During class Wednesday I mentioned Paul Theroux’s line (from The Pillars of Hercules): “Nobody has ever described the place where I’ve just arrived.” And as an example I mentioned my visit to Havana – a city I’d read a lot about, and seen many photographs of – and how I’d been surprised by the water crashing over the malecon and flooding the street near my hotel every night. One of the students said that the Cubans have a saying, “This or that will happen when the malecon is dry.” “Meaning,” he added, “never.”
As the weeks went by, and Paul Theroux’s impressive new travel book On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey went unmentioned in The New York Times Book Review, I assumed the editors were going to put it into their holiday roundup of travel books. And sure enough, there it was yesterday, lumped in with How to Be a Family: The Year I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way to Be Together and a "glossy, coffee-table edition" of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. A few pages on, there appeared a full review of Hisham Matar’s A Month in Siena.
On the Plain of Snakes is an exhaustive exploration of our complex and misunderstood neighbor, by our preeminent travel writer, and one can only speculate as to why it got slighted, particularly at a time when Mexico is in the news (much more than Siena). Early on in the book, Theroux reflects on his age; he was in his mid-70s when he undertook his arduous journey, driving the length of the border and then deep into the Mexican hinterlands. And he notes how, in the U.S., his senior status makes him irrelevant, a person of no consequence. But I doubt he expected this loss of importance to carry over into the literary world, where, historically, longevity has been honored. But today that world seems to have become more political than literary.
In another sign of disrespect, this time for the genre, the Book Review’s roundup almost always includes a statement of surprise that none of the stories resemble in any way a vacation, a statement that reveals a stunning ignorance of the vast literature of travel, which is comprised of books, like Theroux’s latest, that are gripping accounts of dangerous journeys and/or penetrating examinations of peoples and cultures. Yesterday, it appeared in the second mini-review, of The Best American Travel Writing 2019: “The most striking aspect of this collection, though, is that nobody even remotely considers lazing about on a beach.” Though the intention might have been the opposite, this throwaway line, through its imagery, helps perpetuate the stereotype of travel writers as eternal vacationers.
Arrived home yesterday from three days in Key West. I always tell people headed there to get off Duval and wander the side streets, and I followed my advice, discovering, near the cemetery, a street with the now absurd name of Poorhouse Lane. On a nearby street a man coming out his front door with a friend asked if he could help me.
“I’m just taking pictures of the beautiful houses,” I told him.
“You want to buy one?” his friend asked.
“I don’t think I can afford it,” I said.
“I can’t either,” he said. “That’s the problem.”
The Eastern European work force was still around but in smaller numbers. “Nobody rides a bicycle like a Russian girl,” a female travel writer remarked to me once, and I saw some young women looking elegant and unapproachable even on three-wheelers. But many of the Czechs and Poles had been replaced by people from even farther east – Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan.
Eventually, inevitably, I found myself back on Duval Street. This had its good side – the Lighted Bike Parade, with hundreds of people on decorated bicycles – and its down side: the pro-Trump messages on the T-shirts in shop windows. They seemed out of place in a quaint, whimsical, literary town (three adjectives one never attaches to our president) that people have long used as a refuge from the rest of the country. But they were probably a better indicator of next year’s election than all the editorials and political talk shows.
Tomorrow will mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It had great significance for me, having lived east of it for two and a half years. Also, as a recently-hired travel editor, I knew the thrill of a suddenly opened up world.
David Owen, speaking on NPR about his book Volume Control, said that as our hearing deteriorates we start to miss high frequency sounds, which means that in conversations consonants disappear.
So, visit Poland while you’re young.