The Holy Places & A Tourist in Africa by Evelyn Waugh

I'm pretty sure the point of the Waugh Abroad omnibus, assembled and introduced by Nicholas Shakespeare in 2003, was to gather Evelyn Waugh's pre-War travel books into a single volume, rescuing them from the mostly-obscurity they'd fallen into. Waugh had suppressed them, more or less, for the last decade or so of his life, issuing instead a "good parts" collection of the less-politically-tendentious bits under the title When the Going Was Good.

Those books were Labels, Remote People, Ninety-Two Days, Waugh in Abyssinia and - in a different tone and style and not really a travel book in the same sense - Robbery Under Law. I got the Waugh Abroad omnibus soon after it was published, read Labels in 2006, and then finally got back to the rest of those books starting last year.

But that was not the end of the omnibus.

Waugh had two other short books, which came out after WW II, which were suitable for inclusion in a book called Waugh Abroad. And so they were. And now I've read them, too.

The TL;DR is that Waugh got stuffier and grumpier and stodgier and more boring as he got older, and he was not unstuffy and grumpy and stodgy to begin with. His fiction has a lot to recommend it, even towards the end of his life, but his late nonfiction is really for scholars and massive fans and exceptionally right-wing Anglo-Catholics at this point.

With that said, the last two books in that omnibus are The Holy Places and A Tourist in Africa.

The Holy Places is barely a book at all; it comprises one very short introduction and two magazine pieces. I know the bookbinders can do magnificent things, but this is barely twenty-five pages in the omnibus, so I wonder how this appeared on its own in the world.

One essay is about Saint Helena, who was the wife of one Roman Emperor and mother of another in the 4th century. More important to Waugh - so important that he barely mentions it - is that she's credited with discovering the True Cross. Waugh is a true believer, so the fact that it's pretty clear that the jumble of wood she was lumbered with is no such thing - assuming that there was originally a thing that it could be, and I might not even go that far myself - cannot impinge on his thinking. Since she is a saint, she must be a wonderful perfect person, and that's basically what his essay says. It is nice that he had such a durable religico-philosophical underpinning to his thinking, Andy said brightly, searching for something positive to end with.

The other essay is about a trip to Jerusalem in 1952. It is also suffused with the piety of a convert, and some circumlocutiously-worded stuff that I think is grumping about the existence of Israel, because clearly only Christians should be in charge of that land and the world in general. (Preferably Catholics, of course, but Anglicans are mostly all right and those Orthodox chappies have much to recommend them. Waugh is less fond of more radical Protestants.) Muslims are mostly treated as good enough fellows, for lesser races - I suppose because this was before most of the major wars and oil shocks, so they had no power. The essay is decent on architecture and some aspects of history, and it's nice that Waugh had such a resolute faith, I suppose. He's not actively dismissive of Judaism and Islam, I'll add, in an attempt to be somewhat positive.

A Tourist in Africa is somewhat longer - actual book-length, though not a long one - but sketchier and smaller and less well-formed than his pre-war travel books. He admits he hates being in England in the cold weather - and almost admits to hating being with his family at Christmas - and so fled in the winter of 1958-9 for a trip down the East coast of Africa, somewhat visiting places he'd been before the war and at intervals since.

The book is based on a diary he kept at the time, and still maintains a diary format. I suspect that, instead of turning diary notes into a fuller narration and spending some serious time thinking through what he wanted to say, this time Waugh just expanded his notes in situ, threw in some of his usual hobbyhorses, and called it a day. I don't want to say a book about traveling several thousand miles over the course of two months is lazy, but there are definitely aspects of it that show an impulse to take the easiest path.

It is substantially less interesting and detailed than his pre-war travel books. It's still Waugh prose, so there are good lines and specific thoughts throughout - the reader may not agree with those thoughts, and I expect most won't, but they're worth engaging with in one's own head to be clear on why they're wrong.

In that typical old-boy-network way, Waugh avoids giving names to most of the people he meets - it's the commissioner or agent of this particular town, or "R" - though they mostly seem to have been friendly and solicitous and happy to give this visiting dignitary dinners and house-room and the use of their cars and drivers to roam about and see the sights. And, as usual, it will be the rare modern human being who can agree with any of Waugh's political ideas - I'd be very suspicious of anyone in 2026 who could, actually.

I do recommend the Waugh Abroad omnibus - or, at least, the first four books collected in it, which are actually about travel and see Waugh giving insights about places and people he met that are long-gone now. The later bits of that omnibus, though, are for a much more select and massively smaller audience.

Waugh in Abyssinia by Evelyn Waugh

I had never thought to ask "How much of Scoop is actually true?" I had assumed that a satirical novel set during an abortive African war would be almost entirely untethered from the actual facts of the Abyssinian/Italian war of 1936.

And then I read Waugh in Abyssinia [1], the book Evelyn Waugh wrote immediately before Scoop, a non-fictional account of his time as a newspaper reporter covering that war - well, mostly the early period, when it looked like there would be a war but it hadn't quite started yet, with a late coda covering a short second visit, more than six months later, to see the Italian occupation. And I was amazed to see how many of the bizarre, goofy details of Scoop were straight out of the actual war and Waugh's own experiences.

I don't know of any edition that brings the two books together, but that could be a fascinating thing, especially if there was a scholar who could draw out the comparisons and who knew the real (messy, complicated, not necessarily explicated perfectly by Waugh) history, too.

Abyssinia is an interesting, fascinating read in any case - Waugh is particularly good on the weird contingent atmosphere in a corrupt society on the brink of a war that hasn't quite started yet - but it's particularly strong for a reader who has recently read Scoop, which, by random coincidence, I had.

On the other hand, Waugh mostly suppressed this book - and his other three pre-war travel books - post-WWII, publishing a "good parts" version of all four under the title When the Going Was Good and declaring nothing else in those books was worth reading. In the case of Abyssinia, I suspect his glowing accounts of Italian road-building and civilization-bringing in the closing chapter - with some language that shades far too close to "these fascist chappies really know how to run a society, and we should follow their lead" in retrospect - was the big issue.

But Waugh was always moderately racist, and Abyssinia under Halie Selassie was, by all accounts, deeply corrupt, badly run, and full of factions who kept just this side of actual open battle. I'm finding Waugh's travel books' strengths are largely related to how weird and complex and irrational the places he visited were - and Abyssinia, just before the war, was about as weird and complex and irrational as any real-world place ever could be.

Waugh is not writing about the larger geopolitical context here, but it was certainly in the back of his mind, and the minds of his readers, in 1936. Europe was stumbling towards war - medium-sized ones, like the Spanish Civil War, and the Big One that came a few years later - and Abyssinia could be a microcosm of that. In that context, Waugh's hopeful note at the end - that this war was quick, and the conquerors seemed, in the early stages, to be competent and doing productive things - could be seen as optimism, or self-delusion, or a dozen other things on that spectrum, depending on the reader.

Abyssinia also has a lot of excellent Waugh sentences and thoughts; I dog-eared more passages here - and it's a short book - than I usually do. Waugh was grumpy, misanthropic, and, at this point in his life, more than slightly flirting with fascist sympathies - but he was also a fine thinker and observer, sometimes because of his prejudices and sometimes in spite of them.

[1] I read it in the big '90s omnibus Waugh Abroad, which collects all seven of his travel books.

Ninety-Two Days by Evelyn Waugh

I doubt there is a travel book with as much of a throw-my-hands-up title as Evelyn Waugh's Ninety-Two Days. It's as if he was saying, "Look, I went to a place and spent some time there, and this is the book I wrote about it. Can't say it any more clearly than that."

