No baggage A minimalist tale of love and wandering

Clara Bensen

Book - 2016

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Subjects
Published
Philadelphia : Running Press [2016]
Language
English
Main Author
Clara Bensen (author)
Physical Description
288 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9780762457243
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

ONCE THERE WERE just nomads, their wanderings no more than necessary for survival. But then came the stockades their successors built and the fire-warmed settlements in which they huddled - and suddenly travel changed, becoming what for most would henceforth be a pursuit more elective than essential. There were many motives for it. Sheer curiosity-what's beyond the fence? - came first. Then a need to trade, to inhabit, to conquer, to preach, to take part in a pilgrimage, to migrate and settle anew, to wage a war or to seek refuge. These and any of a thousand other proddings of the sharp stick would send travelers out on the road. Before long, humankind had been whipped into a frenzy of wandering, one that has never let up. And nowadays, with technology and low cost combining to create a perfect storm of wanderlust, we see the results: the vast Lunar New Year crowds at a Chinese railway station, the lethal scrums at the hajj in Mecca, the endless security lines at Heathrow and Kennedy and Sheremetyevo, all vivid testimony to the unanticipated backwash of our pathological desire for ceaseless mobility. And yet just why, fretted Blaise Pascal back in the 17th century, when all of this seemed to get going, why the urge to engage in so much movement? Why all this transnational Brownian motion? Surely all of man's ills must stem, the philosopher wrote, from his simple inability to remain quiet and alone, serenely in the comfort of his own home. When confronted with this season's tottering tower of new travel literature, I found it easy to sympathize with poor Pascal. Well over 40 books arrived on my desk, ranging widely in their geographical reach, but most nonetheless possessed of a certain predictability - an urgent need to escape here, a frantic need to impress there, a pressing need to inquire and explore and explain what goes on in the faraway. Only a handful could possibly be chosen for a closer look. A small sampling of those that, with profound regret, had to be left by the wayside, may indicate the scale and manic scope of this tarantella of travel writing: A former cult member tries to bicycle around the world. A man with an appetite for fish walks the coast of India, sampling as he goes. A Canadian waitress who swears like a fishwife goes on holiday to Boracay. A man walks, illegally, along the Keystone XL pipeline. Sixteen school-boys canoe their way from Montreal to the mouth of the Mississippi. An Englishman visits all of the Central Asian "stans" - except the most interesting one, Turkmenistan, with its revolving statue of the former president and an ice rink built in the desert. An expatriate Briton writes admiringly about Holland. A Hungarian writes similarly about China. Someone writes a sentence that includes the words "the atopic character of literary space" and supposes it will appeal to a reviewer of travel books. An oenophile goes in search of the finest wines grown in Georgia, not here but in the Caucasus. A Floridian who has visited more than 60 countries tells us about himself. A radio reporter immerses herself in the dubious delights of the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. In the end, I sifted what I thought might be some pearls from the sand. And there's an irony in my first choice, one Pascal would like, since Philip Marsden's RISING GROUND: A Search for the Spirit of Place (University of Chicago, $27.50) doesn't require the author to venture very far from his home in Cornwall, yielding a travel book that involves little real, physical travel. And yet Marsden's essays about landscape and history and the habitations and habitants of that mysterious, familiar but deeply unknown finger-like peninsula at England's lower left-hand, seagirt end are deft and exquisite, filled with the learning of a supremely well-traveled man and composed in a lilting, finely chased prose. I immersed myself for hours in the comforting blanket of this book, lulled into fond memories of my own. My very first job as a reporter, based in the gritty coal-mining northeast of England, once required me to visit Cornwall, but there was no budget and I had to hitchhike and camp out on Bodmin Moor. In a cafe near Liskeard, I met a wandering American student of quite astonishing beauty, and she spent an evening with me under one of the granite tors, a place called the Cheesewring. She cooked for me and played Joni Mitchell songs on her guitar. And then, for fun, she tried to balance a pile of small stones on the grass, intending to