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Resumen
Resumen
"Banks's narrative seductively juxtaposes rambles through lush volcanic mountains, white sand beaches and coral reefs with a barrage of memories of the hash he's made of his private life." --The New York Times Book Review
Russell Banks has indulged his wanderlust for more than half a century. This longing for escape has taken him from the "bright green islands and turquoise seas" of the Caribbean islands to peaks in the Himalayas, the Andes, and beyond.
In each of these remarkable essays, Banks considers his life and the world. In Everglades National Park this "perfect place to time-travel," he traces his own timeline. Recalling his trips to the Caribbean in the title essay, "Voyager," Banks dissects his relationships with the four women who would become his wives. In the Himalayas, he embarks on a different quest of self-discovery. "One climbs a mountain not to conquer it, but to be lifted like this away from the earth up into the sky," he explains.
Pensive, frank, beautiful, and engaging, Voyager brings together the social, the personal, and the historical, opening a path into the heart and soul of this revered writer.
Reseñas (5)
Reseña de Publisher's Weekly
Although billed as "travel writings," the 10 introspective essays collected in this volume explore their author's emotional geography as much as the far-flung lands he visits. In the lengthy title piece, which recounts "a winter-long, island-hopping journey through the Caribbean," Banks finds occasion to relate the details of his three failed marriages to his travel companion, his fourth-wife-to-be. Acknowledging that the wanderlust that spurs his travels is an outgrowth of his personal tendency to flee from those whose emotional needs he cannot satisfy, he observes, "I could see clearly that my courtship narrative and this peripatetic voyage through the archipelago ran parallel to each other in ways both exculpatory and condemning, the one reflecting, enabling, and explicating the other." Banks's descriptions are visually evocative, and his eye for detail is sharpened by the near-spiritual resonance that his travel destinations have for him. Recalling a Zen moment experienced while mountain-climbing in the Andes, he reflects that "one climbs a mountain for the same reason one enters a monastery: to pray." Whether he's traveling through the swamps of the Everglades, the former slaving grounds of Dakar, or the Russian settlement of Alaska (which he describes piquantly as "a Chekhov story waiting to be told"), Banks makes a magnificent tour guide for landscapes both within and without. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Acclaimed fiction writer Banks (A Permanent Member of the Family, 2013, etc.) turns an able hand to nonfiction in this expansive, elegiac reflection on the pleasures and deceptions of travel.The 75-year-old author recognizes the failings of narratives based solely on fading, self-serving memories, yet he cannot resist indulging in recollections from 30 years ago. "A memoir is like a travel book," he writes. "Whether short or long it's a radical reduction of remembered reality and is structured as much by what it leaves out as what it puts in." In the lengthy title essay, set in 1988, Banks and his soon-to-be-fourth wife embark on a wide-ranging odyssey of the Caribbean, one that wakens many ghosts (of wives and adventures past) while conjuring encouragement and despair in equal measure. The author loves the Caribbean and its people but loathes what is happening to the islands to accommodate, then as now, ever increasing hordes of cruise-ship and package-tour visitors, to homogenize distinctive cultures, and to obscure the real history of slavery. Resolution was a principal reason that Banks, who lived for a time in Jamaica, undertook this return journey to the tropics. Written in 2015, the piece is at least as much about Banks' courtship narrative, his personal history, and his regrets as it is about an enviable assignment in the Caribbean. But the frequent self-flagellation occasionally feels excessive. The other essays in the book are less melancholy, offering observations and insights that, despite their ages, seem timeless. After all, the point of travel is knowledge, not topical information. Of the more "conventional" travel pieces here, the most resonant and vivid are those on the Everglades and the author's mountaineering in South America and the Himalayas, the last at age 72. Banks' ecological warnings might strike even the most fervent environmentalist as rather apocalyptic, yet in the best of these pieces, his clarity of vision and muscular prose are as transporting as a mountain ascent. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Reseña de Booklist