I'm getting the sense that Waugh's travel books were often, perhaps always aimless and faintly mercenary - his older brother Alec had, I believe, already made a successful career as a travel writer, and maybe it took some time for Evelyn Waugh's novels to be seen as the magnificent things they are. [1] Whatever the reason, his travel books can be close to the pure old-fashioned "I am an Englishman, one of the world's aristocrats and a deeply cultured individual. I will go to This Strange and Foreign Land and tell you about it."

See my post, earlier this year, on Remote People, for some more detail. That trip had a slightly more obvious trigger, and yet also involved a lot of random bumming around in search of local color.

In December of 1932, Waugh went to Guiana, more or less because it was a British colony in a different part of the world, and he wanted to see how things there compared to what he'd seen in British Africa (in Remote People). He traveled up-country, by horse and foot, crossing the border into Brazil, and then came back, via a somewhat different route that also included some boats.

The point was not to visit some particular place or person, though he did pass by the famous Kaieteur falls, or to understand local government, or even any obvious anthropological interest in the people of Guiana. No, it purely seemed to be "this is a part of the world my people own; I want to take a look at it." And so he did, spending, as he noted, ninety-two days doing so.

If one were cruel, one would here note that there is no point to Ninety-Two Days. Waugh didn't plan to learn anything specific, and he succeeded at that. He wandered around what seems to be a fairly harsh, somewhat depopulated wilderness for three months, battling insects and heat and dehydration, meeting only a few particularly colorful characters (all white settlers), and spends most of his pages talking about logistics, privations, and hardships. He was supported by a variety of porters and guides and assistants, and makes some effort, in that very eugenics-era way, to make clear which of them were natives and which were black and which were various "mixed breeds," using the local terms and explaining them. But most of those people are just names, sometimes a few traits - usually that this one was lazier than Waugh would prefer for a local hired for a pittance to carry heavy burdens through a tropical wilderness - and that's it.

Of course, all this is written by Evelyn Waugh, who even this early in his career was a master of prose and deeply entertaining. It's an often-true cliché that travel books are better the more uncomfortable they were for the writer, and this trip was deeply uncomfortable for Waugh. There's a lot of insight and fine writing and thoughtful sentences throughout: the whole thing might seem vaguely pointless, but it created a deeply readable book, of the kind where the reader is happier the greater the contrast between Waugh's travails and the reader's comfort, perhaps in a nicely overstuffed chair.

Waugh's novels are more important than his travel books, and I suspect (only having read a few so far) that this is one of the least of his travel books. So I would not recommend coming to Ninety-Two Days early in one's Waugh reading. But if you've already read about a dozen Waugh books, it will definitely suit.

[1] There's a point in the book where Evelyn Waugh points out that he and Alec have divided the world between them - well, I think it's more that Alec declared particular regions (like North American and the Caribbean) as "his" and warned Evelyn off his turf. Guiana is allowed, but his journey there was out of bounds.

Remote People by Evelyn Waugh

How long can one be reading the same book? Well, I got a big omnibus Everyman's Library thing called Waugh Abroad back in the dying days of the last century, read the first book in it (Labels) in 2006, and set it nicely on a shelf to get back to the rest of the books eventually.

Somehow that book survived my 2011 flood, and ten years later I re-bought and re-read Waugh's first novel Decline and Fall, but Waugh Abroad stayed on one shelf or another for about twenty years. I've taken it down now and then - as you do to books on your unread shelves - and finally read the second book in it, Remote People, now that it's 2025.

(The omnibus has five further books. Unless I expect to live until 2120 - which would be nice, but not to be expected - I may have to pick up the pace.)

Remote People was Waugh's second travel book, and somewhat less random than Labels. It was 1930, Haile Selassie was about to be crowned Emperor of Abyssinia, and Waugh thought it might be interesting to witness that - so he got a newspaper to sponsor him as correspondent and set off to witness history. Once he got down to East Africa, he also spent some time in various British colonial outposts in the region - Aden in Arabia, Kenya and Uganda, and traveled through other administrative areas (British or other colonial powers) but didn't spend as much time in those other regions.

Waugh is a colonialist, but not horribly so for his era. I found him somewhat less racist than I expected, remembering how misanthropic he generally is - but this is still fairly early Waugh, when he hated society and his own people mostly, and not as deeply, before the loathing for everyone and everything set in after the war. He definitely is racist: he was an aristocratic British man in 1930, so he considered himself superior to not just everyone with darker skin than his own, but most of the residents of the UK and similar nations as well. And he has that arch British reserve; there's a woman he just calls "Irene" who he spends a bunch of time with in Addis Ababa, and I couldn't figure out if she was supposed to be someone the general 1930 audience would already know, or possibly a cousin or something like that, or if it was just someone he was having an affair with and he was flaunting it as much as possible given the mores of the era.

This is the kind of travel book that is largely about difficulties: getting to places through bad roads and railways and promised airplanes that never appear, heat and mosquitos and dust, food that Waugh detests, physical hardship, the laziness of natives and the random vagueness and lies of colonials, and so on. Waugh has a bunch of interesting set-pieces, though the biggest and most quirky one - Selassie's coronation - is right up front, so the rest of the book is a slight let-down, turning into the usual "this foreign country is a mess and a pain to get around" material after the wacky high comedy of the vast array of global envoys toasting this new self-proclaimed Emperor in in his half-built capital.

The best thing about Waugh is always his voice and viewpoint: he's crisp and mostly clear, but somewhat jaundiced, never expecting anything to completely work correctly or be what it promises. There is some political thought here, though not in any great depth, and fairly mild for its era. (Waugh seems to believe that Africans, or at least Ethiopians, can rule themselves just about as well as anyone else could, and his concerns about colonialism are mostly that it's expensive and not terribly useful for the colonizer.)

This is a world that's been gone for nearly a century now - swept away in the wave of nation-building that followed WWII - and I wouldn't want to claim Waugh was an unbiased or transparent guide to that world in the first place. But this is a fine book of Waugh insights and views of a weird, unusual part of the world at an interesting time, not long before everything got upended.

The Happy Isles of Oceana by Paul Theroux

There's something comforting about seeing books you fully intend to read sitting on your shelves year after year. It's an odd sort of comfort, certainly, and it only works if some of them actually do get read and newer books also land on those shelves for seasoning, but people who like to read also like to have lots of choices, for all of the moods that they think they might have someday.

I've been reading Paul Theroux's travel books for probably thirty years - I think I started with The Kingdom by the Sea or The Great Railway Bazaar in the 90s, when I was reading for a living and hadn't yet developed children to steal my time and the Internet barely existed. I've covered a lot of his books here, and every time I read another one of his travel books I have to shamefully note that, even after thirty years, I still haven't touched a single one of his novels. (I intend to, absolutely. One of these days. They're on the shelf...)

The Happy Isles of Oceania is a big book from 1992, covering a series of journeys over what seems to have been at least all of 1991 - starting in late 1990 during the build-up to the first Gulf War - in which Theroux and his collapsible kayak paddled around and through something like fifty different islands across the Pacific.