echo those that had been piled by nature on the tor. Almost half a century later, Marsden observes a woman at the very same place. She "picked a flattish stone and added it to one of the waist-high cairns, the mini-Cheesewrings that had been put up by recent visitors. The stone kept falling off and she bent down close to position it. Very gently she released her finger and thumb. She held them there for a moment. This time the stone was still." If deep and well-weathered erudition defines Marsden's book, learning and assimilated high culture similarly mark out Andrew Dickson's wonderfully imaginative WORLDS ELSEWHERE: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe (Holt, $35), which appropriately appears around the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death. For this, unlike most of the library-bound literary reassessments produced to mark the moment, demands of Dickson many thousands of miles of hard slogging as he seeks to inquire into the playwright's appeal around the world and to discover the plays being performed with often wild and eccentric enthusiasm in the most improbable places. China is perhaps one of the more predictably bardolatrous countries Dickson visits, where young Chinese (they and their elders raised on the Lambs' "Tales," still hugely popular more than a century after they appeared in translation) have become in recent years among the most numerous and raucous fans of the man officially known as Shashibiya. Dickson reminds us that when Wen Jiabao, then China's premier, came to England in 2011, he flew first to a small airport outside Birmingham and hared off to Stratford to pay homage. He left behind as a gift an edition of "Love's Labour's Lost" rendered into putonghua and wrote an elegantly calligraphed paean, "He brings sunshine to your life,/Gives your dreams wings to fly" - which, though more Elton John than Li Bai, does suggest a certain fondness. And given that Marx revered Shakespeare, it was for much of China's recent history an officially approved fondness. So Dickson treks around to experience Shakespeare with Chinese characteristics - notably watching an up-to-date "Coriolanus" being performed in Beijing, with two local heavy-metal bands called Suffocated and Miserable Faith playing a noisy continuo. In Shanghai, he meets a once and now again famous Shakespearean actor, Jiao Huang, and watches him weep as he explains why he had not been on the stage for nine years during the 1960s. It was, of course, the time of the Cultural Revolution. "If you were passionate about Western plays, you would be so severely criticized that you could n't lift your head- I lived in a cowshed. I experienced everything. My house was destroyed." Such an encounter, which amply repays the price of admission, also transmutes a Shakespeare book (in which Dickson also ventures to Nevada City, Munich, Durban, Kolkata and Gdansk, among other cities) into a true travel book, of the best kind. Of a more traditional kind is WALKING THE NILE (Atlantic Monthly, $26) by Levison Wood. I mean no disrespect for the behatted, bandannaed and be-bearded Wood, who was bred by all appearances out of Bear Grylls by Sir Ranulph Fiennes, when I note that, like all too many of the newly empireless British, he has a perverse liking for far-flung epic stunts - his other travel book, WALKING THE HIMALAYAS (Little, Brown, $27), comes out almost simultaneously. What elevates this perfectly reasonable 4,000-mile northbound wander through Africa, from the trickle of the river's source in Rwanda to where it debouches by the grubby gravel of an Egyptian beach, is how Wood deals with the very lowest point of the trip, when one of his party falls desperately ill and dies. He was Matthew Power, a young man from Vermont who had made something of a name for himself as an adventuresome reporter. Men's Journal had commissioned him to meet up with Levison Wood ("Captain Wood, I presume?" clearly had to be his first words when they joined forces in the scorching uplands of Uganda) and to walk with him toward South Sudan. Tough-looking yet unused to the extreme heat, Power never made it: "I found Matt hunkered down in the elephant grass," a plainly frightened Wood writes. "He was sipping from the water pack attached to his rucksack, through a thin tube. There was something almost ghostly about his face: pale, white and flushed red in equal measure. 