Customer Reviews

The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I ran and bought this book after reading an excerpt in a magazine (I can't remember which). I'd never read Iyer before and left the book impressed by a formidable intellect and attention to details.

I enjoyed magazine piece better than the book. The book was great for the first 50 or so pages and then bogged down I thought until the last few pages. He seemed to be saying a lot of the same things over and over.

I find Iyer does a fantastic job of describing the present world of "disconnectedness". Mind you, I can possibly relate more closesly with this than many readers, sharing a somewhat similar upbringing.

The place I thought this book "fell down" was that Iyer and his friends are not "normal, average people", although he says they are. Unless, of course, average people in your world have parents who teach at Oxford, send their kids to the North pole, and your friends make movies with international casts.

Had Iyer focussed more on (what I'd call) "normal average" people, it would have been great to see his present views on Quebec separatism in Canada, which he barely scratches and which are likely deeply influenced by a lot of what he describes. Nonetheless, his decription of modern Toronto is refreshing and exciting.

It would also have been interesting if he had focused more on the Bangladeshi villager now inundated with western images, the old-guard Torontonian now unable to understand nor read the writing on stores around his neighborhood. A global 2nd hand view of this would have been fascinating and made it a stronger book...in my opinion.

I found this book to be a bit of a disappointment, all the more disappointing for its promise. I share Iyer's conviction that the Global Soul phenomenon is real and important - who among us can say that our personalities do not have some component of Global Soul? - and yet I found Iyer's meditations on it to be frustratingly unfocused. I had read a chapter from this book when it appeared, in a different form, in Harper's a few years back: it was sharp, cogent, witty, interesting, well-observed, and memorable. But freed from the editorial constraints that come with writing for Harper's, the material seems to gain flab; it loses its direction. The book reads something like a few years' worth of notes shaped into memoir form - the notes are interesting, but the subject, at least to my mind, demands something more, an argument, a conclusion, a point, anything beyond just impressions. Iyer comes off as neither a critic of globalism nor a proponent of it - strange, considering that this phenomenon often inspires strong opinions. I'd even settle for ambiguity - I'm a big fan of messy human ambiguity in response to complex topics, and a strong shot of it would do wonders for this book. Instead, Iyer is content to observe and remark in a mannered fashion, dropping the names of the many countries and cultures he crosses paths with as though they were celebrities: exactly the last thing that discourse on this topic needs more of.

I am disappointed with this latest book of Pico Iyer. He is a fine writer and has the ability to picture scenes and behavior superbly. But one comes away from Global Soul confused and unfulfilled. Pico rambles and meanders all over the place and the flow from one issue to the next is unclear to say the least. I was drawn to this book not only by Pico's past work but also its title. At the end however, one feels Pico has succumbed to jet lag and is lost in some mall, never to reach home. Better luck next time.

I had already begun reading this book (have read only a/b the first 50 pages), when I logged on to Amazon, with a view to e-mailing a friend a link to the book. Started browsing through the editorial and customer reviews -- all the editorial reviews v. positive, but majority of the customer reviews quite negative.

My bias is gen. towards the customers (and esp. in this case, since they seem to be more actual travellers, vs. editors who merely review travel writing). Yet, and I find this odd, I actually like what I've read so far (caveat: haven't read it all), though I would agree, to a degree, with some of the negative comments.

Perhaps it's because I can relate. Work in finance. Born & raised in Bombay, studied in the US, lived in China learning Mandarin, now in Toronto and a soon-to-be Canadian citizen. No family, no strong ties to anywhere. Perhaps some those readers who dislike the book can't relate.

Some of the comments I agree with. There is repetition. Tone can sometimes be "whiny", as a few readers note. Iyer should pick up some language skills - I can feel at ease in Bombay or Beijing in large part because I have speak both Hindi and Mandarin.

Other criticisms I don't agree with. E.g., some have commented that Iyer's "global soul" relates to a v. small number of people. Well, that's the going-in position. The book is made of observations about being raised, living and working in multiple cultures/geographies. By definition, it's not going to be relevant for most of the 6 bn + people on the planet. They're not the target audience.

I loved "Video Night in Kathmandu". It was one of the best books I have ever read. Iyer's vivid anecdotes in that book allow a reader to know more about the places he visits. Reading that book gave me a real sense of life in many parts of Asia.