Theroux's nonfiction books usually touch only lightly on his regular life, but this one is the divorce book - his marriage is breaking up in London in the first chapter, and he notes in the last that he didn't have the usual end-of-travel-book experience with this project, since he didn't return to his old life like he did with prior books because that old life was gone. (Speaking of how he comments on things archly, there is a reference to what might be his second wife in the very last line of this book: "I kissed the woman next to me, happy to be with her. Being happy was like being home.") I've noted before that his books focus on the specific journey - the places he's writing about - and usually not about how he got there, or what he was doing in-between. This time, he might actually have been bumming around the Pacific for a whole year or longer.

It started with a book-publicity tour in New Zealand and Australia. Theroux doesn't anatomize his motives in great detail, but clearly there was a sense of "Yes, let's get as far away as possible. And let's do as much as I can while I'm on the other side of the world. I wonder how many islands I could get to?" So this one is even more episodic than many of Theroux's books - there's no thread of a railway to connect these very separated places, each of them sitting in warm waters far from sight of any other land.

It's broken into four large sections - first Meganesia, covering New Zealand and Australia; then Melanesia, with a bunch of smaller islands to the east: the Trobriands, the Solomons, Vanuatu, and Fiji. The longest section, on Polynesia, covers another big group of small islands: Tonga, the Samoas Western and American, Tahiti, the Marquesas, the Cook Islands, and Easter Island. And finally, there's a short section at the end about Hawaii, where Theroux has spent part of the year every year since.

Theroux has always been happiest and most positive about the poorest, most primitive people, and that theme comes out here, as he compares and contrasts a whole lot of different small island societies and sees how they have been affected by colonizers and missionaries and the modern world in general. (I don't want to say he's against all of that - there are small aspects here and there he is not quite as negative about - but it's a reasonable assumption.)

But every travel book is mostly about the traveler, and this one even more so than most of Theroux's work: he was going through a crisis at the time, and paddling around the biggest ocean on Earth was how he wanted to deal with that and find his way forward. He's still reticent, still protective of his privacy and that of his family - he doesn't even mention the name of the wife he's breaking up with, or give any details of their conflicts - but maybe more open emotionally, because this was such a huge transition in his life.

There's a good summing-up of his idea of travel - maybe explaining, sideways, why he does this, near the end of the book, on p.446:

A traveler has no power, no influence, no known identity. That is why a traveler needs optimism and heart, because without confidence travel is misery. Generally, the traveler is anonymous, ignorant, easy to deceive, at the mercy of the people he or she travels among. The traveler might be known as "The American" or "The Foreigner" - the palangil, the popaa, as they said here in Rapa Nui. But there was no power in that.

A traveler was conspicuous for being a stranger, and consequently was vulnerable. But, traveling, I whistled in the dark and assumed all would be well. I depended on people being civil and observing a few basic rules. Generally I felt safer in a place like Anakena than I would have in an American city - or an American campsite, for that matter (mass murderers were known to lurk around campsites). I did not expect preferential treatment. I did not care about power or respectability. That was the condition of a liberated soul, of course, but also the condition of a bum.

So he went to a lot of gorgeous, exotic, interesting places and wrote well and engagingly about the people and things he saw there. For all of us who will never have a year free to bum around the Pacific, The Happy Isles of Oceania is the next best thing.

Hanami: You, Me, & 200 Sq Ft in Japan by Julia Cejas

I've always been a fan of complication - especially if it's complicated mostly in my own head. So a book about a Spanish couple moving to live in Japan for an extended period, originally published in France and translated into English for American publication by a mostly French company headquartered in Hollywood...well, that's the kind of complication I love. I figured it probably wouldn't even affect the book itself much, and I was right.

Julia Cejas is a Spanish illustrator and maker of comics; her partner (I think they're married now; I also think they got married in large part because it would make the bureaucracy of this trip to Japan easier) Marc was an engineer and is now trying to work as a composer, primarily for video games. They realized that they had a moment in their lives - no strong ties, children or animals; work that could be done anywhere; funding from Marc's severance from the job he didn't want and Julia's recent grant - where they could actually live their dream. They could move to Japan and live there for at least months - maybe indefinitely, if things worked out.

Hanami is Cejas's first graphic novel, the story of that time, wrapped up in a little context to show their lives before and after. (Holly Atchison translated it for this US edition.) Cejas has a designer's eye: her panels are each precise and specific, often zooming in closer than the reader expects to This One Particular Thing. She uses a two-color palette, with various intensities of a red and a blue that are both fairly quiet, earthy, and grounded.

They possibly did not do as much planning as they might have - Cejas was a vegetarian and Marc had a gluten intolerance, which made finding food to eat somewhat difficult to begin with. (Not just figuring out what foods they can eat, but reading labels in a foreign language, in a foreign alphabet, and looking for all the words that could mean "meat" or "bread.")

But it was an experience, the kind of thing most of us can only dream of - and that we can live, vicariously, though a well-observed and thoughtfully executed book like this one. They did have a life in Japan for a while, doing many of the things they wanted to do - and they also found some things surprises, or did other things they didn't expect. That's a life, and the joy in reading about other people's lives is seeing those moments depicted clearly and honestly. Hanami has a lot of those joys, made up of Cejas's careful choices in picking moments to depict and her designer's eye in turning those moments into vibrant, interesting pages filled with compelling images.

A Year in the Merde by Stephen Clarke

I try not to judge a book by what its marketers say about it - we marketers are flighty, unreliable creatures who want to sell rather than to communicate clearly at all times. But I bought this book under false pretenses, and I picked it up to read (almost a decade later) also under false pretenses, so I'm doubly miffed.

Only slightly, though, since the book was pleasant, if not what I thought it would be.

The US edition of A Year in the Merde, Stephen Clarke's first (of now six) books about Paul West, is published as "Travel" and generally shelved there, with non-fiction books about their authors' humorous exploits in foreign lands. The trade dress and quotes, with comparisons to Peter Mayle, tend to imply that it is non-fiction, as do the words "nearly true" in the back-copy blurb.

It is not; it is a novel, and very obviously so. Clarke's hero is almost two decades younger than he is, doing very different work, and his episodic adventures play a bit like the brief for a humorous British TV series about a young Brit in Paris, hitting new thematic and dramatic ideas in each of its nine month-themed chapters.

Now, it's a pleasant, breezy novel, with an amusing voice - it reads to me like a cross between a minor UK sitcom and a men's version of chick-lit. Its hero is the usual light-novel protagonist, no smarter or educated or informed than he has to be in any given scene to make the comedy work, and his background is as thin as an extremely thin thing. He's supposedly been head-hunted to run a major fast-casual chain launch in France after just doing the same thing in the UK - as "head of marketing," which is not the right title, but leave that aside - but never shows the level of competence, intensity, or drive that someone accomplishing that in his late twenties would have.

But the overall plot is not the point. Merde is about "Paul West" living through fictionalized versions of events in Clarke's own life, and/or amusing situations Clarke thinks could be bigger and funnier than real life. Clarke has made a career - this was his first book, and a bestseller - out of explaining and/or making fun of French things for a mostly UK audience, and that's how to see this book: it's a kiss-slap at France, from a British point of view.

West is little more than a pleasant narrative voice here, a stand-in so any male reader (preferably British and mildly laddish) can see himself living in Paris and living through these experiences. Female readers, presumably, would not take as well to the relentless sexism and focus on women's bodies - "West" is always on the make, in his quiet British way, always assessing every last woman he meets primarily by whether he wants to fuck them.

Luckily, although he does fuck several of them, Clarke never describes the sex - or even body parts - in any detail. Instead, he keeps the book frothy and surfacy, with each chapter providing a very sitcom-esque setup, complication, and dénouement and the overall book stringing them together under a clear but often ignored larger plot that climaxes, more or less, at the very end in the traditional happy ending for West.

