by Nancy Pearl
And then there’s Easter Island, which was Thor Heyerdahl’s ultimate goal on his great trip by raft from Peru. He made the journey in order to prove that there could be a connection between peoples from Polynesia and South America. He tells the story of the voyage in Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft.
But many of the islands are a bit less familiar to most of us, so take a look at these:
J. Maarten Troost’s Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu is an anecdotal (and frequently hilarious) account of the year he spent with his wife, Sylvia, living on the South Pacific islands of his book’s title. I found Troost to be delightful company. He’s eminently curious, open to new experiences without being foolhardy (most of the time, anyway), and entirely without pretension. Whenever I read the sort of armchair travel book in which first-world authors spend time in third-world locales, I am always on the lookout for any signs of looking down on, or making fun of, the native populations. Troost is entirely respectful (even when he’s describing how corrupt the government is), saving his harshest criticisms for his own fears, inadequacies, and dumb decisions—all of which just made him seem more human to me.Whether it’s traversing (or trying to) the mud-slick, unpaved roads of the islands; coping with landslides; encountering active volcanoes; discovering giant centipedes seemingly bent on household domination; musing on the pros and cons of cannibalism (while visiting a village in which the last incidence of this practice took place within living memory); surviving Cyclone Paula; or trying out kava, Vanuatu’s intoxicating drink of choice, Troost’s writing is lively and entertaining.When I finished this book I was sorely tempted to spend my next vacation in Vanuatu and Fiji, but reason belatedly kicked in and I realized that I would probably need to bring Troost himself along as well in order to guarantee myself a good time.
Troost is also the author of Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation and The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific. What I’ve discovered in talking to fans of Troost is that their favorite book of his tends to be the first one they read, a fact that’s certainly true for me—my first was Getting Stoned with Savages, and it remains my favorite.
Arthur Grimble was a British diplomat who was made Resident Commissioner of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony in 1926. His two books, We Chose the Islands: A Six-Year Adventure in the Gilberts and Return to the Islands, are about his family’s experiences on a set of islands that straddle the equator. Let me just note, I felt more than a little sorry for his wife, despite the fact that Mr. Grimble seemed like a nice enough chap—you had to have a certain quality to be the wife of someone in the British diplomatic service during the heyday of the Empire. Incidentally, you won’t find the Gilbert Islands on a recent map—they’re now known as the Republic of Kiribati.
The components of Nicholas Drayson’s Confessing a Murder include a former (fictional) classmate of Charles Darwin, a mysterious scarab, and a marooned man: together they’re perfect ingredients for a novel to enjoy, and Drayson does it up beautifully.
And these as well:Alexander Frater’s Tales from the Torrid Zone: Travels in the Deep Tropics
James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, set on the New Hebrides during World War II, is my favorite of all the books he ever wrote; one of the stories in it was the inspiration for Until They Sail, one of my best-loved movies.
Charles Montgomery’s The Shark God: Encounters with Ghosts and Ancestors in the South Pacific
Ronald Wright’s Henderson’s Spear is one of those novels that never got the acclaim it deserved when it was originally published, so read it now!
OHIOANA
Since I spent so much time in 2008 working as a consultant for the Cuyahoga County Public Library, I now consider myself an honorary Ohioan. This, I hasten to tell you, is despite the fact that I graduated from the University of Michigan, a sworn enemy to Ohio State. Oh, those yearly football games! I would actually watch them without a book in hand.
As I think about the books I’ve read that are set in Ohio, or are written by Ohio authors, these come to mind:
Ruth McKenney’s Industrial Valley is based around the first wide-scale sit-down strike in labor history—at three tire plants in Akron in the early 1930s. McKenney’s depictions of class conflicts at a time when the country was just coming out of the Great Depression are heartfelt and moving. She clearly had an agenda while writing this novel, but I felt that her novel transcended its message. It’s a bit ironic that McKenney is probably best known not for this novel, or for Jake Home (the story of a labor organizer), but rather for My Sister Eileen, a collection of autobiographical stories, originally published in The New Yorker, about the adventures of two sisters who move from Ohio to Greenwich Village.
