Boldtype | July 2007


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July 2007:: issue 45

Books This Month
1.	Tales from the Torrid Zone: Travels in the Deep Tropics by Alexander Frater
2.	How to Make Friends and Oppress People: Classic Travel Advice for the Gentleman Adventurer by Vic Darkwood
3.	Mortimer of the Maghreb by Henry Shukman
4.	Allah Is Not Obliged by Ahmadou Kourouma
5.	Budapest by Chico Buarque
6.	From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet by Vikram Seth
7.	Istanbul by Alex Webb and Orhan Pamuk
	Feature Interview: "Dishwasher" Pete Jordan Book News Credits/About Us

Journeys
The best cure for wanderlust, short of a plane ticket, is reading about a remarkable trip. This month, we bring you a bevy of books chronicling extraordinary journeys. An intrepid travel writer reports from the torrid zone, while a ghostwriter becomes entangled in intrigue in Budapest. Vikram Seth sneaks into Tibet from China, a child soldier winds his way through West Africa, and a collection of Indiana Jones-wannabes get themselves in trouble in sweltering climes. Vic Darkwood offers a wicked satire of Englishmen abroad; and a Magnum photographer teams up with Orhan Pamuk to sketch a complex portrait of Istanbul. We close with an interview with "Dishwasher" Pete Jordan, who spent ten years trying to wash dishes in all 50 states. The only danger you'll face, of course, is that these tales are as likely to spark your desire to travel as assuage it.

- Toby Warner, Managing Editor

NONFICTION

Tales from the Torrid Zone: Travels in the Deep Tropics by Alexander Frater


Published:	March 2007
Pages:	400
Publisher:	Knopf
Links: Book site NY Times review

“In a single chapter, Frater goes from Fiji to Senegal to Laos to Uganda, crossing open expanses, war zones, and sometimes even the natives themselves, who seem loathe to welcome what they consider yet another colonialist.”

Review
The French call it le coup de bamboo, an incurable form of tropical madness that may not be lethal but can still slow you down to a dead crawl. Unless, of course, you're the Observer's Alexander Frater, the kind of cat who embraces such conditions with open arms, an open heart, and — yes — open eyes. Then such a disease becomes just what the doctor ordered — to keep you alive.

In Tales, our man in the Tropics comes down with le coup, all right, as well as a little bug called mal de jaune ("said to be common among those who yearn nostalgically for Indo-China"), and not only lives through the longing and the lassitude, but lets us live through it too.

Talk about travel. In a single chapter, Frater goes from Fiji to Senegal to Laos to Uganda, crossing open expanses, war zones, and sometimes even the natives themselves, who seem loathe to welcome what they consider yet another colonialist. Mostly, though, Frater flies above and beyond with the greatest of ease, and any restlessness from the natives comes from their wanting to see the man whose kin made such a mark on whatever New Hebrides island atoll he's happened to land upon — the church-building grandfather who saved scores from a volcanic eruption at Ambryn, the doctor father who delivered a generation in Paama, the educationally inclined mother who founded two nurses' schools on Iririki. Yes, Frater, descendent of Christian-mission medicine men and women, was born in these parts, and torrid as they are, Tales is his homecoming.

But don't think for one hot second that this is the kind of warm and fuzzy book that brochures are made of. What Frater doesn't come down with, he comes close to — very often too close for the comfort of most. Elephantiasis, Burkitt's lymphoma, leprosy, and that old standby, malaria, all make lethal appearances, as do dumdum fever, beri beri, and kuru, "a fatal degenerative condition caught from eating the brains of loved ones killed in battle." Add that nasty rodent ulcer our intrepid adventurer needs to have removed from his face, and it makes for quite a scarring, indeed.
- John Hood

NONFICTION

How to Make Friends and Oppress People: Classic Travel Advice for the Gentleman Adventurer by Vic Darkwood


Published:	July 2007
Pages:	256
Publisher:	Thomas Dunne Books
Links: Gustav Temple interview Darkwood's Around the World in 80 Martinis

“More than just a farcical travel guide, this is a scathing catalogue of British attitudes toward other cultures and, in this reflective era, a a work of devastating self-satire.”