There are a lot of books like this. This is a sold example of the form, and Clarke gets in some good jokes. I'm not expecting to get to the five (!) further novels about Paul West, but I don't mind having read this one.

Figures in a Landscape by Paul Theroux

This is a book of miscellaneous short nonfiction; the double-barreled subtitle is "People & Places: Essays 2001-2016." And it is very miscellaneous, the collected work of more than a decade of occasional writings - introductions and magazine profiles and think pieces and "what does noted expert Theroux think about this thing" articles. For those who like variety, that's all good. For those trying to wrangle it into a single narrative and make grand statements, it's not so good.

Luckily, I'm much more of the former than the latter.

Figures in a Landscape follows Sunrise with Seamonsters and Fresh Air Fiend - presumably, if Theroux stays healthy and active, a fourth similar book will emerge around 2034, though he'd be in his early nineties at that point.

My sense - I've read in Fresh Air Fiend but not finished it, and I don't think I've found a copy of Seamonsters yet - is that this one is more literary and less travel-oriented than the previous books. The pieces here were written in Theroux's sixties and early seventies, the era when a notable writer is deluged with requests to write pieces introducing new editions, in this case of Simenon, Thoreau, Conrad, Maugham, and Bowles. He also does more rock-star journalism than I expected, with substantial profiles of Liz Taylor [1], Robin Williams and Oliver Sacks, plus a similar piece about a top Manhattan dominatrix (whom, characteristically, Theroux met on a trip in Africa).

There are some travel pieces, mostly about Africa, since this was the decade between Dark Star Safari and The Last Train to Zona Verde. There are also travel-esque pieces about places he's lived, particularly Hawaii, but also looking back to his times in Africa or commenting on the humanitarian-industrial complex (which he is not, as you might imagine, in favor of).

As always, I come to Theroux for his voice and viewpoint, which at its best feels like a smarter, better-informed and more authoritative version of the way I think myself:

Even my closest friends have seldom succeeded in exerting a malign influence on me. I am by nature pitch-averse, resistant to the selling mechanism. A persuasive sales pitch is no pitch at all, but rather something like a tremor that causes in me a distinct throb of aversion. Praise a product or a person to me, boost something or someone in my estimation, urge me to care deeply about a cause or a campaign, and my shit detector emits a high-pitched negative squeal that blorts in my head and sends me in the opposite direction.

("My Drug Tour: Searching for Ayahuasca," p.2)

I appreciate the way Theroux can be grumpy and clear-eyed simultaneously, deeply pessimistic (without ever being cynical) and yet admitting that there's always reason for optimism. The end of his introduction, about the work he has collected in this book, is characteristic:

As I write, magazines are closing, few television programs interview serious writers, and (apart from NPR) radio is mainly music and sports talk. The writing profession that I have always known is changing, old media is ossified, and what I know of new media is that it is casual, opinionated, improvisational, largely unedited, full of whoppers, often plagiarized, and poorly paid. But as I set this down, I feel I am probably wrong, confusing (as my son once wrote of old men) the end of my life with the end of civilization, and that it is fogeyish to disparage innovation, or to suggest in tones of astonishment that the barbarians are a the gate, because they have always been there, giving writers a reason to be vigilant, and unsparing, and fully employed.

(p. xvii)

I read Theroux for moments like that, for the way he can flow out at full force and immediately turn around and question his own premises. He's an unsparing writer in the best sense, in that the one he's least likely to spare is himself. Figures has several dozen examples of his work; I can't think of a better way to recommend it.

[1] Also including Michael Jackson, whom I never would have expected to see Theroux meet or write about.

The Sinner's Grand Tour by Tony Perrottet

We all want to believe we're unique, until we realize we're doing the same damn thing as a million other people a lot like us. For example, I am a middle-aged suburban man; therefore I will read a bunch of pleasant but undemanding non-fiction.

I don't have to like that to realize it's true a lot of the time. I do tend to grab books from my shelves that I think I can get through quickly and will enjoy at least moderately. [1] And then I damn them with faint praise here, which I seem to be already doing today. (Sorry! Maybe I can raise the tone of the praise before I'm done.)

That's how I came to The Sinner's Grand Tour, a 2011 travel book by Tony Perrottet that was originally a series of articles for Slate under a slightly more shocking title, in which the tourist was a "pervert." I've never read Perrottet before, and I got this book semi-randomly, when it was mostly new, during a grand buying orgy while the chain Borders was flaming out. It sat quietly on my shelf since then.

And I use the word "orgy" deliberately - maybe jokingly, but deliberately - since that's what Grand Tour is about, in a classy, historical way. Perrottet is a historian, mostly - of the "writing about it for publication" kind, I think, most of the time, rather than "talking to undergraduates" - and this is a history of... well... famous European smut and sexy stories, basically.

He travels through the UK, France, and Italy, starting with the British Museum and ending at the fabled vacation isle of Capri, looking for records of things like 18th century Hellfire Clubs and the Marquis de Sade, Casanova and randy medieval peasants, chastity belts and historical condoms and the great brothels of Paris. He's trying to visit and view as much of those things as he can, and most of the chapters are largely about the roadblocks in his way - most obviously near the end, when he wants to see some smutty frescos Raphael painted in the Vatican, which are now in a highly secure area used by the Pope to meet with visiting heads of state.

I don't know if he did this on purpose, but he was also doing this in high summer, in the company of his wife and two young sons (ages 10 and 3), which is not the usual baggage train for an assault on the Great Smut-Dens of Europe. (Wife, maybe, depending on the relationship. Kids, definitely not.) So there's also a lot of material about negotiating with the family about spending the next two weeks in a lousy rented flat somewhere boring, far away from the ways the rest of his group would want to spend their summer. The descriptive copy of the book, perhaps sensing mentioning this would ruin the mood it's trying to set, wisely keeps silent.

But it's an interesting, quirky thread to the book, making it much more than just "a tour of some smutty historical sites in Europe" - if I wanted to be expansive, it turns Grand Tour into something more like the tug-of-war between desire and necessity, between what anyone wants and what they need to do to keep their normal life going.

I mean, you're going to read Grand Tour, if you ever do, because you're interested in that smutty history. I think a lot of people are interested in smutty history, but, being someone who is interested in smutty history, I would, wouldn't I? But know, if you do, that there's more here than that.

Perrottet is a pleasant, discursive writer here - he's got a lot of good material, and makes strong use of it. I'm not going to claim this is some lost classic, but it's a lot of fun and about something of perennial interest (maybe two things: sex and travel), and I read it quickly, smiling a lot, laughing a few times, and learning things I'll probably never have a chance to work into polite conversation.

[1] The odd thing there is that the books I get the most out of are always the ones that demand I put the most into - demanding, thorny books, more often fiction but not always. So there's a weird Benthamesque weighing of inputs and outputs going on the back of my head, I think: is this book worth it?

No Touch Monkey! by Ayun Halliday

I'd forgotten that I'd ever read anything by Ayun Halliday before. No Touch Monkey! was on my shelf because I bought it back in 2013 soon after reading Halliday's YA graphic novel Peanut (drawn by Paul Hoppe) but that long on the shelf made me forget Peanut entirely while reading it.