All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House by David Giffels is the story of how a columnist for the Akron Beacon Journal (and former writer for Beavis and Butt-Head) and his wife restored an old, more-than-a-little-decrepit house that was once owned by a rubber baron. This is more than a do-it-yourself memoir; rather, it’s a paean to his hometown.
Crooked River Burning takes place against the backdrop of Cleveland’s descent from a major industrial city in the 1940s to a symbol of urban failure by the last decades of the twentieth century. Mark Winegardner interweaves the story of an on-again, off-again years-long relationship between an upper-class girl and her lower-class boyfriend with chapters about major Cleveland movers and shakers, from disc jockey Alan Freed to Carl Stokes, the city’s first black mayor.
The Broom of the System was David Foster Wallace’s first novel. It’s set in a recognizable but clearly not real Cleveland and is marked by Wallace’s inventive use of plot, characters, and language. (One of its major characters is a cockatiel named Vlad the Impaler.)
When I was reading Don Robertson’s The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread, I found myself alternating between laughter and tears, and I knew I would never forget the young hero, nine-year-old Morris Bird III (whom some classmates unkindly call Morris Bird the Turd). One autumn day in 1944 he walks across Cleveland to visit his best friend, Stanley Chaloupka. He sets off with an alarm clock, a jar of Peter Pan peanut butter, a map, a compass, a dollar and some change, and (most reluctantly) his six-year-old sister, Sandra. Along the way he gets delayed by a cigarette riot and Sandra’s whining insistence that she be allowed to play a game of jacks. He also dropkicks a football into a coal wagon (much to the annoyance of the football’s young owners), is rescued by Miss Edna Daphne Frost, and eventually, as the afternoon winds down, Morris and Sandra collide with history. They arrive at Stanley’s block at the exact moment when above-ground gas tanks belonging to the East Ohio Gas Company explode. (The explosion and subsequent fire would kill over one hundred people and destroy a full square mile of Cleveland’s east side.) I loved this slim novel when it was first published in the early ’60s; I am just thrilled that a whole new generation of readers is now going to get to read it, too.
OXFORD
I think I fell in love with Oxford the first time I read Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night way back when I was in college; I’ve never fallen out of love with the city (or that novel). Even a “real life” visit didn’t dim my ardor. And judging by the number of books that evoke the spirit and sense of the place that Matthew Arnold called “that sweet city with her dreaming spires,” I’m not alone.You have a wide choice in reading here—nonfiction, mysteries, and literary fiction about the place abound. Here are some that I’ve particularly enjoyed.
Nonfiction
Two good places to begin to get an overview of the city are The Oxford Book of Oxford, edited by Jan Morris, and David Horan’s Oxford: A Cultural and Literary Companion. Both are filled with good bits of history and lively anecdotes. Horan’s is loosely arranged by the many well-known people whose lives touched the city or the colleges—from Charles I, who holed up in Christ Church (the largest of all Oxford Colleges) when he
was trying to escape from Parliament, to the novelist John Buchan (The Thirty-Nine Steps) and Nobel Prize-winner William Golding (Lord of the Flies), who were both Brasenose lads.Ved Mehta’s Up at Oxford is one of the author’s series of memoirs, and, I think, his best. It’s a splendid picture of Oxford in the 1950s, told in Mehta’s unique voice.Then there’s Justin Cartwright’s Oxford Revisited, in which the novelist looks back on his student years there.