'Are you O.K., Matt?"' He was dying of hyperthermia. Wood knew the symptoms, had seen them before in Afghanistan. He got out his satellite phone and called - for medical advice, for a helicopter, for help. Gunshots were fired in the air. But no one came. One of his companions lit a fire to create a landing zone for a chopper, but lit it in the wrong place, and the wind-whipped flames swept toward the party and their fast-dying charge. They tried to carry him out, but he stopped breathing, his pulse vanished. They took his fast-cooling body to the top of a hill, wrapped him in a tarp and whispered a prayer. And then, the next day, after the rangers had come and the formalities had been completed in the closest town, Power's photographer picked up his cellphone and dialed the New York number of Power's wife. And told her the terrible news about her husband's death, about what happened to the man who had come out to Africa, as Wood puts it, "so that he could write about me on my indulgent, pointless, selfish trek." I was near tears when I read that passage. It cast a shadow over the adventure, from which neither the adventure nor the book's eventual account ever really recovered. I confess I had an instinctive initial dislike of what seemed to be a truly indulgent, pointless and selfish trek undertaken by a troubled young woman from Texas named Clara Bensen, whose NO BAGGAGE: A Minimalist Tale of Love and Wandering (Running Press, $25) recounts her three-week adventure traveling from Istanbul to London, quite deliberately baggageless. She had little more than an emerald-green cotton sundress, a slim leather purse holding three pairs of underwear, her iPhone and iPad Mini, a pen and notebook and a toothbrush - and a devil-may-care boyfriend named Jeff, whom she had met on the dating site OkCupid and about whom she knew very little, other than that he taught environmental science at a college in Brownsville and had a young daughter, who would stay home with her mother. (Baggage there, of course. Half the point of the book.) Near the start of what turned out to be an absorbing and well-told tale, Bensen refers to Baudelaire's admiration for the life of the flâneur, citing the "immense joy" of being able "to be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world." And with gusto, courage and a palpable sense of joy, so Bensen goes on to enjoy her brief wander through the southeastern corner of Europe, as far away from Texan certainty as her budget allowed her to go. We learn perhaps a little too much about her feminine plumbing crises en route and the history of her various low-level mental troubles back home among her evangelically minded family. But she arrives back in Texas with her relationship with Jeff intact and her eyes widened to the wondrous realities of the world. I was happy for her, and I hope she travels once more, returning with another well-furnished notebook. Finally, and by deliberate sartorial contrast, there is Rush Loving Jr.'s THE WELL-DRESSED HOBO: The Many Wondrous Adventures of a Man Who Loves Trains (Indiana University, $35), which has all tOO many pictures of the boring-looking men in business suits who ran, for good or for ill, some of the various railroads with which this former Fortune editor is acquainted. Loving loves trains - indeed, some years ago he wrote a book with a title professing just that - and he has a stiffly mannered approach to the delights of permanent-way passage, the kind that made E. M. Frimbo so beloved a character of the old New Yorker. His is by no means a good book - neither a good bad book nor a bad good book. But for those few of us who are attracted to a sentence that begins, "Then the Golden Arrow took off over the flatlands of the Midwest, highballing for Chicago, passing Crestline at 12:44, Fort Wayne at 2:02 and Valparaiso at 3:54," it is an essential book. And how much nicer a sentence that is than all that life-ruining piffle about the atopic character of literary space, an indigestible confection that deserves to be tossed from one of Loving's trains, to languish by the wayside forever. SIMON WINCHESTER'S most recent book is "Pacific." ONLINE The travel books described at the beginning of this review are listed at nytitnes.com/books.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 5, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review

Months after a tentative recovery from a mental breakdown, Bensen met Jeff on an online dating site. She was sensitive and reclusive, fragile and afraid to venture out. He was an academic at loose ends, living in his office and prone to taking spontaneous trips. No commitments, but would she travel with him to Istanbul and on to London, with no luggage and no itinerary? Could this be the way to let go of her chronic anxiety? Off they go to Istanbul, relying on the cosmos and strangers to shelter them each night. All they had were the clothes on their backs, some cash, and a credit card. Bensen chronicles a 21-day journey through Turkey, Greece, Croatia, and England, traveling by plane, train, bus, and car. They stroll through streets at random, visiting usual and unusual sites, pondering the meaning of life and whether the kismet of the trip was bringing them closer or pulling them apart. Readers intrigued as much by modern romance as by world travel will appreciate this thrilling travelogue of an erratic relationship and the landscape of ancient and modern Europe.