty with sediment, as much charcoal as it is sludge." No matter what country or continent he visits, the author makes a point to swim and become a part of that sea. He's fearless as he leaps into oceans near and far to commune with any swimming mammal that may be near; whether whales or a superpod of 200 dolphins, the mammals of the sea circle him, inspect him and accept him. His travels and his meandering, humorous writing take us from the Isle of Wight to the Azores, Sri Lanka, and the nearly primeval Tasmania and New Zealand, and Hoare delivers delightful descriptions of sea creatures and shore birds, bemoaning animals newly and nearly extinct. This is not a book following the geography of the sea; nor is it a history of sailing. It is an attempt to establish and examine the oneness that the Maori have understood for years: There is no difference between life on land and life in the sea. While the author may digress occasionally, readers will relish his writing and devotion to nature and likely won't begrudge him a bit of family history here and there. A beautifully written memoir/travelogue with readable diversions into philosophy.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