And, frankly, I don't think the two projects have a lot in common. My sense, from some quick desultory Googling, is that Halliday's career has been mostly closer to No Touch Monkey! than Peanut: she's written a number of prose books, all more-or-less nonfictional and about aspects of her own life, and that one graphic novel for someone else to draw. (She's also a - I think former - long-time member of an experimental theatre troupe and the writer/artist/publisher of an even longer-running zine [1] called The East Village Inky, which seems to be roughly equally about the exploits of her now-early-twenties kids and various interesting stuff in boho NYC.)

Anyway, No Touch Monkey! was Halliday's second book, from 2003. It was ten years old when I bought it ten years ago, and it tells stories going back fifteen or more years before that, so I had to recalibrate a bit when I picked up a book that I thought had just been on my shelf for a short time and suddenly I was back in the dark days of the late '80s. It tells travel stories in fourteen basically-chronological chapters, covering the author's backpacking years.

I've tended mostly to read travel books by travel writers, but Halliday has, as far as I can tell, never been paid to go somewhere - she just went places she wanted to, and then (many years later) assembled the best moments from a whole lot of trips on the cheap into this book. Halliday went from just post-college (and poor) to mid-twenties (and still poor) to early-thirties new motherhood (but still traveling on the cheap) - this is all very much the backpacker ethos, all Lonely Planet and early Rick Steeves, focused on spending as much time in interesting places as authentically as possible, on very little money by doing things like taking trains overnight on a rail pass to avoid paying for a hostel.

I've never traveled like that - I was too poor to get out of the country, and had too many commitments to spend months on the road, when I was young and spry enough that it was physically plausible. And I've never been all that enthralled with nostalgie de la boue to begin with. But other people's stories of dysentery and monkey attacks and dislocated knees are always much more fun than living through them yourselves, and Halliday is a pleasant, zippy writer with a bunch of stories to tell.

So this is a bit outdated - the trips range from roughly 1987 to 2001 - and very much a specific kind of travel, and not at all a guide of how you might travel like this. But the stories are fun, and never underestimate the pleasure involved in having someone else have a trying time in a funny way.

[1] Remember zines? Even typing the word makes me feel old, but Halliday is apparently still trucking along quarterly on paper as if it were still the first summer of Lilith Fair.

On the Plain of Snakes by Paul Theroux

Theroux's previous travel book, 2015's Deep South, saw him shift his mode of operations from trains to his own car and from foreign lands to his own USA, to reinvigorate his travel writing in his seventh decade and after the near-disaster of his last Africa book, The Last Train to Zona Verde.

2019's On the Plain of Snakes mixed up those two changes, with Theroux still using his own car, but heading even further south to once again get out of America and into foreign countries. This time, it was Mexico, where he'd spent some time during The Old Patagonian Express trip several decades earlier. But this time was a more specific trip - not the old "take the railroads as far as they go" trips of his younger years, but a deeper exploration of the whole land, starting with the border.

Plain of Snakes covers roughly a year of travel, 2017-2018, and Theroux presents it as continuous. There do seem to be some lacuna in his time, though, so I suspect his old "lives half the year on Cape Cod and half in Hawaii" popped up, with trips presumably to Hawaii, particularly for the last month or two of 2017. But it's pretty clear he drove his car south to the border, then the whole length of the border, and then on a number of trips deeper and deeper into Mexico, following the initial border section with a long stay in Mexico City and more journeys further south to Oaxaca and Juchitan, devastated by the recent Puebla earthquake. And then he drove that car back - the car made the trip the whole way, and never went anywhere else in the middle, even as Theroux made side trips by bus and plane and (perhaps, as I'm guessing) returned to the States here and there for other things.

Plain of Snakes is a book about ordinary life in the shadow of larger threats, mostly of violence: from the bizarre kabuki of the border, where everything real is entirely different from the rhetoric (this was 2017, remember: high season for "they're not sending their best")  to the lurking threat of the narco gangs everywhere in the country and their corrupt enablers in the police and military. Theroux came across a few mildly corrupt officials and cops - he doesn't make the point strongly, but I get the impression it was nothing unusual for someone who had traveled as widely as he has, just a few bribes here and there.

The book starts with that border, and the relationship with the USA permeates the book: how could it not, written by an American sojourning in Mexico? Theroux talks with dozens of people who lived and worked for a while in the USA - all of them, I think, illegally, probably all of them doing jobs locals wouldn't take, at wages equally illegal - and investigates how first NAFTA and then 9/11 completely transformed the border from a pleasant though mostly porous place where people travelled both directions and had strong connections into a militarized zone devoted only to commerce and where money flowed only to the criminals and the big businesses.

The first thing to know is that, though gringos seldom cross to any of the border cities and towns, tens of thousands of Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals cross every day, in both directions. They have visas and passports, or an ID that allows them access. Renting or buying a house on the US side is prohibitive for many, so a whole cross-border culture has developed in which American citizens of Mexican descent live in a house or an apartment - or a simple shack - in a Mexican border city, such as Juarez or Nuevo Laredo, and commute to work in El Paso or Laredo.

It is a fairly simple matter to walk to Mexico at any point, but there is always a crush of people - all of them with documents - waiting to enter the US to work, go to school, or shop. As the man told me in Tijuana, clothes and electronics are much cheaper in the US. A busy, bilingual Walmart can be found on the American side of most border crossings.

(p.34)

The Mexican side is also crowded, in those same border cities, with factories that sprung up after NAFTA, making goods mostly for the US market, mostly by people making a few dollars a day. Theroux is describing what he sees rather than critiquing capitalism, but the reader can very easily fill in the gaps.

The narco threat is more amorphous, the background of all life in Mexico, everywhere in that large, complex nation. The gangs fight with each other, sometimes fight with government forces - or seem to do so, the cynical might say - and massacre civilians in what seems a random fashion, a bus-load here, a group of protestors there.

Because in Mexico Mundo, life on the plain of snakes was so uncertain, every venture out of the security of the home could become dramatic and precarious. One of the more bizarre cruelties of the country, found in both its political and criminal culture - and of course the two often overlap - were sudden disappearances. As I found out from the humanitarian organization Caminos Oaxaca: Acompanamiento a Migrantes, hundreds of migrants disappeared en route to the border; the feistier journalists disappeared; the forty-three students from Ayotzinapa disappeared; virtually every day people went missing in Mexico, kidnapped, abducted, lifted, deleted, never to be heard from again.

(p.385) 

This is an oddly happy, positive book, for all of the upheavals and danger in the background: the border, the gangs, the earthquake that forms the background of much of the last hundred pages, even the Zapatista rebels Theroux spends time with near the very end. Mexico's people are strong and resilient, with a rich, deep vibrant culture, and Theroux presents them as rejuvenating him at a time in his life (mid-seventies, if I'm counting correctly) when he was feeling old and worn-out and useless. It is deep and rich and full of  interesting details, yet another masterful book of travel by a man who has been doing this well for forty years. I'm thrilled to see he's still going; if Paul Theroux can still head off to strange places and come out of them whole and with another thoughtful book, there is hope for all of us.

I, Rene Tardi, Prisoner of War in Stalag IIB, Vol. 2: My Return Home by "Tardi"

This is, obviously, a sequel. The first volume of Rene Tardi's WWII war memoirs, as interpreted, reimagined, and made into a graphic novel by his son Jacques, was published in French in 2012 and English in 2018. That one covered the bulk of the war: how Rene got into it, his capture and transfer far to the east to Stalag IIB, and the life of the camp through the end of 1944. (See my post on that book for more.)