The anecodtes in "The Global Soul", in contrast, only tell me more about Iyer himself. Too much introspection, too little information. "The Global Soul" is an interesting magazine article (which I think I read somewhere) stretched into a very thin book.

This is a good idea for a book, but I don't think he had an inkling of a plan before he sat down to type. He rambles, repetitiously without really stating or arriving at a destination, leaving me hungry for a point. I think he also greatly over-intellectualizes nearly everything.

What happened to the Pico Iyer who wrote the wonderful 'Falling off the Map'? Mr. Iyer was once able to capture the spirit of a foreign place, and his humble, amused, and always acute observations of distant, exotic cultures reflected a keen intellect as well as a keen eye.

Now Iyer, as the world-weary 'Global Soul' comes across more as an ordinary, grumpy foreign correspondent than the wonderful travel-writer that he used to be.

Gone is the loving eye that he had cast on quirky, wonderfully undiscovered lands. Instead, he turns his hardened, more-bitter-than-sweet gaze towards Atlanta, London, and California, with nothing but critical remarks and a barely-tolerable condescending air. Granted, he spared Toronto and Kyoto (but not the rest of Japan) of his barbs for the most part, but it is clear that Mr. Iyer's love of his job is not what it once was. His gift, and the gift of the best travel-writers, was to revel in the differences, good and bad, of foreign cultures and places, and to take with them the good experiences to be had in the *PRIVILEGE* of traveling. Mr. Iyer, who once seemed happy to be alive and experiencing the privilege of globe-trotting and soaking up different cultures, then writing about them for a living, now seems to trudge through most of what he sees, and the sense of the world's splendor in his eyes is now gone.

This is a shame, too, with a man of Iyer's talents and background. While this book does fill in much of his highly unusual, mysterious background, rather than making it intriguing, Iyer seems to only reluctantly fill in the background. He says that while his parents lived in California, they sent him to boarding school and university in England. This was back in the 70's, back when doing so would be even more exorbitantly expensive than it would be now. Yet, Iyer maintains that his parents, as academics, were of only modest, middle-class means. What gives?

I loved some of Iyer's early work, particularly, 'Falling off the Map', in which his love of things new and foreign was palpable, and in which he was able to bring the reader closer to another place through his enthusiasm, playful wit, and keen, insightful observations. I was looking forward to savoring 'the Global Soul', yet found reading it to be slow-going, unenjoyable work. Particularly trying is Mr. Iyer's fondness for endless listing of meaningless specifics-- "(Int'l Blvd) offered a Hard Rock Cafe, a Planet Hollywood, a McDonald's outlet, and a seventy-three-story Westin hotel.."..."Indian cricket teams were Indian, Australian were Australian, English were English, and West Indian were 'Indian, Negro, Chinese, white, Portuguese mixed with Syrian'..."

In fact, endless, meaningless lists dominate this surprisingly tedious-to-read book, as if Mr. Iyer felt that his painstaking attention to specific minutiae and proper nouns were a testament to the breadth of his ability to remember and assimilate details of current world pop-culture, yet still quote from english classics. The resulting mix is a nearly unreadable mix of words, structured so that the places Iyer explores come across as a massive deluge to the human senses. I am sure that this was his intent (his message being that the world is assaulting him with heaps of meaningless sensory overload), yet if this was his true impression, it is not surprising that he did not get much positive out of his experiences at the time.

Mr. Iyer would do well to note that his readership approaches travel-writing for an escape, to be transported and enjoy the thrill of exploring that which can only be experienced through extended travel. Even not-so thrilling, but sobering and eye-opening experiences are of course fascinating and enriching. Most of us with regular jobs are not in a position to thorougly experience many foreign cultures and places, so we must read about it and see it through the eyes of those who are lucky enough to experience it first-hand. If we wanted amateur negative commentary on what is wrong with our respective societies, we can do so much more easily and succinctly by watching the news or reading the newspaper. After all, Mr. Iyer has the nerve to slam the city of Atlanta for its poor and homeless, yet unashamedly whine about his treatment as a 'Global Soul' (and a privileged one at that) at the hands of English and Japanese officials while he globe-trots between the two countries.

