Customer Reviews

Aa Gill Is Away

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This sorely underappreciated book needs to be read. This guy is one of the funniest and most illuminating writers around, worthy of the highest esteem.

Fresh, intelligent and exciting work.

His piercing, amusing perspectives stimulate emotions the way writing is intended to.

I was recently on a business trip to seattle and ended up at a bookstore with a large wall of recommended books. I was just finishing A Walk in the Woods, the first "travel" book I had read. It was so good, I caught the bug and set off to find other travel writers with irreverent styles and sharp wit and I found AA Gill. The book is geniously designed, concise, and well-written. I had not heard of AA Gill before and so these newspaper columns were all new to me and I picked through them one at a time glimpsing places from around the world like postcards. There is a - how to use this book - segment at the start following the foreward. I studied fiction writing for two years in graduate school and wish greatly that someone, anyone, would have assigned this book to me or at least recommended it. The how to use portion of the book holds secrets and insights into writing that some people might never discover but that any reader upon picking up this book can hold within a few minutes. Highly recommended.

I generally like travel essays. Unfortunately, this is perhaps one of the sparsest sections of the bookstore (especially once you remove the volumes written by Americans pretending to be expats in Italy).

I read this book in one sitting. I read fast, but even so that's not all that common, and is normally something I can say only about an excellent novel. I was sorry for this book to end.

What is presented in this book is a set of travel essays which range in subject from the Sudan to California, Monaco to the British Army's Sniper school. The author's style is as readable as Bryson or Cahill. The author is a bit pretentious (as noted by other Amazon reviewers) in his forward and in his introductory sections for the broad categories of his pieces (North, South, East, and West), but that pretention does not tend to flow into the columns themselves. Gill is perhaps the travel writer for the rest of us, who suggests that you should go see the Taj Mahal, or Havanna, even if it's been done to death because the places are worth going to, even though they are popular. (Reworded then, that they are correctly identified as places worth going to, and that is why they are popular.)

I hope Mr. Gill continues his travels, and that another volume may be published some day.

For those familiar with Gill's writing in GQ and The Times, this book will be a pleasure anticipated and delivered.

For those not familiar with Gill's writing but in search of the modern, English-language essayist this book is an introduction to an artist in the genre. Gill's peripatetic life is documented here and, while he often loves the places he visits, he's at his best when exasperated and furious.

Despite all of that, Gill loves the people he meets (although he'd deny it vehemently) and it comes through in his writing.

A vivid collection of memories from places I'll never visit but which now seem as real to me as my own backyard.

The cover is black. Matte, ominous, "2001" monolith black, the title spelled out in stark white letters. It's a collection of travel writing, but no clues for guessing that when AA Gill is away, he's not sunning his backside in St. Tropez or picking sunflowers in Andalusia (or if he is, he has to good sense not to tell anyone). It's not just the cover that's black and white: Mr Gill takes us to some of humanity's darkest hellholes, but also shines a light in some surprising places. He veers between apoplectic rage and childish glee, but his writing always sears like a quicklime shower. This is travel writing like you've never seen before. Ladies and gentlemen, AA Gill is the new black.

The AA Gill of the title is Adrian Anthony Gill, restaurant and TV critic for the UK's Sunday Times newspaper, travel writer and contributor to magazines such as Vanity Fair and GQ. The key word there is "critic", and Mr Gill has scribbled himself a very profitable byline in being an outrageously, provocatively opinionated ass about most things. In the course of his literary career he has managed to give offense to--in order of decreasing plausibility--animal-lovers, the Germans, the Albanians, and the Welsh. Irritatingly, he also happens to be a very, very talented ass. Mr Gill is the master to the unexpected metaphor and vivid visual imagery, each page hitting you like a psychedelic thunderstorm.

He's also one of the few writers this side of Edgar Allan Poe who appears aware that English is a spoken language, not just a written one. Try reading it out loud, "chuckling children being bathed in tin buckets ... gaggling women at the wheezing water pump filling the first of interminable four-gallon plastic cans", and you realize there's more to Mr Gill than foreigner-baiting. It's travel writing, but at times it's closer to poetry.

"AA Gill is Away" is a collection of 25 travel articles by Mr Gill, previously published in either the Sunday Times or GQ (the latter are easy to spot--they're about either cars or porn), mainly between 1998 and 2001. The book is divided into four sections, titled South, East, West and North, though these divisions only make sense if you happen to be Maltese: Argentina and Cuba are West, but Milan and Monaco are North.

Mr Gill is not a foreign correspondent, and these pieces tend to be more snapshots than in-depth analyses. Often, when he takes us somewhere unexpected or makes us look at something in a new way--he spends several days as the director of a pornographic movie--this is effective and informative. Bethlehem on the eve of the new millennium is a revelation, his piece on sleeping sickness in Uganda is a wakeup call. However, when it really is just AA Gill on holiday, the end result meanders about very prettily but doesn't leave any lasting impressions.

As delightful as the articles are, Mr Gill's hyperactive vocabulary and emotional extremes can be a little wearying. Sometimes, too, he's so busy tossing out Technicolor commentary he forgets there are readers trying to keep up with him. You want to sit him down, fix him some ice tea, and say "Now the Gilly, what was that about Canadians and Cubans being the opposite poles of human variation? Can't make head nor tail of it." What does he mean when he says hating Germans is "the only thing that truly emulsifies us"? I don't hate the Germans; I know what an emulsion is, but I'm clearer of how they work in chemistry than international relations. Maybe the line works better in Britain, as do the references to Britons famous in the UK and not elsewhere.

Intellectually, "AA Gill is Away" is like learning at the feet of Socrates. You shake your head. "If only I could write like this". Emotionally though, it's hard to know how to react to the book. Mr Gill is a professional critic; that is, he earns a living by being contentious. You always wonder how much is heartfelt, how much is calculated to push your buttons. Does he really hate Japan or is that what he thought would make a better story? A little of both, perhaps. No doubt he feels, but also he exaggerates.

I doubt I could be friends with Mr Gill, and I certainly wouldn't want to travel with him. Yet I could read and re-read almost any one of these pieces endlessly and call it perfection. Black, you see, never goes out of style.

Great words that take you places in a way that no other author can. I can't wait for FURTHER AWAY to come out in April 2011. Way to go Gill!

The writer comes across as a conceited and nasty person, for example he wants to throw a TV set in the pool just because the stroke of the swimmer in it is not synchronized.
He does not even bother to check facts; he refers to Los Alamos near Lompoc in California as:" where they dicovered what you can do with a well-split atom". This Los Alamos is in New Mexico a long way away. Taking cheap shots at everything is not amusing.

A boring rehash of old newspaper columns.I'd rather chew sand than be forced to read this pompous nonsense again.
All in all this book was overlong,pointless and poorly written.
Somehow Gill doesn't seem to realise the writing is different from showing off.