Mysteries
Guillermo Martínez’s The Oxford Murders (one of those cerebral puzzles that always make me wish I were smarter than I am); The September Society by Charles Finch; Colin Dexter’s series featuring the irascible Oxford policeman, Inspector Morse, and his trusty sidekick, Sergeant Lewis—two of my favorites are early ones, Last Bus to Woodstock and The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn; and Edmund Crispin’s series of puzzlers featuring Gervase Fen, an Oxford don who keeps stumbling across murders. The Case of the Gilded Fly is one of the best, The Moving Toyshop is my favorite, and The Glimpses of the Moon is a humorous treat. (And there are a few more in the all-too-short series, as well.)
Literary Fiction
Javier Marías’s All Souls, which begins with “Oxford is, without a doubt, one of the cities of the world where the least work gets done”; Melanie Benjamin’s Alice I Have Been (a well-wrought fictional retelling of Alice’s relationship with Lewis Carroll); the satirical Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm; Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh; Philip Larkin’s Jill; Where the Rivers Meet and sequels by John Wain (lots on the town vs. gown division); Jane and Prudence by Barbara Pym; and The Temple by Stephen Spender.
But I defy anyone to read Oxford, James (now Jan) Morris’s book, originally published in 1965 and reprinted in 2001, and not want to go there for a long stay, immediately. History, biography, literature: the whole ambiance of the city is engagingly presented.
PARMA
One of my teachers at St. John’s College recommended The Charterhouse of Parma to me. It took more decades than I care to admit to finally get around to reading it, but I have to say that finally reading Stendhal’s novel was a revelation—it’s a book of love and passion in the late nineteenth century in Northern Italy that doesn’t minimize the complications that come along with those feelings. I read the translation by Richard Howard, but probably every reader will have his or her favorite. (Incidentally, it wasn’t until I was writing this section that I realized that I didn’t know what Stendhal’s first name was and learned, via Wikipedia, that Stendhal was a pseudonym for Marie-Henri Beyle.)
John Grisham eschewed courtroom thrillers and young lawyers choosing the wrong law firm to join in Playing for Pizza, a captivating novel about Rick Dockery, a pro quarterback who—as a result of having a very bad day on the football field during the AFC championship—goes to play for the Parma Panthers and learns there’s more to Italy than pizza, despite the title. In fact, one of the things Rick learns is that it’s important to pace yourself through those multiple-course Italian meals.
PATAGONIA
Patagonia might someday be its own country but for now it’s partly in Argentina and partly in Chile, in the southern-most parts of both countries. I must warn you that once you start reading about Patagonia it’s hard to stop, because it’s been the scene of such diverse events: for years Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hid out from the Pinkertons there; rumors abounded that creatures who were well known in prehistoric times were now being glimpsed roaming the wilderness; Welsh and Jewish settlements were common; and gauchos rode to glory on the pampas. Here are the best books I’ve found.
Probably the granddaddy of writers who described their days in Patagonia is W. H. Hudson. (He may be best known for Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest—remember Rima the Bird-girl?—but that takes place in Guyana, not Patagonia.) His Patagonian book—heavy on the bird life there—is Idle Days in Patagonia.
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin is probably the one book every Patagonian traveler takes along with him or her; second choice, not far behind, is Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express. (Incidentally, if Chatwin’s life interests you, don’t neglect Bruce Chatwin: A Biography by Nicholas Shakespeare.)
Speaking (even parenthetically) of Nicholas Shakespeare, in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Chatwin’s In Patagonia, he has this to say: “In Patagonia, the isolation makes it easy to exaggerate the person you are: the drinker drinks; the devout prays; the lonely grows lonelier; sometimes fatally.” I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem a far leap to imagine that Robert Kull had the same sort of notion in mind when he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the effects of deep wilderness solitude on a human being. His research resulted in Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes: A Year Alone in the Patagonia Wilderness, a book that is a lesson to anyone who thinks that being alone with one’s thoughts for an extended period is in any way easy.
Nick Reding’s The Last Cowboys at the End of the World: The Story of the Gauchos of Patagonia convinced me that the world is not quite as tamed as most people think it to be—there are still unusual lives to be lived, and unusual places to live them.
