Four books about travelling through Europe, written by men who fail to achieve, or attempt, subtlety or suavity.
Neither Here Nor There,
Bryson is the sweetest oaf; he's foolish & sometimes insulting, but not deceptive, and not even unkind. He makes tremendous mockery of the wierd customs of foreigners, but loves travel, lives to be a foreigner, is evidently tremendously happy just to see all the different ways civilizations have adopted to deal with common problems, or invented problems peculiar to themselves.
Sometimes a nation's little contrivances are so singular and clever that we associate them with that country alone - double-decker buses in Britain, windmills in Holland (what an inspired addition to a flat landscape: think how they would transform Nebraska), sidewalk cafés in Paris. And yet there are some things that most countries do without difficulty that others cannot get a grasp of at all.
Bryson is funny with both cases. He's unbelieving when describing how stupid assigned seats in a nearly-empty theater are, or how stupid he himself is when faced with a dog, a hill, a choice between rail stations. He's also enormously happy when describing something that works well, whether it's medieval and untouched or as new as this morning; and he drops his hyperbolic style a few times a book, when discussing something morally grave.
If I ever plan a European vacation again, I should reread this book for its mentions of minor and beautiful cities.
ISBN: 0-552-99806-0
The Grand Tour,
Moore's first travel book, Frost On My Moustache, was belchingly funny. I hear other people enjoy it too, and I look forward to getting my copy back.
This one has a good frame and a bad frame. The good one is his history of Thomas Coryate, an unsuccessful social climber - but very powerful walker - who wrote the first of the many many English Grand Tour books, and got no respect at home for it. Moore finds a couple of plaques to Coryate in obscure villages, and is repeatedly impressed by how far Coryate went & how much he was mocked for it; Coryate comes off as an inspired crackpot.
Moore would probably like to be an inspired crackpot, and in his first book he was - following a square-jawed, stiff-upper-lip aristocratic scion on his historical path North. Moore is none of these; comic failure ensues. In this one, he buys an ill-running Rolls Royce and a velvet suit, with some intention of playing the Grand Tour dandy, but has no fun. It moves him to excuses and makeshifts, which are a little amusing in an unsympathetic way, but too artificial to be really funny.
ISBN: 0-312-28156-0
A Cook's Tour,
This one is disorganized: it's putatively about the search for the perfect meal, or maybe for the author's past, or maybe for what will look good in an hour on TV with no background given. Bourdain mostly ignores the TV stuff, and mocks bad food and feeble people as he did in Kitchen Confidential. So, several visits to dangerous places with excellent to gory cuisine; a couple of grand feasts in wildly expensive, world-famous restaurants. When writing about the first, he's more about the people; about the second, more about the food. He should have been more analytical about the peasant food and the expensive people - that would have been rarer.
His visit to "Where Cooks Come From" was sweet. It's a region, even a few towns, in Mexico, which (network effects) is producing way more than its share of professional sous-chefs and chefs, classically but not formally trained in Continential cooking. Fifteen years ago they were completely exploited; now some are immigrating, and more are better paid, and that's where cooks come from; and they eat well at home, too, although it seems that the women cook in Mexico and not in the States: no fusion cuisine.
Only a few things were too obviously made-for-TV; snake-eating, and a vegan potluck in California. I think his criticisms of the logic of wealthy Cali veganism are only slightly more coherent than their subject, and equally heartfelt, and a big detour into global politics and economics; won't go there. It is righteous of him to criticize the vegans for being terrible cooks of vegetables. But the cheap shot is in aiming at vegans in California after he spent so much time eating in Southeast Asia. Buddhists (and possibly others, but I know about the Buddhists) have a long tradition of really excellent vegetarian or vegan cuisine, a coherent philosophy about it, and a much closer view of the human suffering that Bourdain - incoherently, IMO - adduces as something that trivializes vegetarianism. I wouldn't expect him to give up haggis, but he shouldn't cheat, no more than a vegan polemicist should discuss Tyson chickens as though they were the only imaginable meat supply.
ISBN: 0-06-001278-1
Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars,
It's been so long since I read this that I need to reread it to blog it ('s why I started booklogging in the first place!). As a placeholder, what this is really about is the delight that travel to poorer countries afforded male homosexuals from Britain between the wars. There's at least one reference to 'boys' of Greece or Sicily, etc., that is right squicky whether it refers to actual children or to adult-enough-for-consent men who were 'boys' because poor and foreign.
This would, I suspect, have been a better book if it had been more consciously about its sexual matter; like Sultry Climes, for instance. One trap his avoidance lays for him is a cross and incoherent dismissal of female writers who would otherwise qualify, although he does quote Rebecca West and Freya Stark on particular subjects. (The dismissal is from my memory and maybe imaginary; there are index entries for particular writers, but not for 'women, pooh-poohing'. No index entry for Gertrude Stein.)
The other comparison that makes this book suffer is, of course, to Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, which everyone should try who likes or - drat, I've forgotten the title - lovely, lovely young men in English country houses, TV miniseries years ago, angst, not "Upstairs, Downstairs", starts with 'B' but isn't Barchester Towers either - well, never mind that attempt at pop culture references. The Great War and Modern Memory is about literature and reality, horrible reality and imagination, WWI, poetry, homosexuality, and suffering.
ISBN: 0-19-502767-1
So wrote clew in
History (21st c.).