My Return Home picks up the story from there: the first page has the POWs on the march, having already been herded out of the stalag by their posten (guards). It's late January in Northern Poland -- well, what is now Northern Poland; it was conquered Nazi territory then, part of the crumbling dreams of the greater Reich. Jacques begins deeply in medias res, giving no explanations for potential new readers. We don't even get a date for nearly a dozen pages, and if we've forgotten that Jacques is drawing his younger self (circa 1958 or so; he was born in 1946 and seems to be a tween here) as an interlocutor and interpreter for Rene's sketchy notebook account, there will be no relief to our confusion. (That's the two of them on the cover: Rene from 1945 and Jacques from about 1958. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, frankly, but it works as a framing device.)

So: this is the story of a long forced march, of hundreds of French POWs (and some others, I think -- Jacques and/or Rene are not particularly clear on the makeup of the POW group), through Poland and northern Germany, for reasons that were not clear to Rene on the ground in 1945 and are no clearer to us now. The posten apparently thought they would be killed by the advancing Russian armies -- which is probably entirely true -- and perhaps were still dutiful or suspicious enough not to leave hundreds of former combatants, even ones broken down by four years of camp life, in their rear as they fled West. (It probably made sense to them at the time. Some of them likely even made it out to safety and survived the end of the war.)

Rene kept a skeletal diary of the march -- names of towns and kilometers on the road for each day, and a few other notes on river crossings and armies seen in the distance and similar events. That diary survived for Jacques to turn it into this book, but the reader has to be amazed at how much work it took for Jacques to go from those quick notes, which we can see on the endpapers, to three wide panels per page, full of landscape and men trudging through that landscape, with events and dialogue and endless marching.

In the end, though, My Return Home is more than a bit of a slog itself. We know Rene made it home, and the march is neither particularly interesting (another night in a random field! backtracking yet again to cross the same river!) nor horrifying (there are some moments, but it looks like nearly all of the POWs survived and only a few of them got up to anything that could be called seriour war crimes [1]). It's another war story, and war is hell: we know that already. My Return Home is about a hundred and fifty pages of men marching through dull terrain under duress: that's it.

Jacques' writing, or perhaps the translation by Jenna Allen, is a bit stilted in spots. Since Jacques's afterword is stilted, and fond of random exclamation points in the middle of the sentence the same ways, I'm inclined to pin it on him. His art is strong as usual, and his slogging POWs remind me of Mauldin's soldiers -- maybe just due to the era and my American biases.

There is a third volume, which was just published in the US, covering (I think) Rene's return to Germany as a civilian, years later. But, frankly, it's looking like there only needed to be one I, Rene Tardi, Prisoner of War in Stalag IIB, and that's the one when he actually was a prisoner of war in Stalag IIB.

[1] Rene did, as part of revenge against the remaining posten near the end of the march. It's mildly shocking in the story, but not surprising.

Smile When You're Lying by Chuck Thompson

It's easy to pretend to be more radical, more transgressive than everyone else: you just have to say that you are. Living up to it is another thing.

Chuck Thompson's 2007 memoir/collection of travel essays Smile When You're Lying positions him as the one truth-speaker among travel writers. The one who doesn't use superlatives like candy (except when he does, later in the book, describing the people of each place he likes as the best in the world at something he particularly respects). The one who will tell the truth about why people go to places like Thailand (for sex; he never mentions this again after bringing it up in his fiery intro and is remarkably quiet about drugs as well). The one who is fearless and unafraid to burn bridges (except for the very long list of editors he effusively thanks at the end).

That all would be fine: we expect a little showmanship from our writers, particularly those (like travel writers) who are always aiming for the new and the hot.

But I unfortunately read this book, which presents itself as an expose about how travel magazines are a big profitable business that stifle contrarian views in favor of relentless puffery [1], more than a decade after Thompson wrote it. The magazine market of 2019 is not what it was in 2006 when Thompson wrote this book -- hell, no business in the world is what it was in 2006, purely because of 2006, but magazines, and print periodicals in general, were already on a downward trend due to the rise of the Internet and a massive advertising transition there.

Thompson shows no sign of seeing that his entire world was about to change: he presents a monolithic, massively profitable entity when we all know it was nothing of the sort. (And I think that transition hit Thompson as well: he seems to have spent much of the last decade transitioning into TV/Internet himself, as executive producer of CNN Travel and editorial director of CNNGo.com.)

So he wasn't prescient: how many of us were?

Smile When You're Lying is still fun, a loose assemblage of stories vaguely organized around travel and Thompson's life, with no actual structure (geographical, historical, thematic) to be discerned. It is divided into three sections by airline seat -- Aisle, Middle, and Window -- but my high-powered instruments were not able to detect the actual differences between them.

Thompson, as one might guess once one realizes he has spent most of his career as a reasonably connected travel editor/producer himself, is not actually as radical in practice as he is in rhetoric. (Again: how many of us are?) Smile When You're Lying has a reasonable hook, which Thompson uses to hang some loosely-related material, and he's pretty entertaining along the way. I suspect that if he'd instead written a more traditional "how I grew up and got out" memoir -- he's from Juneau, and had an interesting background from the glimpses he gives here -- it would have been more coherent and focused, but it probably also would have been more personal, and Thompson would rather be bold than personal.

Instead, each of the eleven chapters is supposedly about something but ends up pulling together a bunch of stories from a particular time and place in his life -- again, generally related to his travel-writing career, but taking that very broadly to start with an ill-fated cross-country car trip when he was about eighteen and including a couple of years spent teaching English in rural Japan. It does start out more fire-breathing than it ends, with digs at various periodicals and book lines (that this reader started to think wouldn't hire him, or where he has personal conflicts with major editors), before it settles down into more stories about stuff he did, or, more accurately, stuff that happened while he was there to see it. (He's a writer: they're much more likely to hang back and observe.)

It's entertaining and rabble-rousing, and contains possibly a few facts that might be useful to the reader later on. Just don't spent any time buying into his introductory screed: it doesn't go anywhere, in this book or in real life.


[1] It's not actually that: it's a loose baggy collection of stories from Thompson's life, most of which happened during his career as a travel writer and all of which happened somewhere other than his house. Thus it is a travel book.

Hav by Jan Morris

This book is an allegory, unless it isn't. Or maybe it's two allegories, of different things, written twenty years apart.

What is it an allegory of (if it is at all)? Well, author Jan Morris doesn't say, or even hint. And the introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin denies any whiff of allegory.

So: do you believe the author, even if she's clearly being puckish and more than a little vague? Or a third party with her own opinions and disdain for formal allegory?

Hav presents itself as two different travel narratives. The original Last Letters from Hav is supposedly the letters Morris wrote from this small Eastern Mediterranean principality to some publication, collected into a book soon afterward in 1985. Twenty years later, she returned to a radically changed Hav -- the beginning of that radical change was what made her leave in '85 -- for a week and wrote Hav of the Myrmidons, which first appeared in this omnibus edition. They're both quite short: the whole book is barely three hundred pages.

That's what it says it is. Every allegory has two levels: what it says and what it means.

Hav doesn't actually exist. Morris never quite makes clear where it would be, this small peninsula guarded by a sharp rocky escarpment. It points south, possibly from somewhere in Turkey -- less likely Greece (since then it would point into the Aegean, and it would be harder to aim straight south) or Syria and almost impossibly somewhere on the Black Sea or the Sea of Marmara. But, since it's not real anyway, it can sort-of be in all of those places and none of them. It can have Russian and "Arab" and Greek influences and history -- and even a random Chinese community, because Morris wanted it to.