There’s also a gripping section in Michael Novacek’s Time Traveler: In Search of Dinosaurs and Ancient Mammals from Montana to Mongolia about hunting for whale fossils in Patagonia.
For fiction (and there’s not a lot available), try Richard Llewellyn’s sequels to How Green Was My Valley: Up, into the Singing Mountain, and Down Where the Moon Is Small (sometimes called And I Shall Sleep . . . Down Where the Moon Is Small), both about his hero Huw’s life in Argentinian Patagonia.
PEACE CORPS MEMORIES
In the fall of 1960, at a speech at the University of Michigan, President John F. Kennedy outlined his ideas for what would shortly become the Peace Corps. Little did anyone realize at the time that one unexpected outcome of the project would be a lot of good reading, in the form of memoirs by former Peace Corps volunteers. Here are some I’d recommend.
Jeanne D’Haem’s The Last Camel: True Stories of Somalia
Sarah Erdman’s Nine Hills to Nambonkaha: Two Years in the Heart of an African Village (Ivory Coast)
Susana Herrera’s Mango Elephants in the Sun: How Life in an African Village Let Me Be in My Skin (Northern Cameroon)
Peter Hessler’s River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (China, of course)
Kris Holloway’s Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali (more fully described in the “Timbuktu and Beyond” section)
Hilary Liftin and Kate Montgomery’s Dear Exile: The True Story of Two Friends Separated (for a Year) by an Ocean (letters between two college friends, written when one was in Kenya [Kate] and one was trying to make a life in Manhattan [Hilary])
George Packer’s The Village of Waiting (Togo, West Africa)
Josh Swiller’s The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa tells of his experiences as a deaf Peace Corps volunteer in an out-of-the-way village in Zambia.
Moritz Thomsen’s Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle was one of the first published accounts by a Peace Corps volunteer; it remains one of the best. And, if you’re going to just read one book on the topic, make it this one. It’s realistic, painful, and somehow ennobling in its descriptions of Peace Corps life in Ecuador. There’s another superb book of Thomsen’s described in the “Brazil” section.
Mike Tidwell’s The Ponds of Kalambayi (Zaire)
Tom Bissell hasn’t written what could be called a memoir of his experiences as a PCV in Central Asia, but it’s certainly informed several of his other books, including Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia and God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories.
PERU(SING) PERU
When you think of Peru, probably the first thing that comes to mind is Machu Picchu, one of the last strongholds of the Incan Empire in the sixteenth century. Present-day travelers to Peru may want to read about the history of Peru but should also take a look at contemporary works. Here are some suggestions for both.
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Of the three major histories of the Spanish conquest of Peru (William Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru, originally published in 1847; John Hemming’s The Conquest of the Incas, which came out in 1970; and Kim MacQuarrie’s The Last Days of the Incas, published in 2007), Prescott’s is magisterial and weighty, Hemming’s is considered by many the definitive contemporary account, and MacQuarrie’s is eminently readable.
Yet another classic is Yale explorer Hiram Bingham’s Lost City of the Incas. (He’s often considered to be the basis for the fictional explorer/adventurer Indiana Jones.) Although there’s an ongoing kerfuffle over Bingham’s exact role in “discovering” Machu Picchu, and there’s a lawsuit in place to force Yale to return the artifacts that Bingham brought home, we shouldn’t let that stop us from reading his accounts of the country whose history he loved.
The newest biography of Bingham is Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones, and the Search for Machu Picchu by Christopher Heaney.
Hugh Thomson is a great storyteller, and his book The White Rock is a perfect mixture of history, geography, and sightseeing in the Peruvian Andes, framed around a search for the lost Inca city of Llactapata. And you can’t do better than his A Sacred Landscape: The Search for Ancient Peru, which considers what’s changed and what’s remained mostly the same in the five or so centuries since the end of the Incan empire.