Despite everything you read in this book, the world is *still* a wonderfully wide, diverse, and stimulating place!

It's always interesting to read someone else writing about you, or your family, or the place where you live. At best, you might gain insights you would otherwise have overlooked; at worst, you learn how generalizations are made, and how quick, second-hand judgements distort the facts. I've liked much of Iyer's work before, and eagerly read his chapter in The Global Soul on my hometown, Toronto ("The Multiculture".) My heart sank, unfortunately, when old stories were told inaccurately, and current events were misinterpreted in the service of a thesis that, apparently, the writer had no intention of contradicting.

The old story of the Christie Pits riots are recalled quickly as a nightmare race riot where "the entire city" violently attacked its Jewish population "at play" in a park. More than a mere exaggeration, it turns an ugly incident from the inter-war years into a cartoon of intolerance that does no service to the fact that a small contingent of anti-Semites and fascists were met with equal resistance from hundreds of Jews (and non-Jews). It's the equivalent of saying that Oswald Mosley instigated the whole of London to attack the Jews of that city.

At another point, Iyer identifies Aloyzius Ambrozic as the new Anglican archbishop of the city, in an attempt to make his point that the racial demographics are changing from the WASP hegemony of old to a new, multicultural future. Cardinal Ambrozic, alas, is the Catholic archbishop of the city. (Terence Finlay is the Anglican archbishop of the city and metropolitan of the province -- but it just doesn't make such a good story, though, does it?) According to the acknowledgements, this was information provided by a friend after the fact, but the fact that his friend got it wrong -- and that no fact-checker caught it -- is even more telling, to my eyes.

Toronto was never a primarily Anglican city -- Scots Presbyterians had more say in its running during its Victorian era of prosperity -- and the ruling class here was never so monolithically British as Iyer, and many city histories, like to pretend. Today, Catholics -- Italian, Portugese, and Latin-American -- outnumber Anglicans of all nationalities by a huge majority; the fact that Iyer's source knew Ambrozic's name and not Finlay's is quite telling. The Orangeman's parade here has long since subsided into a straggling tradition, far less vital than, say Caribana, or the countless saint's day parades.

Toronto IS a multicultural city, but Iyer's description of it betrays more about his own, post-colonial upbringing, than it tells the truth of this huge, ill-defined municipality. The two points outlined above, while (obviously) nit-picking, hopefully intimate the kind of faulty conclusions and presumptions that "flying visits" like the ones Iyer made to Toronto inevitably produce. The old chestnut about "Thinking globally and acting locally" might have more implications than it seems, and Iyer's book makes you wonder about what other inaccurate generalizations are being made, and turned into "common knowledge", as we struggle to grasp the ever-larger world in which we live.

Pico Iyer is one of the most beautiful writers around. I know few writers who can write as beautifully as he does. Though it is dated, Video Night in Katmandu, is a right on the mark look at travelling throughout Asia. And his Lady and the Monk is simply one of the best books you will ever read. Lady and the Monk is as close to Japan as you can get without actually being there.

It was with the in mind, that made me purchase his latest book immediately upon release. However, I never read The Global Soul after reading bad reviews in the Times and on Amazon here. Instead I read the biographies of Ataturk and Hirohito. I picked this book up again to kill the time before reading the new biography of Ho Chi Minh.

Like Iyers other works, this book is great. Many of the critics of this book point to the disjointness of the story, which is true but this is done on purpose. The book is as confused to create a jet lag type state which is a fundamental part of the book.

Iyer is not for everyone. Iyer is the type of writer that Asia travellers will get the most out of. That is the bottom line. The appreciate this book one must do a lot of travelling to Asia and at the same time know a lot of people who travel. If this is not you, I do not think you will like the book.

But again, if you enjoy travel narratives with a heavily slant towards East Asia, read this book.

Iyer is a great writer and I enjoyed this book a lot.

Iyer is an entertaining writer. That's why I read him. This book, although not excellent, is good (I like "The Lady and the Monk" better though). I really enjoyed the last chapter of the book about his experiences as a foreigner in Japan. I could relate because I too, lived as a foreigner in Japan. But the remainder of the book came across to me as a little bit too much. In other words - exaggerated and overdone. But this is not a worthless book. It's merit comes in remembering that these are the author's ideas and experiences - not everyone else's.