By The Bedside Table: Travel Edition

When I travel, I read. Actually, when I do anything, I read. But multiple 12-hour-plus flights, lots of airport downtime, solitary hours in hotels, eating alone: These circumstances lend themselves to ploughing through a lot of books and journals and magazines and newspapers. I unrepentantly travel heavy as a consequence -- better to bring a book or two too many than one too few even if you know you will buy books along the way. I am pretty much guaranteed to pay luggage overage on the way home because I have purchased a good five or six kilos of written pages, not to mention research and gifts.

In any case, here is a travel edition of my semi-regular feature, "By the Bedside Table," a compendium of mini-reviews of books I've been reading. In addition to these books I have also been staying on top of a newspaper or two a day, plus the weekly Mail & Guardian and Sunday Independent, several magazines, including the recent 20th anniversary issue of South African Sports Illustrated, which just recently entered into a formal partnership with the US version of the magazine, and thus has adopted the familiar format from the US, which is a bit disjunctive. I've also been working my way through the latest Dissent and Foreign Affairs (well, they were the latest issues when I left anyway) and a small book I purchased to try to teach myself some Zulu. On this latter front, I am not doing all that well. I have also finished a book that I am reviewing for Aethlon, the journal of the Sports Literature Association, and have started another that I am reviewing for H-South, but I don't want to annoy my editors by pre-empting myself here. In any case, away we go:

Paul Theroux, Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China: As you might imagine, I brought several books on China to supplement the reading I did before I got here. I might have even written about this book in the past, as I started it, then set it down for a while, then recommenced in the days before I came on this trip. Theroux, who had travelled through China before, and who had developed a decent grasp of the language (he is something of a linguistic savant, it seems, from all of his books that I have read), spent a year (centered around 1986) travelling by train through China. I enjoy Theroux's travel writings. He seems like a bit of a crank, and I sometimes think his breezy generalizations go too far, but he is a remarkable observer, a fine writer, and an intrepid traveller. This is not the first of his books that I have read and it surely will not be the last. His China is now two decades past, and so many of his observations seem not to hold, but there is value to older travel writing. If you want a guidebook, go to Lonely Planet or Rough Guides. If you want a travel companion, Theroux produces the kind of literature that won't let you down, even when he annoys you, as almost all travel companions do at some point along the way. A-

Will Randall, Botswana Time: Randall has written a number of travel books as well. I found this at a bookshop in Beijing and since I was bound for southern Africa and had travelled through the very area about which he writes in Botswana Time, I figured it might make for a good read. Randall is a pretty keen observer, he is an ebullient fellow, and occassionally he is a wonderfully descriptive, if a bit purple, writer. I imagine that many of you have surmised that there is a "but . . ." attached to all of this guarded praise, and you are right. In the wake of the James Frey imbroglio I wondered why people were so shocked: I've rarely read a memoir that did not make me pause and say "wait a second . . .". In some ways, it is the nature of the genre. One of my major pet peeves is nonfiction authors in non-footnoting works who recount conversations. I know it may be a trifling complaint, but this book provides a prime example that almost led me to flush the book down a plane loo. You see, Randall travelled to southern Africa to attend a friend's bachelor party and wedding. He had no intention of staying, certainly no intention of living in Botswana, a place he knew nothing about, and above all, if his chronology of events and happenstance is to be believed (and since it takes up about half of his book, it had damned well better be believable) he had no idea that he would write a book. Yet somehow he is able to recount drunken pub conversations, two-year-old discussions, and inconsequential asides in full. Furthermore, and this is most vexing of all, his characters all speak with stock national characteristics. For example, he has an Aussie travel companion who apparently says "mate" every sentence, oftentimes twice. I'd have to beat him with a wallabee carcass after about two days if he really talked like that all the time. It is as if Randall feels the need through these little tics to remind us that this is the rugged-outback-travelling-gung-ho-Aussie. This is the proper but intrepid Brit headmaster. This is the racist Afrikaner. Fortunately, this trend has gotten better as the book has progressed, but at the stage I have reached he is now ensconsed in the Botswana school that he is going to teach in and that makes up the brunt of the book, and I wade trepidatiously into his inevitable conversations with Africans. By the way, Theroux is a conversation quoter as well. And at times it is unbelievable. But there are two caveats: First, Theroux knew full well precisely what he was doing and that a book or other project would come from his travels. Thus, he took notes. Second, compared to those in Randall's book, Theroux's conversations don't noisomely remind us of cartoonish traits that supposedly embody anyone from place X. For all I know, his conversations might all be imagined as well, but Theroux is better with the sleight of hand if that is the case. Whatever the situation, writers, please, if you are producing nonfiction, there are ways to make clear what was said in conversations without imagining them or stuffing everything into quotation marks that imply a reality that does not exist. If you are reading this, Bob Woodward, it really is sage advice. B-

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go: I am only seventy-five pages in, so lots can happen. But to put it in the simplest terms possible, I have not been this affected by a book since I read Ian McEwen's Atonement, my favorite new work of fiction in the last decade. This is my first exposure to Ishiguro, who is probably most famous for The Remains of the Day, and I can already tell that more of his books will pass through my hands. His pacing is brilliant, his storytelling masterful, and his characters sympathetic and realistic (given that Randall's supposedly real characters are not realistic, this is high praise). Told from the vantage point of Kathy, a former student at a British boarding school, Never Let Me Go has a constant undertone of pending heartbreak, or perhaps simply of foreboding. Kathy drops little hints throughout her recounting of her school days to let you know that hers is not an ordinary school, theirs were never intended to be ordinary lives, and their futures are likely already spelled out for them. As I say, I have many pages to go, and books have promised but not delivered before. But unless he inserts fighting robots or something (and even then, maybe he can write his way out of it), Ishiguro earns an A+ so far. Go buy this book.

V.S. Naipaul, Guerrillas: I think I have written about this one before as well. I started reading it the last time I was in southern Africa, in December or January, and for whatever reason, it never really grabbed me. I'm sure it was my fault, not Naipaul's. In any case, I stopped reading it because I had assigned his wondrous A Bend in the River for my Modern Africa class in the spring and I knew that would cast its spell on me. But I picked Guerrillas up again for this trip, and while it still never fully took hold, one does get a reminder of why Naipaul is so exalted. He is an exquisite writer. Basically the novel follows the tumultuous political and personal circumstances faced by a couple of expats in an unnamed chaos-torn caribbean nation. One expat is a woman from London who falls for a somewhat inscrutable white former political prisoner and resistance fighter from apartheid South Africa. Things devolve quickly. There is violence. I think Naipaul's intended statement is a little fuzzy, but that may well be the point. B

Geoffrey Douglass, The Game of their Lives: The Untold Story of the World Cup's Greatest Upset: Want to annoy a Brit? Of course you do! Bring up the 1950 World Cup to them. That was the one in which a plucky band of overmatched underdogs who played for local clubs funded by funeral homes and car dealerships somehow managed to upset the mighty British soccer empire. Douglass intersperses a rehashing of the game with the far more compelling stories of the men who played for that US team. In particular his book is an homage to an America long gone (if it ever was -- there is a bit of a sepia-toned coat to his telling) in which neighborhoods, flag, and family are cherished. I wanted to read a couple of books on soccer during the World Cup, and I got this one from my friend and colleague Jaime. It is a very short book (maybe 150 pages) and a fast read, though it still lasted longer for me in this World Cup than the US team did. (Ouch.)B+

I am happy that the French beat the Portuguese. My early prediction: Italy 2, France 1 in regulation time. But I am wavering -- Zidane looks like a man possessed right now. And to all of my English readers: 1950 World Cup.