*Starred Review* Fans of Banks' exceptional fiction (A Permanent Member of the Family, 2013) and all readers enamored of travelogues will clamor aboard this compact, gusto-filled, retrospective anthology. A teenage Banks hits Florida with delusions of joining the Cuban Revolution, then, 42 years later, is extravagantly hosted by Fidel Castro. He complicates an island-hopping magazine assignment to the Caribbean with provocative scrutiny of his three failed marriages. Banks takes blame for the divorces yet suggests that his mother and ex-wives wanted to control his life. Banks' warm, probing intellect guides readers on thoughtful journeys whatever the destination: a 1980s hippie reunion near the University of North Carolina, the Berkeley of the South ; a solitary paddling trip in the Everglades; and visits to historic slavery sites in West Africa and the Caribbean. He treks the Andes and the Himalayas and takes a cynical drive in a Humvee along the Alaskan coast. Banks meets an oil-company executive in the Eden-like Seychelles and is unimpressed when he opines that it's too late to save the planet. Marriage comes a fourth time, in Edinburgh, a match that has lasted for almost 30 years. Readers will be hard put to find a more engaging travel companion.--Carr, Dane Copyright 2016 Booklist
Reseña de New York Review of Books
SOME WRITERS - Paul Theroux, Bill Bryson, William Least Heat-Moon - are prolific globe-trotters, repeatedly channeling their wanderlust into best-selling travel yarns that span the world. Then there's a literary subset for whom such writing is a sideline, a secondary calling to successful careers as novelists, journalists and culture critics. Andrew Solomon, Bob Shacochis, Russell Banks and Geoff Dyer all made their names as masters of other genres. In four travel-writing anthologies out this spring, the authors amply display the powers of observation and empathy that animate their other work. Andrew Solomon is best known as the author of two ambitious books of nonfiction that explore human psychology and family relationships: "The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression," which won the National Book Award in 2001, and "Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity," the winner of the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. But he has also roamed the globe for magazines ranging from Travel & Leisure to The New Yorker, casting his gaze on fragile societies in the midst of upheaval. In "Far and Away," Solomon gathers nearly 30 travel pieces over three decades that reflect, he writes, "my lifelong fascination with ... places in the throes of transformation." Solomon's early articles focus on the changing art scene in countries recently freed from the grip of repression. In "The Winter Palettes," an evocative time capsule written for Harpers & Queen in 1988, Solomon meets avant-garde Soviet artists in the age of glasnost and finds their solidarity fraying in the face of overnight fame and fortune. Attending Sotheby's groundbreaking auction of contemporary art in Moscow, where the works of former outcasts fetch six-figure sums, he notes with amusement the hype and hysteria surrounding artists once ostracized by the Communist regime. "Elton John's manager exchanged pleasantries with the sister of the king of Jordan," he writes. "A retired baseball player escorted a small bevy of titled Scandinavian ladies." The Ministry of Culture, meanwhile, "which retained a sizable part of the takings, suddenly began looking at the once-detested artists with a self-interested kindness now that they had become a prime source of hard currency." Solomon's more recent reportage widens his scope to whole societies in transition - Afghanistan in the months after the Taliban's fall, Myanmar during the halting changeover from military rule to quasi-democracy, Rio de Janeiro's favelas in the midst of a huge crackdown on organized crime in anticipation of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Posing as a "British Christian archaeologist rather than as an American Jewish journalist," he visits Libya in 2006 during a dramatic thaw in relations between Qaddafi and the West. The mercurial dictator has renounced state-sponsored terrorism, and cut back on the torture and executions of dissidents. Yet Solomon finds a deep-seated contempt for the regime that foreshadows Qaddafi's downfall half a decade later. Inquiring about the heaps of garbage that litter the magnificent ruins of Cyrene, Sab rat ha and