A Year in the World: Journeys of a Passionate Traveller
the new travelogue from Frances Mayes, feels like it sounds: too broad and too long.
Mayes, the author of Under the Tuscan Sun is famous for her beautiful imagery of Tuscany and for her mid-life transition to the area, portrayed by Diane Lane in the hit movie of the same title.
This book features her visits to Greece, The British Isles, Crete, Morocco, Portugal and Turkey. Pages are still devoted to Tuscany, areas where her love of experiencing new things is most apparent. Each chapter is a discrete destination as she and her lover, Ed, criss-cross Europe.
She is brilliant at illuminating the local flavor ' especially the flavor of food, which she sometimes toils on to the extent of boredom ' and enriching her present travels with history. When she sails the Aegean, she speaks of Homer and infuses it with modern Greek prose. Her words are exquisite, and she is undoubtedly one of the great travel writers still working. But she repeats herself, not in verbiage, but in style. Her transcendent voice keeps a consistent tone, but it also becomes stagnant. There are times when it seems outrageous that she can continue to stay tranquil in the face of the wonder she is writing about.
Some of her most introspective moments are her discussions with the people she meets along the way, including an almost painfully awkward chat with a woman who claims to speak directly to God. The woman says God called Mayes' style a holy approach to writing. A possible touch of lunacy aside, this is an accurate description. She writes with something like flattery for her destinations, but it is much loftier, more like adoration or reverence.
The biggest flaw is length. Readers preparing for a trip should probably treat each chapter as its own entity, as opposed to trying to digest the entire work at once. The risk is that the specific references will get lost in a sea of ship names and regional food titles.
Tuscany was her greatest fodder because she could write extensively on everything without losing focus or trailing on unnecessarily. The whole of Europe, on the other hand, was a subject Mayes could not write about concisely. Buy this book for its imagery and its allusions, but be prepared to set aside a week, or a year, to finish reading it.Retro pick of the weekIn a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson (2001)One of Bill Bryson's travel masterpieces finds the quirky, hilarious, middle-aged author in Australia, a land of barren wastelands, freaky flora and fauna and prime ministers who can go missing in the ocean without much talk. Bryson is one of the most informed and intelligent essayists, though many of his unforgettable tales are the result of beer binges in the middle of the Outback. His books are a mix of travel, history and personal insight, and this book is as brilliant as kangaroos are unique.
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Justin Thompson