Hav is the kind of place a travel writer makes up out of the pieces of all of the other places she visited. Maybe not the places she liked best, because Morris isn't that kind of a writer, but not the places she hated most, either. Maybe the places that most intrigued her, the places that were the oddest, quirkiest, most specific. Maybe the places that she wanted to twist a bit to one side or the other, that she wanted to fiddle with in her mind to make them something slightly different. Maybe any or all or none of those things.

(Morris is still alive, and apparently still vital, at the age of 92. Anyone who cares really deeply could try to ask her. I doubt there would be a straight answer, though.)

And the other side of the allegory? What does Hav mean?

Last Letters presents it as one of those quirky, quaint small countries beloved in travel writing -- full of officious bureaucracy and deep secrets and surprising connections to all of the things Morris likes best, a history that is deep and rich and more important than the reader expects. There are hidden currents under the placid surface, of course -- and the ending, in which Morris flees Hav ahead of a mysterious Intervention (presumably by some stronger power, Turkey or the USSR or some less likely nation), makes it clear that those hidden currents were stronger and deeper than Morris-the-character realized.

(Morris is, of course, at least two people in Hav: the writer who made it all up, and the traveler who experiences it.)

Myrmidons drops an older Morris-the-character a more modern, sharper-edged society: I was reminded a bit of late-period Ballard in the emphasis on shiny consumer surfaces, though Morris's manner and affect is miles from the chill of Ballard, and Morris-the-character doesn't fit into the new Hav the way a Ballard protagonist would. This piece feels closer to allegory to me -- or perhaps I'm just closer to that world to begin with, so I can see more of the outlines of Morris's means there.

These two narratives are at least sly commentaries on what travel writers do, and how observation changes what is observed, even if they're not formal allegories. Perhaps that is the allegory, actually: Hav is the Platonic Ideal of the Travel Destination, and Morris-the-character is the equivalent Observer, precipitating out revolution or unrest by her mere presence. And the difference in the two allegories would then be the differences in expectations between 1985 and 2006 -- how the world has changed in that time, and what "we" want out of our travel experiences in those two moments.

What I like about travel narratives, I realized while reading Hav, are the surprises, the interaction of an observer with a real world that does not fit preconceptions and that refuses to follow rules (allegorical or otherwise). Hav is an interesting, unique book -- and I am, as always, fond of fake non-fiction for a lot of reasons -- but the fakeness of the travel narrative was like a constant itch in the back of my skull while reading it: this was exactly the opposite of what I wanted from a book like this.

I think I'm a pretty quirky reader, though. So I try to recommend, or dis-recommend, as clearly as I can, since my guess is that most people are not looking for anything like what I am in a book. Hav is a book in a tiny genre: the fake travel narrative. It doesn't pretend to tell a larger story; it has nothing of the novel about it. It is written entirely as if Hav were a real place, and things much like those that happened in other real places happen in Hav. It's not funny: it is not a joke. Morris is serious, even if she's not going to tell us exactly what her allegories mean.

If it's an allegory at all. Which it may not be.

Book-A-Day 2018 #307: One for the Road by Tony Horwitz

Other people's travels are soothing to read about, no matter what they went through. We can read their books in serenity, sitting  somewhere comfortable, and enjoy their descriptions of hardship and danger while facing exactly none of it.

(That's why we read travel books, right? It's not just me?)

Tony Horwitz, later the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Confederates in the Attic and other books that I've actually read, was a young journalist, newly married and newly arrived in a foreign country in the mid-80s. He'd done what he describes as a lot of hitchiking in his teens, and had the itch to try it again on the other side of the world.

So he set off, in what seems like the antipodean summer of early 1986, to finger [1] his way around the Outback and see what kind of reporting he could get out of it. His first book, One for the Road, emerged from that trip.

Thirty years later I read that book. Now, the world is big and full of people, and old books move around it like a vast endless wave. So it's probably not true that I'm the only person who read this particular book this year -- Horwitz was later a bestseller, and this was published by Vintage, which means there's probably a lot of One for the Road out there and a lot of people happy to read more Horwitz. But I'd like to think it's so; it's amusing to think of ourselves as more singular than we really are.

He was living in Sydney, so of course that's where he set out from, with originally a vague plan to head straight across the country, through the middle of the Outback. But it turns out hardly anyone goes that way, and there isn't a string of towns to hitch through, so instead he went up, around, and then back south towards Alice Springs.

Eventually, he made it back to the south coast, west of Adelaide, around the south and west coast through Perth, and all the way up to Darwin, where he had a scheduled flight back to Sydney and his regular newspaper job. But, as is more common with travel books than they sometimes let on, he didn't do all that in one go. Horwitz's hiatus came about because of a wreck, so he wrote it into the book -- whether there would have been a pause anyway is unanswerable.

You see a very particular side of a country while hitchhiking, and that's what Horwitz covers -- even in the late '80s, when the tide of hitching had miles yet to go out, the people who would stop for a single man with his finger out are mostly poorer, mostly grumpier, mostly more battered by life. But that's what makes for interesting travel books anyway, so I don't think Horwitz minded at the time, and his readers won't mind now.

Horwitz, unsurprisingly, decides he's too old for this shit towards the end of the book. (I wonder if he secretly knew it all along, but figured the idea was too good to give up on -- and he did get his first book out of it.) We all should be able to know when we're too old for this shit: it's an important lesson.

I still haven't read Horwitz's most famous book, and I'm starting to think I'm unconsciously avoiding it. But if we can't be idiosyncratic in our reading, where can we be idiosyncratic? This is a fun jaunt through an Australia that I'm pretty sure is quite different now, with a young but insightful American as our guide. So why not?


[1] Australian hitchhiking uses the index finger of the left hand rather than the thumb of the right. So, presumably, they do not "thumb" their way around when hitching.

Book-A-Day 2018 #178: On the Camino by Jason

Why does someone go on a pilgrimage in modern Europe? The obvious reason would be religion, but that's rarely the central purpose these days. It's not part of general cultural life for Christians -- not the way the hajj still is for Muslims -- and many of the people who make those journeys aren't particularly Christian to begin with.

But pilgrimages continue. People find a reason to walk, and find something for themselves at the end of the walk. The Norwegian cartoonist who works as "Jason" trekked the 500-mile Camino de Santiago in northern Spain in 2015, soon after his fiftieth birthday. And he made a book out of it, On the Camino. He doesn't say why he went; it's not clear he knows, or has a single "why." And he doesn't tell us what he found out, for the same reason.

What he does is tell us the story of the trip, placing us in his head and shoes for that month-long walk, and to let us feel what it was like to be Jason on the Camino. (Well, his real name is John, and that's what he tells people his name is in the book. But you know what I mean.)

It's all told in a very Jason way: matter-of-fact, almost affectless, with animal-headed characters moving through a world depicted fairly simply. He works entirely in black-and-white for this book as well. Jason himself is at the center of the trip, obviously, and is the viewpoint the entire time. This is what he saw and did in thirty-three days of walking, told like a Jason graphic novel. He even gets in his abrupt shifts of points of reference, as when he sees a giant slug on the trial -- first drawing it "giant" and then it's actual size.

The story is inherently different from Jason's fictional works: there's no twists to the plot, obviously, and he can't throw in genre elements for complications or interest. On the other hand, how do we know this is all true? We think it is because Jason tells us so, and because it has the everydayness and banality of real life -- but that's justification rather than proof. That's the case for any non-fiction story, of course: how can we believe the teller and the tale? If there's no reason not to tell the truth, we assume it is the truth -- we're all lazy, both as storytellers and listeners.

