Book Lust to Go Page 6

  Another enjoyable choice for those who enjoy off-the-beaten-track accounts is Welcome Home: Travels in Smalltown Canada by Stuart McLean. It includes vignettes from eight towns all over Canada, including Maple Creek, Saskatchewan; Dresden, Ontario; St.-Jean-de-Matha, Quebec; Sackville, New Brunswick; Oxwarren, Manitoba; Nakusp, British Columbia; and Ferryland, Newfoundland. (I’d never heard of any of them, and trust most of you haven’t, either.) But as McLean hunkers down for a longish stay in each town, we come to know not just the residents of the place, but also its patchwork quilt, and how that history fits into the larger history of the times, including the separatist movement in Quebec, racial issues in Ontario, and more. McLean’s book, published in 1993, doesn’t reflect its age.

  Anything that Jan Morris writes, I’ll read, because of her incisive descriptions, her grasp of history, and her ability to pick just the right examples for any point she chooses to make. Even though O Canada: Travels in an Unknown Country is now almost two decades old, the descriptions she offers of ten Canadian cities—St. John’s,Toronto, Montreal,Yellowknife, Banff, Saskatoon, Edmonton, St. Andrews, Ottawa, and Vancouver—will still make you want to go visit them.

  Once I tell you the plot of The Girls by Lori Lansens, you might have to overcome a certain discomfort before you pick it up, but please don’t let the subject matter—the story of conjoined twins Rose and Ruby Darlen—prevent you from reading what is one of the most humane, touching, and beautifully written books you’ll read this or any other year.

  Tom Allen’s Rolling Home: A Cross Country Railroad Memoir is hard to find, but—especially if you’re keen on travel by railroad, as I am—worth looking for. It was published a few decades ago, but it’s still evocative, informative, and engaging.

  Other books either by Canadians or about the country include those by Miriam Toews—my two favorites of her novels are The Flying Troutmans and A Complicated Kindness; for pure fun, take a look at Douglas Coupland’s three volumes of Souvenir of Canada in which you’ll find some iconic Canadiana by a native son: everything from “stubbies” to two-headed geese; two superb novels by Emily St. John Mandel—Last Night in Montreal and The Singer’s Gun; the works of Paulette Jiles, whose fiction is not set in Canada but whose ability to bring a place and characters to life shines through in such titles as The Color of Lightning (Texas) and Enemy Women (the America Civil War); mystery fans shouldn’t miss the gripping novels of Giles Blunt, all set in Northern Ontario—my favorite is Forty Words for Sorrow; and don’t forget Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Robertson Davies.

  CAVORTING THROUGH THE CARIBBEAN

  The first thing you’ll want to read before heading off to the land of sun and sea is the dictionary, to figure out how you’re going to pronounce it: kar-ə-bē-ən or kə-ri-bē-ən. The first is widely used in the United States, while the latter is the preferred pronunciation when you’re “in country.” My advice is to pick one and stick with it, no matter where you are. I’ve gone with the second, for what it’s worth.

  Here are the countries I’m including in this section—Antigua, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad and Tobago.

  Antigua

  Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid is a lovely coming-of-age novel. Though Annie John grows up on Antigua, I think the feelings she experiences are universal. Most of Kincaid’s novels and short story collections deal with life in the West Indies.

  Cuba

  When I read Three Trapped Tigers, Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s 1958 novel (and acknowledged masterpiece) in the one language I’m fluent in—English—I was sorely tempted to learn Spanish, just so I could read it in the original and experience it in situ, as it were, for so much of the wordplay and sense of fun must inevitably be lost in translation, no matter how excellent the translator(s)—in this case, Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine, in collaboration with the author. Even in English, though, the setting—pre-Revolutionary Cuba—came thoroughly alive. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in Latin American literature or Cuban history and literature, as well as for fans of Borges, Nabokov (particularly Pale Fire), and Luis Fernando Verissimo. In fact, anyone taken with verbal high jinks will find this a delight.

  Other books—fiction or nonfiction—that help us get a feel for this country only ninety miles from our border that has played such a major role in our national psyche include:

  Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs’s riveting One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War. Although there have been numerous books written about 1961’s Cuban Missile Crisis, it appears (from a nonscientific survey that I did recently among friends and family) that few people remember the details of an event that, along with the 1940s Berlin blockade and resulting airlift, demonstrated the political realities of a post-war, Cold War world.

  Rachel Kushner’s multilayered novel Telex from Cuba offers a portrait of Cuba in the years culminating in 1958’s revolution, using a multiplicity of voices and viewpoints to describe the social and political realities during the decades-long setting of the American sun over the island. The writing, filled with memorable phrases and descriptions, carries the reader along effortlessly.

  In 1970 Mexican journalist Alma Guillermoprieto spent six months teaching modern dance in Cuba. Her story, told in Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution, explores not just her life and career, but also the history of her “adopted” country and the revolution she supported.

  NPR reporter Tom Gjelten’s fascinating history of Cuba is described through the experiences of five generations of the Bacardi (think rum) family in Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause.