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Freelance writer Bensen gives a book-length treatment to an article she wrote for Salon, "The Craziest OKCupid Date Ever," detailing her relationship with Texas maverick Jeff and their luggageless 21-day trip through Europe in the spring of 2013. After suffering a quarter-life existential crisis, Bensen decides to dive back into life with gusto. She meets Jeff on a popular dating site, and a month later they purchase tickets to Istanbul. The resulting adventure includes serendipitous couch-surfing hosts, raucous political protests, a dust-up with security at the Parthenon, and the "grueling surrealism" of a 23-hour bus ride. Bensen exhibits a knack for description and history as she recalls touring the Hagia Sophia, the temple of Apollo, and even Bosnia's "shelled-out skeleton houses with collapsed roofs and Swiss-cheese walls." Jeff is a bit of a caricature at first, but as their relationship progresses, he evolves from a vessel of energy and New Age platitudes into a sensitive man facing his fears of commitment and vulnerability. If this sounds like a tale of ridiculous millennial whimsey, it is, but Benson is self-aware, frequently acknowledging her privileges; her account of her mental breakdown borders on maudlin, but her willingness to discuss it in detail is admirable. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

In this engaging debut, the author writes of her three-week whirlwind tour through eight countries while traveling with Jeff, a college professor and avowed minimalist she met just a month earlier on an online dating site. Bensen's trek is accomplished with only what fits into her small purse-underwear, wallet, passport, and toothbrush. The author's intelligent and witty writing, sprinkled with apropos quotes from William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, and Paul Harvey, deftly combines information on her life and her nascent recovery from a two-year bout with mental illness with relevant history on the locations she visits. In Turkey, the author muses on teachings from her childhood religion classes while visiting the ruins where Paul the Apostle wrote his letter to the Corinthians. In Greece, a conversation she has with their couch-surfing host on Greece's economy segues into difficulties she and thousands of other millennials experience when college graduation only leads to being in debt and moving back in with parents. VERDICT Women who have considered taking an unconventional path in life's journey will find this book entertaining and thought-provoking. The author explores not only the countries she is in but also the possibilities (and impossibilities) of her relationship with Jeff, and her own feelings on what is important in life.-Lorraine Ravis, Monmouth Schs., ME © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A 20-something's debut memoir about a whirlwind romance with an eccentric professor who took her on a three-week luggageless trip in Europe. Austin, Texas-based writer Bensen was just recovering from an emotional breakdown when she met Jeff, a divorced environmental science professor with a "larger than life" personality, on OkCupid.com. Just four weeks into their free-spirited, "definition-free dating," Jeff asked Bensen to join himwithout baggageon a European adventure. To her own surprise, the normally shy and retiring Bensen immediately consented. They started their experiment in unencumbered travelwhich involved mostly unplanned wandering by day and then couch surfing at night in the homes of people they connected with onlinein Turkey. As they drifted from Istanbul to Izmir and then into Greece, Bensen began thinking more deeply than she had bargained for about the nature of their relationship, which both had initially agreed would remain open. Jeff "was a pendulum undulating back and forth between freedom and desire," while she was still trying to find herself on the spectrum his "swings" defined. When Jeff began a harmless flirtation with a girl on a bus to Sarajevo, Bensen realized that her connection to the free-wheeling professor had grown far stronger than an uncommitted relationship would be able to accommodate. Only after confronting him with "evidence" of his infidelity did she discover that her "Kerouacian" lover was open to the idea that "a partnership could enhance freedom instead of weighing it down." Bensen's story of an unexpectedand unexpectedly meaningful and at times magicalromance that developed from a chance online encounter is charming. Yet it is also insightful for the author's observations about the conflicting desires for freedom and commitment that are the hallmarks of modern romance. An engaging memoir of travel, love, and finding oneself. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.