Jason is an introvert, most comfortable alone -- as you would expect from someone who spends his life sitting in a room to think up stories and draw them -- and much of On the Camino, starting from the very first page, is his struggle to be more open, to come out of his shell and engage with the other pilgrims and the locals. He has no gigantic epiphanies -- we wouldn't expect them from Jason, anyway. His hopes aren't dashed, either, which would be more in keeping with his fiction.

Instead, he walks. He meets some people, and runs into some of them repeatedly. He has some good conversations and interesting thoughts while walking alone. He also has blisters and bedbugs and food that doesn't agree with him. Every life and journey has good and bad, yes? It's a cliche even to mention it.

And he tells that story, in his four-panel grid, with his stone-faced characters with animal heads -- this is a Jason book, and it looks like one. He will not tell you what to think of it in the end; he's never told you what to think of any of his stories. But you can take the trip with him. I think it's worth the time.

(Note: this book does not credit a translator. And, in the story, "John" speaks English much of the time. So my guess is that Jason translated it himself, or wrote a text for this edition in English. I think I've found the original French edition, Un norvégien vers Compostelle, published only four months before the US edition.)

Book-A-Day 2018 #124: In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Anyone's experience of a new place is going to be disjointed -- without cultural and personal context, many things won't be clear at all. At worst, it may all feel like entirely separated moments, removed from everything else.

Travel books don't usually try to reproduce that feeling: they embed those moments of strangeness in an overall narrative, controlling them through the writer's personality and viewpoint, to impose a single view of the new land. That view may be positive or negative, but it's the point of the travel book.

Bruce Chatwin doesn't play that way. In Patagonia is made up of nearly a hundred mostly very short chapters -- from a few paragraphs to three/four pages. Sometimes they lead one into the next, thematically or sequentially, but not all that often. They are all things that happened to him in Patagonia, or related to his wanting to travel to Patagonia, or showing his family history there. But this is not a single narrative, and Chatwin will not tell you how to feel about these places that he visited in the mid-1970s.

It's a fascinating structure, and a liberating one. We don't know how Chatwin traveled around Argentina and Chile -- he's not always clear on which country he's in, though it seems to be primarily Argentina. We don't know how he got there, how long he spent in each place, where he stayed much of the time. All of the organizing structure of the standard travel book -- taking the 5:15 from here to there, chatting with random colorful strangers on the way, the "arriving in a new town" scene -- is missing here. All Chatwin includes, all he focuses on, are the moments where he learns something, witnesses something, experiences something. All the moments when he feels that he is "In Patagonia."

Is it all true? Well, it's all what Chatwin experienced and thought on that mid-70s trip, the stories he heard as he wrote them down, and what he wanted to remember. So it's about as true as anything else -- one man's experience of a strange place where he had an intimate historical family connection, full of family legends and retold peasant tales and gossip and scurrilous rumors and explorations of the historical Butch and Sundance and stories of exploits on the unforgiving seas.

It's a unique travel book. All books of travel are as much about the traveler as the place, but Chatwin writes right at that intersection, where he reacts to Patagonia and how it reflects back his family stories to him. Every place is strange, and In Patagonia makes that real like no other book I've read.

Book-A-Day 2018 #83: You & A Bike & A Road by Eleanor Davis

What is this book about?

Well, the title is You & A Bike & A Road. It's by Eleanor Davis. It was published by Koyama Press in May 2017.

The outside of the book will tell you no more. Opening it doesn't give much more information -- some legalese on the copyright page, and more of the pretty cover scenery on the French flaps.

The only way to know what You & A Bike & A Road is about is to read it. But it's a comic, so reading it is easy. You might as well just jump in and see what you find.

The same spirit drove Davis to try to bike from her parents' home in Tucson, Arizona to her home in Atlanta, Georgia. Her father had just built her a bike, so why not ride it back? Why not draw a couple of pages each day along the way, and see what comes of it?

So this is a travelogue, of what Davis hoped would be a month or two of biking across the southwest and southeast US, starting March 16, 2016. Davis works in what looks like soft pencils, and gives us an impressionistic view of days on the road -- knee pain, headwinds, flowers, friendly fellow bikers, and the omnipresent Border Patrol. It was over two thousand miles, but she sets off in good spirits: alone but happy to see the world and push against it for a while.

Any travel book is as much about its creator as the territory covered, and You & A Bike & A Road is no exception. Davis was riding alone, camping alone, spending most of her days alone with her thoughts and her bike beneath her. That'll lead to a lot of introspection, a lot of thinking.

You & A Bike & A Road is a lovely, thoughtful book, as much a meditation on life and physical activity as anything else. Davis makes great pictures and thinks serious thoughts -- and is open enough to meet people and learn about the landscapes she travels through. This book is as wide and open as the desert and as welcoming as the people you meet. If you see it, pick it up, even if you're not sure what it is.

Book-A-Day 2018 #5: The Tao of Travel by Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux is the modern master of travel writing, at least as far as selling books in the US goes. (And I spent enough years in the book-publishing industry to take "getting people to spend money on books they like" as a serious metric.) But the problem with travel books, at least as Theroux does them, is that they take a long time: up to a year for the travel itself, plus time to write and publish afterward. For an industry that would really like to publish a book by Author X at the same time each year to the same or increasing sales, it can be a frustrating category.

But there are ways to extend a travel writer's brand. Eminent authors often, after a career of suitable length, turn to editing or compiling similar works, or to combining their old works into a mix-and-match, and often are successful in retaining a sizable fraction of their usual audiences for these secondary works. In the best cases, those assemblages can even be more productive than original works, as they introduce the main author's (presumably large) audience to other books they might like.

I don't know the behind-the-scenes wrangling that went into The Tao of Travel, Paul Theroux's 2011 compilation of his favorite bits from other travel writers. But I suspect something like the scenario I sketched above had something to do with it. (Although I look slightly askance at the fact that Theroux gets credited as author rather than editor, when most of the words here are by other hands.)

This is not a book by Paul Theroux; there are words in here that he wrote, but those words serve to introduce and contextualize excerpts from other people's books about travel. The point here is to see what other people have written about the places they visited, and only secondarily what Theroux can tell us about those places and those writers -- though, in some cases, contextualizing is very important. For one blatant example, take Theroux's chapter about travelers who pretended they were alone when they actually had anything from a wife up to a full pack train accompanying them and taking care of the drudgery.

Theroux pulls out short chapters of quotes from some of his favorite writers in the genre -- Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Sir Francis Galton, Robert Louis Stevenson, Freya Stark, Claude Levi-Strauss, Evelyn Waugh, and Paul Bowles -- and intersperses those chapters among longer ones, each devoted to one aspect of travel writing. So he has chapters on what travelers brought with them, fear of travel, writers who spent inordinately long or short times abroad, various forms of travel (walking, trains), blissful journeys, horrible journeys, the books that crystallize a particular place, strange food, outrageous lies, and the inevitable chapter on writers who never went anywhere at all.

Each of those chapters has a Theroux intro, often giving us in miniature what the original authors will provide moments later, and then a series of quotes from other writers, sometimes as part of a general narrative with connecting tissue by Theroux and sometimes just a series of extended individual quotes. Everything is well-chosen and on topic, and Theroux is clearly very well-read.

So this is the kind of book that can send its reader scurrying to other books -- or, if they are a different kind of reader, scurrying to their travel agents to make plans to visit some of these places for themselves. Either way, it's successful in its aims, and what more can you ask?