Leptis Magna, he is told by one Libyan academic that "it's how the people of Libya piss on the system.... The Leader doesn't actually care about this country. Why should we keep it beautiful for him?" Solomon's pieces occasionally read as though he is emptying his notebooks, with long, rambling quotes from a succession of interview subjects. Far more often, his prose sparkles with insights and captivating description, whether he is observing camels in Mongolia ("When they lack water, their humps droop like aging bosoms. At night, they howl - an eerie sound, like the spirits of purgatory crying out") or eating his way through China. "The throbbing bass beat from the nightclub downstairs obtrudes," he writes of a hedonistic night in Shanghai, "but not enough to diminish the lotus root stuffed with sticky rice or the teasmoked duck, which is to waterfowl what Lapsang souchong is to Lipton." BOB SHACOCHIS'S WANDERLUST has infused much of his fiction, including his debut collection, "Easy in the Islands," which won the National Book Award for first fiction. It has also led him to some of the roughest corners of the planet - the mountains of Nepal, the slopes of Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey, the lawless badlands along the Kosovo-Albanian border - on assignments for magazines like Harpers and Outside. Many of the pieces collected in "Kingdoms in the Air" are vivid portraits of iconoclasts and rugged individualists who have surrendered their Western comforts for adventure and higher purpose in the developing world. In the opening story Shacochis profiles Tom Laird, a one-time hippie drifter who joined "the great transcontinental traveling freak show" to Kathmandu in the early 1970s, and there morphed into a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, photographer, mountain guide, development expert, "Sherpaphile" and confidant of the renowned author and naturalist Peter Matthiessen. Laird leads Shacochis and a team of fellow trekkers on a journey on horseback to Upper Mustang at the northern reaches of the Kali Gandaki gorge, a once secretive kingdom that, with Laird's gentle prodding, has recently opened to the outside world. Shacochis evokes the pains and pleasures of the trek with lyrical prose. Traveling up the valley, he finds himself the "point man in a nightmare, riding a horse high on a cliffside along an 18-inch-wide trail of crushed rock, the river slurping the base of the wall far beneath me." As they ascend to the 15,000-foot plateau, he writes, "We are immediately sobered by the desolation we ride into, its lifeless, lunar magnitude, the dense stacking of scorched, scoured mountains, so unwelcoming, we had quickly learned, that even the Maoists were giving Mustang a wide berth." Arriving in Lo Manthang, Mustang's walled capital, Shacochis meets the king, explores 15th-century temples and ponders the trade-offs between environmental protection and development. Laird, who once was celebrated in Mustang for raising the quality of life in the region, now finds himself vilified for having taken photos of sacred paintings in the temples, and for smuggling out art and animal parts - a false accusation spread by rivals. "The last thing Tom Laird could ever have imagined for his life had come true," Shacochis notes with irony. "He was the Ugly American." In "Gorongosa," first published in Outside, Shacochis travels to Mozambique's most famous game reserve, which was devastated during the 16-year civü war that broke out soon after independence from Portugal in 1975. Once the habitat of thousands of elephants, the park, Shacochis writes, became "a shooting gallery, a shifting headquarters for both armies, the area swarmed by destitute refugees, the footpaths ... rigged with land mines, its animals serving as a type of A.T.M. machine to fund and supply the combatants." Enter another of Shacochis's heroes, Greg Carr, a telecommunications and Internet entrepreneur turned philanthropist who donated $40 million to revitalize the ruined park, and now works closely with Mozambican conservationists to protect the newly introduced wildlife from poachers. Shacochis weaves an engaging profile of this American original, "whose permanent optimism was exceeded only by his irrepressible, well-aimed and sometimes kooky enthusiasm (like plopping down on a restaurant floor to do push-ups)." THE MASSACHUSETTS-BORN novelist RUSsell Banks achieved prominence for "The Sweet Hereafter," set in a small town following a deadly bus accident that killed many of the community's children. (It was later made into a movie directed by Atom Egoyan.) In "Voyager," he ventures farther