  An excellent history of the early military involvement of the United States in Cuba can be found in Evan Thomas’s The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898.

  Havana: Autobiography of a City is Alfredo José Estrada’s hymn of love to his native city.

  Dervla Murphy (whose name you’ll encounter many times in the pages to come) describes her trips to Cuba in The Island That Dared: Journeys in Cuba.

  And don’t forget Graham Greene’s unforgettable Our Man in Havana. It’s both an entertaining satire of the spy genre and a picture of pre-Castro Cuba.

  Dominican Republic

  Julia Alvarez’s historical novel In the Time of the Butterflies is a heartrending, fact-based story of the Mirabal sisters during the dictatorial reign of Trujillo.You can watch my interview with Alvarez at www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=3030606.

  Junot Díaz’s Drown is a collection of harsh and beautiful stories set both in the D.R. and among the Dominican immigrants in New York; and you simply shouldn’t miss his utterly remarkable novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, about a New Jersey teenager dreaming of becoming the Dominican Republic’s J. R. R. Tolkien. If audio books are your thing, this is a good one to choose.

  I don’t usually like true crime—too scary to think that these things actually happened—but I found an exception to be J. B. Mackinnon’s Dead Man in Paradise: Unraveling a Murder from a Time of Revolution, the story of the murder of the author’s uncle, a missionary in the D.R.

  Haiti

  Edwidge Danticat’s memoir Brother, I’m Dying will likely bring you to tears, as it did me. Danticat opens the book with a day in 2004 when she learns that she is pregnant and that her father, André, is dying of pulmonary fibrosis. These two events, one happy and the other tragic, bracket Danticat’s story of two brothers—her father, who decided to leave Haiti for the possibilities of a better life in New York, and her uncle, Joseph, her “second father,” who chose to remain in Haiti.

  It’s not easy to find a happy book about Haiti, but Danticat’s After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti fills that particular bill.

  While I don’t suppose you could call Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World particularly cheerful, it is bo
th insightful and inspiring.You can watch my interview with Kidder at www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=3031003.

  If you want a little background, and/or have a particular interest in voodoo or Zora Neale Hurston, try her fascinating Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, an account of her experiences learning voodoo practices in those countries during the 1930s.

  Jamaica

  Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s novels The True History of Paradise and The Pirate’s Daughter both offer compelling portraits of people living in this island nation.

  The Jamaican American Colin Channer is a writer not to miss. I first discovered his work in Iron Balloons: Hit Fiction from Jamaica’s Calabash Writer’s Workshop, which he edited. Although The Girl with the Golden Shoes is set on a fictional Caribbean island, it’s pretty clearly Jamaica. The stories in his collection Passing Through have a sultry beauty.

  The Rastafarians by Leonard E. Barrett is an accessible history of the religious movement that began in Ethiopia and traveled to the Caribbean. It’s a valuable introduction for those of us unfamiliar with its history, influences, and practices. Even though I am not a particular fan of Bob Marley’s music (and he’s the one who is most responsible for bringing the religion to the attention of music lovers worldwide), I found Barrett’s book captivating.

  And don’t forget all of Andrea Levy’s novels, including Fruit of the Lemon, Small Island, and her newest, The Long Song, set during the last years of slavery on the island.

  Puerto Rico

  Steven Torres writes a great series of mysteries set in a small town in Puerto Rico. The first is Precinct Puerto Rico, but there’s no real need to read them in order.

  I found The Noise of Infinite Longing: A Memoir of a Family—and an Island by Luisita López Torregrosa to be a mesmerizing account of growing up not only bilingual, but bicultural.

  Rosario Ferré’s early novels were written in Spanish, but she then turned to writing directly in English. Her second novel in English is Eccentric Neighborhoods; it offers a panoramic view of Puerto Rico as seen through the lives of one particular family.

  Love and revolution in the 1950s are at the heart of Captain of the Sleepers, a novel by Mayra Montero. It’s translated by Edith Grossman, who’s one of, if not the, foremost translators of works from Spanish to English.

  For those interested in Puerto Rico’s colonial past, don’t miss Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’s difficult (in the same way Borges is difficult) but exhilarating (in the same way Borges is exhilarating) novel, The Renunciation.

  The lives of five generations of African Puerto Rican women are explored in Daughters of the Stone by Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa.

  In Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary: The Long Lost Novel, we get an exuberant picture of the drinking life in Puerto Rico in the 1950s.

  Trinidad and Tobago

  Noir mystery fans shouldn’t miss Trinidad Noir, part of the Noir series published by Akashic Books. This one is edited by Lisa Allen-Agostini and Jeanne Mason. Dark, dark, dark, or should I say to better effect: noir, noir, noir.

  Earl Lovelace’s Salt shows the effects of colonialism on Trinidadian society and explores the diversity of its populace. But this is definitely not a humorless treatise—it’s instead a novel that’s alive with people and ideas; a must-read for anyone interested in Trinidadian history and culture.

