Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Sunburns Easily
Happy Bryson—book review
August 16, 2008 · No Comments
Finally finished Bill Bryson’s huge book on Australia—”In a Sunburned Country.” I started it months ago and read only a paragraph or so a day. Bryson is a happy writer and a jovial soul. I wonder that he’s not more rotund but then I haven’t seen a recent photo of him. He put the book together about ten years ago out of a number of trips he had taken to Australia.
The Chapter on Ayer’s Rock is remarkably good. Gives a great sense of how impressive it must be—or might be. And he does the same consistent job for all the other sights he sees, both ordinary and exceptional. The exceptional are mainly natural phenomena.
I’m so used to reading Paul Theroux that when I’m in a Bryson book I start to miss Theroux’s usual grumpiness. Bryson is so steadily pleased with everything and everyone. He fills us in on things in great detail, so you can’t fault the info flow. He has interesting encounters with people and places. So what’s to fault? Well, nothing. But if he asked me to accompany him on a jaunt somewhere I might not go or want to go. He’s too even-keeled, so content with things that at times you wonder whether he is very interesting, really.
He loves Australia and gives it great press in every possible way. Yet after reading the whole book I’m glad to have had the bit of history, the amazing tales of human folly and adventure, the suspicions confirmed about all my impressions—the vastness, the emptiness, the beauty, the dangers. But the book has not increased my interest in ever actually going to Australia. In fact just the opposite. I’ve never been that curious to go and now that I’ve done my duty with the book I can now check it off as a place I need never have any worry about not wanting to visit.
Somehow that is not a comment a publisher would want to put on the back cover of this really good book. But I had a similar reaction years ago in reading another of Bryson’s bestsellers—I do of course envy him his sales and his income—the book on the Appalachian trail. “In These Woods.” Is that the title? Bryson hikes the Trail and gets way much farther along than most, including many of my former students who have set out to do it. But he doesn’t do the whole trail. He shuts down somewhere in Maine before Kahtahdin. Bummer. Now Theroux would never have done that I think to myself. Theroux would have figured some way to have finished the darned thing or he would have put the manuscript back in a drawer and written another book.
It is unfair of me to compare Bill this way. But he lost one of my votes some years ago. He lived for a short while a bit west of here in Hanover, NH. He had lived in England for years and said in print somewhere he wanted to come back to the states to see what’s what. In truth he wanted to put his kids through American high school and get them into American colleges. One of my students who grew up in Hanover knew one of Bryson’s kids and met Bryson on an occasion or two. But again, in print, Bryson said he looked around the country to find a place to live and he had always wanted to live in a typical New England town (he grew up in Kansas & likes Australia because it reminds him so much of Kansas in the 50s), so he chose to live in Hanover, NH.
That’s where he lost my vote. Living in Hanover, NH as a “typical NE town” is a bit like choosing to live in Monaco because you’ve always hankered to sip espresso in a typical Mediterranean village.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
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