Book Review - Anthology

Jeff Meller

6 Nov 13

598 words

Victorian explorers in shopping malls, appealing radioactive local foods, helping jilted girlfriends are among the subjects anthologized in “The Best American Travel Writing of 2012.”

The travel writer, David Abel, of The Boston Globe asserts that the first sentence of a travel essay requires the most sweat to craft. It should hook the reader and set the context for the story.

How do the first sentences of three contributions to the 2012 edition of “The Best American Travel Writing” realize this exhausting achievement?

Monte Reel launches his essay “How to Explore Like a Real Victorian Adventurer” with this gripping sentence:

“In Zanzibar, late in 1856, Richard F. Burton and a caravan of porters prepared to venture into the heart of Africa’s interior to search for the source of the Nile.”

Not gripping and not relevant, except to its title.  The essay in fact is about how to explore your local shopping mall.  Reel encourages readers to observe keenly as did, he says, 19^th century explorers like Burton. But Reel does not examine real Victorian adventurers. Rather he reviews Victorian travel “how-to manuals” which told Victorian tourists how to follow comfortably in the footsteps of the real adventurers.

Henry Shukman offers a less prosaic destination than the shopping mall in “Chernobyl, My Primeval, Teeming, Irradiated Eden.” He endeavors to hook readers with this opening gambit:

“The wild boar is standing 30 or 40 yards away, at the bottom of a grassy bank, staring right at me.”

If the opening is not riveting, Shukman does at least have an intriguing idea: to visit the Chernobyl region a quarter-century after the great meltdown.

Shukman is invited to a meal of local foods inside the 1,100 square mile Exclusion Zone: fish, eggs, tomatoes, bread, berries and vodka. He has been admonished by friends: “don’t eat anything that grows there.” But, he exclaims, “It’s all local and it all looks great;” he “tucks in” like the locals. “Going native” has virtues in meaningful travel. But when one of the natives tells him “Radiation is good for you,” Shukman suspends his cosmopolitan education at his peril.

The last of the three submissions actually follows Abel’s prescription: 

“In the ancient caravan city of Timbuktu, many nights before I encountered the bibliophile or the marabout or comforted the Green Beret’s girlfriend, I was summoned to a rooftop to meet the salt merchant.”

What reader wouldn’t want to learn more about the bibliophile, marabout, girlfriend, and salt merchant in such an exotic locale?

Peter Gwin’s essay, “The Telltale Scribes of Timbuktu,” however, diverts its attention from the captivation tale of the scribes in its digressions on the salt merchant, marabout and girlfriend.

The salt merchant has a friend who wants to sell some parchments; the girlfriend had a two week fling with a Green Beret and hopes he will take her to the US; and the marabout, a Muslim mystic, wants to sell Gwen an amulet to protect him from Al Qaeda for US$ 1,000.

Only the tale of the bibliophile is worth telling. Haidara has a library of 22,000 volumes assembled over 500 years. He points Gwin to the real story: the threat to “many thousands of manuscripts which lie buried in the desert or forgotten in hiding places slowly succumbing to heat, rock and bugs.” Gwin, writing in National Geographic, one of the most esteemed scientific publishers in the world, overlooks this story to tell of the unexceptional charlatans and girlfriend.

If this is “The Best American Travel Writing of 2012,” the reader only may hope for the redemption of American travel writing in 2013.

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Sources:

None.