  Trinidad’s Nobel Prize-winning writer V. S. Naipaul turns to nonfiction in The Loss of El Dorado: A Colonial History. Fiction readers won’t want to miss Naipaul’s novels that are set in his birthplace—The Mystic Masseur and A House for Mr. Biswas are my two favorites of his early novels.You might want to read his own writing before you tackle his biography: The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French. I usually think it’s better to get to know a person’s writings before you meet him or her in person.

  I’ve also enjoyed the novels of Elizabeth Nunez, especially Bruised Hibiscus and Anna In-Between.

  And the Others . . .

  Don’t forget the other Caribbean Islands and their authors, including St. Lucia’s Derek Walcott, who won the Nobel Prize in 1992. Try Omeros, a retelling of Homer that is set primarily in the waters of the Caribbean. And Maryse Condé writes about her grandmother’s life on the island of Marie-Galante, a dependency of Guadeloupe, in Victoire. The author calls this mix of family history and fiction a “reconstitution.” Whatever you call it—novel, biography, or a combination of the two—it’s one of the best depictions of island life.

  CHESAPEAKE BAY

  I went to college in Annapolis, Maryland, and still remember how beautiful the Chesapeake Bay area was. Here are some books that give you a sense of its appeal, as well as making clear that beauty is often only skin deep, and the ecology of the place (both natural and man made) doesn’t make one sanguine about its future.

  Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay by William Warner

  Chesapeake by James Michener

  An Island Out of Time: A Memoir of Smith Island in the Chesapeake by Tom Horton, who reported on environmental issues for the Baltimore Sun newspaper

  Mason’s Retreat, a novel by Christopher Tilghman

  Skipjack: The Story of America’s Last Sailing Oystermen by Christopher White

  Song Yet Sung, a historical novel by James McBride

  The Tidewater Tales: A Novel and The Development by John Barth

  The Waterman: A Novel of the Chesapeake Bay by Tim Junkin

  CHINA: THE MIDDLE KINGDOM

  In the thirteenth century, the great traveler Marco Polo supposedly spent seventeen years with the emperor Kublai Khan. In Polo’s memoir, The Description of the World, he describes Kublai Khan’s magnificent palace. Or at least some scholars think he is describing what he saw—others believe that Polo was never really in China at all and simply concocted his description from merchants and others that he met along the Silk Road. We don’t have to decide here whether or not Polo actually went to China and wrote about it—enough other people did to keep us reading for years, if not decades and lifetimes. In fact, books about the Middle Kingdom could probably fill Book Lust To Go, so I had to be very picky about what I included. Here then, in alphabetical order by author (and including both fiction and nonfiction, old and new), is where I’d begin my reading.

  Joe Bennett’s Where Underpants Come From: From Checkout to Cotton Field: Travels Through the New China and Into the New Global Economy (I’ve also seen editions with a slightly different subtitle.)

  Isabella Bird’s The Yangtze Valley and Beyond: An Account of Journeys in China, Chiefly in the Province of Sze Chuan and Among the Man-tze of the Somo Territory

  Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (gut-wrenchingly painful subject, handled with dignity)

  Leslie T. Chang’s Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China

  Da Chen’s two memoirs: Colors of the Mountain and Sounds of the River

  Shen Congwen’s Border Town (a novel set before the Chinese Revolution and originally published in 1934)

  Fuchsia Dunlop’s Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China (great cover, too)

  Gretel Ehrlich’s Questions of Heaven: The Chinese Journeys of an American Buddhist

  Emily Hahn’s China to Me

  Peter Hessler’s three marvelous books: River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze; Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present; and Country Driving: A Journey from Farm to Factory (It’s in the latter that Hessler coins the phrase “sinomapped” for those frequent times when his out-of-date book of driving maps led him to dead ends, nonexistent roads, and other untenable situations.)

  Ha Jin’s stories, collected in Ocean of Words and A Good Fall

  Lincoln Kaye’s Cousin Felix Meets the Buddha: And Other Encounters in China and Tibet

  Yiyun Li’s The Vagrants

  Jen Lin-Liu’s Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through
China

  Rosemary Mahoney’s The Early Arrival of Dreams: A Year in China

  W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil

  Zachary Mexico’s China Underground

  Kirsty Needham’s A Season in Red: My Great Leap Forward into the New China

  Jiang Rong’s novel Wolf Totem

  Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China, a solid yet readable history of the country that covers the sixteenth century to 1989

  Jonathan Tel’s The Beijing of Possibilities is a collection of stories set just before the 2008 Olympic games that—despite their surrealism and Italo Calvinoist tendencies (that’s a compliment, actually)—depict Beijing in all its contradictory glory and shame.

  Among the other plusses of Colin Thubron’s Shadow of the Silk Road—an intricate weaving of history, sociology, philosophy, and contemporary events along a seven-thousand-mile journey—there’s one brilliant sentence that I felt summed up modern China—that is, China of the twenty-first century: “All at once the future had grown more potent than the past.” Those dozen words lead one in so many different directions: the Cultural Revolution, the life and death of dynasties, Islam, Buddhism, the Internet; they offer so much to think about. And don’t miss Thubron’s other great travel book about this country, Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China.