Review
Vic Darkwood's opinion is that everything we moderns do, the Victorians did first, and with greater aplomb. Or that's Darkwood's satirical shtick, which he promulgates through The Chap, a quarterly magazine he coedits with fellow mock-dandy Gustav Temple. In How to Make Friends and Oppress People: Classic Travel Advice for the Gentleman Adventurer, Darkwood has penned a straight-faced guide to the lost etiquette of foreign expeditions, interspersing his own narration with passages and old engravings from actual Victorian manuals. More than just a farcical travel guide, Darkwood has written a scathing catalog of British attitudes toward other cultures and, in this reflective era, a a work of devastating self-satire.

Written in highfaluting prose and peppered with faux-Wilde witticisms, How to Make Friends is divided into chapters on such discrete topics as "Expeditionary Skills" and "The Englishman Abroad." Early on, the satire feels humorous enough — the absurd litanies of necessary clothing, scientific instruments, and carpentry tools that Darkwood recommends travelers pack are more than average people have in their homes today — but Darkwood doesn't shy away from taking real jabs at figures of modern travel, like "so-called 'backpackers' who clad themselves in gaily hued polyester." Nor does he flinch when depicting Victorian attitudes toward race in the later section "Foreign Servants," citing Victorian passages that compare the advantages of "a Madrassi" to those of "John Chinaman." Pictures of the Bentley & Simpkins servant transporters ("ideal for the economical conveyance of staff"), used to pack servants as luggage, jolt one out of the comfort afforded by the book's facetious tone. If Darkwood's for real, then the Victorians weren't just genial fools, but civilized barbarians.

Self-loathing has a distinguished history in British comedy, from Jonathan Swift to Ricky Gervais' David Brent in The Office. Darkwood's seamlessly deadpan tone leaves the reader at a loss for any real opinion of the Victorians. On the one hand, Darkwood truly does seem to be against mass-culture's debasement of life's finer pleasures, but he also illuminates the narrow-minded pomposity and downright offensiveness of those pursuits to begin with.
- H.G. Masters

SHORT STORIES

Mortimer of the Maghreb by Henry Shukman


Published:	2006
Pages:	480
Publisher:	Vintage Contemporaries
Links: Shukman's Sandstorm

“Despite his rather self-promoting credo that a war doesn't exist without a journalist, Mortimer's enthusiasm for the mud huts, sandstorms, topless 4x4s, and muskets of his day job is contagious.”

Review
Imagine you're a journalist at the top of your game — you were sidesaddle on a camel alongside nomadic Turaeg as they rose up against Algeria's Sahara Initiative, starting a war the world would never have known about save for your stellar reporting. You broke the story of a 1,100-kilometer wall of sand built by hand to keep out roving Moroccans in the desert. Le Monde, Zeitung, the Washington Post: your investigative reporting knows no bounds. So, what do you do? Make love to a beautiful French photographer, of course. Then you get a little cocky. And then, you blow it.

That's what happens to British journalism's rising star Charles Mortimer, who writes a front-page article that was picked up by the wire services about the Soviet Union's diehard impregnability. Weeks later, the Berlin Wall came down, and with it all Mortimer's credibility as a reporter. The stories of Mortimer of the Maghreb begin in North Africa and Tajikistan, as Mortimer's career peaks at the world's most desperate sites — wars, earthquakes, and famines — and then crumbles into a stodgy food critic's complacency. Despite his rather self-promoting credo that a war doesn't exist without a journalist, Mortimer's enthusiasm for the mud huts, sandstorms, topless 4x4s, and muskets of his day job is contagious. During one of his many heady pontifications on the craft, he writes, "One had been given a number of decades in this sunny, tragic world — what else to do but explore and report back on what you saw?"

In this collection of (long) short stories, Shukman does just that. His lucid descriptions of exotic settings and Indiana Jones-wannabe narrators betray his own love for travel. A bon vivant whose map at home in Santa Fe is chock full of pins, Shukman is also a travel writer, trawlman, and trombonist. Like Peter Matthiessen and Allen Ginsberg, Shukman's been known to dabble in one of the world's strongest hallucinogens, ayahuasca, to cross other kinds of borders, as well. While each of these stories could stand alone, by weaving them together, the author has formed a piecemeal globe — the kind that hides a full bar within it. Sounds like a good travel companion, no?
- McKay McFadden

FICTION

Allah Is Not Obliged by Ahmadou Kourouma


Published:	May 2007
Pages:	215
Publisher:	Anchor Books
Links: UNESCO interview Book excerpt

“A quest story as timeless and archetypal as its narrative voice is raw, ribald, profane, and unprecedented.”