afield in a series of pieces that seamlessly combine globe-trotting and autobiography. The title story is the best in this fine collection, a novella-length account of the 60-day island-hopping boondoggle he took through the Caribbean for a glossy travel magazine, joined by Chase, a University of Alabama professor who would soon become his fourth wife. "One travels to the Antilles driven by vague desires, mostly unexamined, rarely named, never advertised," he writes. "One goes like a bee to a blossom, as if drawn by some powerful image of prelapsarian beauty and innocence." Banks's exploration of the islands by ferry and small plane begins as a soothing balm following the wreckage of an earlier marriage, but soon morphs into an agonized journey of self-revelation. Banks's narrative seductively juxtaposes rambles through lush volcanic mountains, white sand beaches and coral reefs with a barrage of memories of the hash he's made of his private life - a short-lived first marriage at 19, a second to a folk-singing college student with whom he had three daughters and a third to a failed novelist from Fort Worth. "I was ... reenacting my parents' catastrophically broken marriage," he writes of his leaving his first wife and infant daughter, "my father's rampaging violence and alcoholism, his relentless womanizing and his abandonment of his four children." Self-flagellation mingles with moments of romance, and meditations on the slave trade, Caribbean poverty and the perils of overdevelopment. Looming over the journey is Banks's desperate hope for rejuvenation in the tropics, a magical place of second, third and fourth chances. "I'd come back for the bone-clear light and the depth and power of color and the abundant, tumultuous play of forms," he writes. "I simply open my eyes and look, and I start to feel healed from a sickness I hadn't known I was afflicted with." THE BRITISH WRITER Geoff Dyer won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism for "Otherwise Known as the Human Condition," a collection of meditations on everything and everyone from 1980s Brixton to jazz to the photographers Richard Avedon and Ruth Orkin. Dyer's new collection, "White Sands," anthologizes his travel writing over the past decade, displaying the author's mordant wit and penchant for misadventure. In the title story of this slim volume, he and his wife, here given the fictional name Jessica, stop in the desert for a hitchhiker, who may - or may not - be an escaped convict. "We are totally in a nightmarish situation, I thought to myself," he writes. "Before I could pursue this thought the guy in the back seat cleared his throat. In the tense atmosphere of the car the sound was like the blast of a gun going off." In "Northern Dark," he and Jessica head for the Arctic Circle in Norway in winter to see the Northern Lights, only to find themselves waiting in vain in round-the-clock darkness and a hostile environment that resembles "Ice Station Zebra" "with elements of the retreat from Moscow thrown in." The trip culminates in an ill-fated dog sledding expedition led by a pair of m ushers named Birgitte and Yeti. "Everything about this environment was quite unsuited to photography, human habitation, tourism or happiness," Dyer grumbles after losing control of his sled in the deep snow and terrifying his wife. "Jessica had had enough too, was persuaded to continue only on condition that she was driven by Yeti or Birgitte and not by 'that idiot.'" JOSHUA HAMMER'S most recent book is "The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu."
Library Journal Review
Novelist Banks (The Sweet Hereafter; Affliction), on the cusp of his fourth marriage, spends the first half of this collection of travel writing telling readers what went wrong with the first three. He does this by interspersing these erstwhile faulty relationships with descriptions of the Lesser Antilles. This is not a logical pairing, but oddly enough, it works. Banks owns up to his past and somehow convinces the woman who is to become No. 4 into -marrying him--successfully this time. Between the ups and downs of his past one learns that the Virgin Islands are overcommercialized, Saba is wonderful, and the French side of St--Martin/Sint Maarten is better than the Dutch. The second half of the book includes recollections of a hodgepodge of places: Cuba, North Carolina, Scotland, Alaska, the Everglades, and the Andes and Himalaya mountains. -VERDICT Banks puts the literature back in travel writing in this extremely well--crafted book.-Lee Arnold, Historical Soc. of -Pennsylvania, Philadelphia © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.