This summer marks the 50th anniversary of Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar, the rollicking account of the four and a half months he spent riding trains through Europe and Asia before coming home (he was then living in London) on the Trans-Siberian Express. I wrote an appreciation of the book for The American Scholar that turned into an examination of travel writing over the last 75 years: https://theamericanscholar.org/the-great-american-travel-book/
In his review of Keith McNally’s I Regret Almost Everything, Dwight Garner quoted George Orwell: “An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.”
I am pleased and embarrassed to say that my memoir passes the test.
In Sunday’s New York Times, David Brooks bemoaned the decline of great novels – and “big-time” novelists. And he put the blame on writers, for not being audacious, and progressivism, which encourages conformity.
It was astonishing to me that Brooks, a man who makes a living from his wits, failed to cite the obvious: the post-literate world we now inhabit. Books, and perhaps especially novels, no longer hold the place in the culture that they once did; they were supplanted years ago by TV. There is, and always will be, a small core of readers, but the vast majority of Americans do not look to novelists for profundity, solace, or even entertainment. When people meet – including Boomers, who grew up in the last great age of reading – they don’t talk about the books they’ve read but about the shows they’ve watched. And no generation of writers, however audacious, is going to change that.
It’s said that if Anthony Trollope finished writing a novel in the morning he would start a new one in the afternoon. I find that remarkable. I recently finished reading a book – Czesław Miłosz: A California Live – and am taking a break before starting the next one.
The long holiday weekend brought the usual problem of what to watch. I have called a temporary moratorium on mystery and detective series – and a lifelong ban on Harlan Coben, a writer I had never heard about until I subscribed to Netflix. How can it be that so many shows have been made from books one never sees in bookstores – even airport bookstores?
A Polish friend messaged me this morning with the news that she’s presenting a paper at an academic conference and one of her co-panelists will be discussing my book. Looking at the program listing that she attached, I saw that a professor at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin will be talking about Unquiet Days: At Home in Poland, as well as another book about Poland by another American. I googled this author and learned, with dismay, that she is an esteemed anthropologist, the recipient of numerous academic awards. Surely, she wrote a deep, well-researched, important study of Poland. My book, by contrast, is a mix of descriptions and anecdotes from the two and a half years I lived in Warsaw. I hope the professor is not too hard on me.