Review
A dozen years after Charles Taylor's seizure of power in Liberia showed would-be dictators the efficacy of drugged-up eight-year-olds with Kalashnikovs, America has finally awoken to the realities of the two-decade-long civil wars in West Africa — a part of the world whose history, both distant and recent, is more closely linked with our own than we might like to think. The story has no doubt gone down more smoothly with a mocha latte and beats by Kanye West.

In Allah Is Not Obliged, ten-year-old Birahima's journey into the horrors of war after his mother's death is meant to prove a titular mantra: "Allah is not obliged to be fair about all the things he does here on earth." Accompanied by a local grigriman — a shaman — named Yacouba, the narrator leaves his village in Côte d'Ivoire in 1993 to find his faraway aunt, only to be captured and conscripted into Taylor's National Patriotic Front after crossing the border into Liberia.

Birahima is thrilled by life as a child soldier, initially, and he views killing as a small price to pay for a roof over his head, plenty to eat, and all the hash he can smoke. So when his commander is killed, Birahima merely switches to the side he'd been previously fighting against. Eventually, hearing that his aunt has moved there, Birahima winds up in Sierra Leone in the mid-1990s. The country is the very lowest circle of hell on earth, a place where he's considered lucky because he's an orphan: his comrades' initiations required that they kill one parent while the other watched.

As a sort of mercenary Candide, our hero is fictional, but the Ivoirean Kourouma, who died in 2003, uses Birahima as a guide through conflicts whose antagonists are very real. In that sense, the book's as good an introduction to the plight of West African child soldiers as any. But it endures as fiction, principally: a quest story as timeless and archetypal as its narrative voice is raw, ribald, profane, and unprecedented.
- Chris Parris-Lamb

FICTION

Budapest by Chico Buarque


Published:	2005
Pages:	181
Publisher:	Grove Press
Links: Guardian interview Book site

“There's a hint of tragedy in Costa's tale, the sad fact that the journey from one identity to another will never end, if only because life would become unbearably mundane.”

Review
Chico Buarque, a Brazilian writer best known for his music, begins this pleasantly surreal novel by asking you to believe that there is an annual ghostwriting conference. But he does so with such nonchalant confidence that you don't realize you're being led down a rabbit hole. Or rather, you don't mind.

The narrator, Jose Costa, himself a ghostwriter, travels from Rio to Budapest to meet and cavort with his comrades in the hidden-artist business, but he gets waylaid at the airport and stays in Budapest much longer than he intended — becoming entranced with the language and with his various female tutors as the weeks stretch into months. Eventually, Costa returns home, and is swept up in a wonderfully unpredictable plot involving a memoir he ghostwrites, the fame it brings the "author," Costa's own shaky domestic life, and his obsession with the nuances of linguistic identification — fueled by a return trip to Hungary.

Despite such an indulgent plot, nothing in the novel seems improbable. Costa comments on the unfolding scenes with the sort of stranger-in-a-strange-land attention to detail that creates a dreamlike evenness; no single scene has greater magnitude than others, and the result is that nothing seems out of place. Irregular passages of time — long stretches slip by within pages, while hour-long scenes become entire chapters — enhance rather than distract from the intricate plot.

Having written a novel of ideas, Buarque is certainly trying to make a point, but the novel doesn't march toward a self-righteous, predetermined, sweeping conclusion. Costa the ghostwriter resembles an actor who sheds one character for another, although his key to each new identity is language. There's a hint of tragedy in Costa's tale: the sad fact that the journey from one identity to another will never end, if only because life would become unbearably mundane. Every time Costa boards a plane or puts pen to paper, the reader is invited to join him as he confronts issues of identity, nationality, and personal narrative.
- Tom Roberge

NONFICTION

From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet by Vikram Seth


Published:	1987
Pages:	192
Publisher:	Vintage
Links: Boldtype interview BBC interview Seth's poetry

“To travel across Eastern China in the early '80s was unheard of for a Westerner — to cross into Tibet from China is nearly impossible to this day.”

Review
In 1981, Vikram Seth was an economics graduate student at Stanford University and on a leave of absence at Nanjing University, studying the Chinese language and economic structure. He had published a book of poems, but was not yet the author of that doorstop of a novel A Suitable Boy or the outrageously inventive Golden Gate. After two years in Nanjing, Seth hitchhiked home to New Delhi via Tibet. Fluent in Chinese and garbed in the traditional blue trousers, jacket, and visored cap, Seth recorded his astute observations and candid conversations in From Heaven Lake.

The starting point of From Heaven Lake is in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang. While on an organized tour for foreign students, Seth soon becomes frustrated by the limitations imposed by the trip's "minders" and makes plans of his own. A mixture of guile, doggedness, and luck land him a visa that allows him to hitch from Tibet to Lhasa and on through Nepal to Kathmandu. This is no ordinary travelogue, and Seth is no ordinary traveler — he has an eye for character and vividly describes the land, the people he meets, and the fragility of Tibet's cultural heritage in the wake of China's Cultural Revolution.

It is also true that this is no ordinary journey. To travel across Eastern China in the early '80s was unheard of for a Westerner — to cross into Tibet from China is nearly impossible to this day. Seth describes his fair share of obstacles and irritations, but his main focus is on the unexpected gestures of kindness he encounters in the course of the journey. The author is at home in any part of the world: climbing into lost caverns in Chinese temples or wading in underground canals; playing basketball with officials or Frisbee with waiters; assimilating the quietude of a Chinese shrine and a mosque alike; enjoying a picnic with a Tibetan family he has just met; and, above all, conversing on all topics with an assortment of strangers. Much has been said about how travel broadens one's experience, but with From Heaven's Lake, the reader witnesses it happening.
- Sage Van Wing

PHOTOGRAPHY

Istanbul by Alex Webb and Orhan Pamuk


Published:	May 2007
Pages:	136
Publisher:	Aperture
Links: Artist bio Fototapeta interview Image gallery

“Images frequently find old Muslim temples paired with European cars and streets, and capture neighborhoods ranging from the winding streets of Cihangir and Ayvansaray to the nightclubs of Taksim.”

Review
Perhaps the best way into Alex Webb's photographs in Istanbul: City of a Hundred Names is the accompanying essay by Orhan Pamuk, which examines the Turkish word Hüzün. The term means both caring too much for material possessions, and spiritual suffering as a result of not being able to do enough for Allah. "Istanbul is Hüzün," claims Pamuk, filling more than a page with descriptions of scenes that might well double as descriptions of Webb's photographs.

As the artist explains in his introduction, Istanbul straddles two continents, connecting Asia and Europe to create one of the most diverse cities in the world. Images frequently find old Muslim temples paired with European cars and streets, and capture neighborhoods ranging from the winding streets of Cihangir and Ayvansaray to the nightclubs of Taksim. "Faith" 2001 and "Eminõnü," (2001), for example, open the book and document a familiar relationship with the religious architecture that dominates the landscape. By contrast, the nighttime shots, with glowing reds and greens in bars and lit streets, feature prominently later in the book.

Such photographs build a robust portrait of the city, but even with Pamuk's breathless account and more than 75 photographs of the city, a feeling of incompleteness permeates the book's raw and unpolished documentation. Much like the static and transitory advertisements that appear in Webb's photographs or the shots of people either relaxing in their homes or working and traveling, no distinct emotional state can be attributed to those captured. The images do not depict strict melancholy, nor do they frame elation. Each photograph suggests a city merely on its way to experiencing something else.
- Paddy Johnson

FEATURE Interview: "Dishwasher" Pete Jordan		Over the course of ten years, Pete Jordan had but one goal — to become a dishwasher in all 50 states. Growing up in a working-class household in San Francisco, Jordan used dishwashing as a vehicle to see the country and, eventually, the world. Since dishwashing was an easy gig to take on — and even easier to lose — Jordan used the flexibility and anonymity of the occupation to make a living while traveling according to his own whims. Along the way, he published a popular series of zines simply called Dishwasher, which found an admiring audience and earned him the moniker of "Dishwasher Pete." His status as a contemporary folk legend scored him an appearance on Letterman, regular contributions to This American Life, and now, a memoir of his adventures entitled Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All 50 States. Jordan, who currently resides in Amsterdam, spoke with Boldtype's Kai Hsing about his inspirations, his beginnings in zine culture, and his future plans. Boldtype: Your book in some ways mirrors the quintessential American road trip/travel story. How do you see that fitting into the tradition, if at all? Pete Jordan: Well, I know a lot of reviewers like to throw out On the Road, which I can't avoid, but when I read that book I was already 19, and wanting to get out of San Francisco and travel a lot. And so that was one more log on the fire that fueled me wanting to travel. I actually find it kind of odd when bookstores shelve Dishwasher in the travel section, because I was not consciously trying to write it as a travel book — more of a dishwashing book, or, if anything, a coming-of-age book. BT: In the beginning, your primary goal with dishwashing was to travel. What were some of the major things that made you want to do that? PJ: Growing up here in the city and not traveling at all, I was just curious — reading a lot of maps, buying a lot of maps, reading National Geographic. Not the physical geography, but the cultural geography of different cities or different states always interested me. For more than ten years, I was propelled by riding on that high of seeing new places and going to new towns, and walking around to see what made those places unique — and becoming sad that so many places were becoming less and less unique; the Wal-Martization of the country. In a way I almost felt like I was in a rush against that homogenization of America. BT: Do you think the same kind of traveling and publishing you did then would be possible now? Keep reading »

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BOOK NEWS A few notable bits of recent book news.
Book Ads Through the Ages (NY Times)
Dwight Garner examines how a collection of book advertisements from 1962-1973 influenced a new generation of readers and writers, with vivid images and pithy copy.
*Library of Water* (Guardian)
Roni Horn's Icelandic art installation Library of Water invokes the country's desolate landscape by converting an old library into an "archive" of glaciers.
Don't Mess with Texas (New Yorker)
The University of Texas, Austin, houses a treasure trove of archived literary material, despite accusations of excessive spending.
Zonk! (Wall Street Journal)
Comic-book publishers are starting to corner the teenage-girl market, bringing in a whole new wave of comic heroes largely influenced by Japanese manga.
100 Words (Houghton Mifflin)
The American Heritage Dictionary presents a list of 100 words every high-school graduate should know, leading to a tectonic shift in thesaurus usage.


CREDITS Editors Toby Warner Mark Mangan McKay McFadden Toby Shuster Zolton Zavos Chris Parris-Lamb Paul Laster Nick Merritt Chris Gage Doug Levy Editors-at-Large Larry Weissman Sean McDonald Contributors John Hood Kai Hsing Paddy Johnson H.G. Masters Tom Roberge Sage Van Wing Production & Design Teel Lassiter Jessica Bauer-Greene Morgan Croney Sascha Lewis Andrew Steinmetz Cover Art Alex Webb Eminõnü, 2004 From Istanbul: City of a Hundred Names Courtesy the artist and Magnum Photos, New York Distributed by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved		ABOUT US Boldtype is a monthly, email-based review of books published by Flavorpill Productions. Our mission is to cover five to seven books each month that are worth reading. No money is accepted from any publishers, writers, reviewers, or marketing or PR companies. In addition to this monthly review of books, Flavorpill also publishes ten other email magazines, covering ART, FASHION, NEWS, MUSIC, and cultural events in six cities — NEW YORK, LOS ANGELES, SAN FRANCISCO, CHICAGO, MIAMI, and LONDON. MEDIA PARTNERSHIPS Every month, Boldtype presents one exclusive media partner. Click for more information about advertising opportunities on Boldtype and across all Flavorpill publications. FEEDBACK We welcome any and all feedback — comments, criticism, and even effusive praise. To reach the staff at Boldtype, please email us at editor. SUBMISSIONS If you have a book that you would like us to consider for review, please send an email to books or mail a copy here: Boldtype c/o Flavorpill Productions 594 Broadway, Suite 1212 New York, NY 10012

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