Haunted Traveller [Hardcover]

Barry Yourgrau (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 12, 1999

Barry Yourgrau writes bedtime stories for adults that take on the age-old themes of love, family, sex, and loneliness and shock them to fresh life, dazzling readers with their prodigies of imagination. In Haunted Traveller, his most personal and ambitious work to date, he takes the reader on a post-modern literary journey like no other. Here are forty-four fantastic episodes that together paint an imaginary memoir of one man's yearning, alienated passage through life. Think Bruce Chatwin meets Monty Python. Meets Paul Bowles meets Fellini meets Scheherazade meets The Twilight Zone. Think the moody romance of Travel itself. Haunted Traveller packs readers along on the moonstruck roaming of a lost soul searching for a childhood memento. Wander to tropical hotel rooms to hear deathbed whispers: book passage on a wild sea voyage with a heartbreaking, cross-dressing crew: climb to mountain graveyards where a ghost shops for a live wife; spy on stolen kisses in snowbound palaces. Voyage to lands that exist in the dreams, poetic whimsies, and troubled confessions of a man who's seen all too much.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Barry Yourgrau has always put his own peculiar spin on sudden fiction. His short bursts of prose are as compact as Zen koans and possess the eeriness of detective stories spliced with dreams. In Haunted Traveller: An Imaginary Memoir, an unnamed narrator (who may or may not be Yourgrau himself) recounts various adventures in 44 thematically linked stories. Meandering by boat, foot, plane, soap bubble, and armchair, our traveler finds himself strikingly out of place among the natives of various lands. He does his best to adapt to the cultures of each region, removing his teeth to ward off evil spirits, booking passage on a tramp steamer with a crew of cross-dressing revolutionaries, and enjoying a variety of amorous entanglements along the way. Yourgrau is at his most winning when his traveler's internal disorientation fits hand-in-glove with his outlandish surroundings, as in this passage, where he finds himself decapitated in a dream:

Bizarrely, I catch a glimpse of myself in a gilded mirror: a headless, traumatized figure in gore-rimmed torn pajamas, drink in hand, floating the lamest of bon mots at a crowd of swank, grotesquely ignorant party-goers--in a warm, sumptuous paradise of a room, amid ornate carpets and polished things gleaming in lamplight. The metaphor is so calamitously apt to my life, so cruel, I almost sob with sputtering laughter at myself.

What separates Barry Yourgrau from the surrealist-of-the-month club is the close attention he pays to emotional as well as physical landscapes. There's a subtle feeling driving these stories, something between the thrill of discovery and fear of the unknown. Ultimately, it's this combination that keeps Haunted Traveller so compelling once the journey's over. --Ryan Boudinot

From Publishers Weekly

With the wild humor and fertile imagination that he brought to his previous books (The Sadness of Sex; A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane), Yourgrau offers a dazzling invention that delights and challenges, an imaginary travel memoir whose nameless narrator undergoes outlandish, nightmarish escapades in variegated, unnamed locales and psychic landscapes. Shuttling fluidly from Kafkaesque fable to ghost story to surrealist situation, from romantic farce to extravagant fantasy, the quirky tales that make up this fragmentary, somnambulist narrative often defy easy categorization. In the eerily beautiful "Visit," the narrator, while a guest at his estranged brother's suburban home, stumbles onto a vast subterranean lake, a ghostly realm known only to his niece and nephew, and frequented by his dead parents. In "Clouds," a dark satire on art's redemptive power, the decapitated narrator wanders into a dreamscape: first a costume party where he's suddenly the most desirable guest, then an encounter with a picnicking bear whose childlike demand to be told a story at last comforts the headless man. Metaphysical conundrums abound as our hapless traveler encounters trick-playing natives, grave-robbers, waterfalls that change location, cross-dressing female partisans disguised as seamen to smuggle illegal arms. In "Netting," the wayward narrator is forced to hear a wasted man's deathbed confessions, a litany of squalid losses that turns out to be the narrator's own life story. Although too many of the pieces are anecdotal, repetitious or turn on pat devices, the "memoir" overall urgently speaks to the anxieties, loneliness, wonder and strangeness of travel, which serves as a metaphor for the human condition. This enjoyable, weird excursion poignantly evokes the universal plight of the traveler for whom everywhereAand nowhereAis home. (May) FYI: The Sadness of Sex was recently adapted into a movie in which Yourgrau stars.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing; 2nd edition (May 12, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559704829
• ISBN-13: 978-1559704823
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,661,207 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Haunted Journey... Indeed, June 17, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Orlando) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Haunted Traveller (Hardcover)

The book was thrown my way by someone who read my review of The Beach on this very sight. He raved in a couple short lines about what an amazing book "Haunted Traveller" was... Haunting is more like it. Fragments that create a lucid dreamlike world for adults. This is quite a novel.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Genius genius genius, April 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Haunted Traveller (Hardcover)

I have been reading Barry Yourgrau since Man Jumps out of an Airplane and he is one brilliant, funny guy. The Haunted Traveler is definitely his most ambitious and best book so far. He writes in these short short stories, like three pages each. In this book the stories are closely linked, with the same main character and there's a thematic building going on throughout. It feels almost like a novel. It's just an amazingly satisfying reading experience, both rich and entertaining. I loved it. I love Barry Yourgrau and I love this book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pretty amazing, May 31, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Haunted Traveller (Hardcover)

Hadn't heard of this Barry Y'grau before, a friend turned me on to the book. Pretty amazing, indeed. Book flap copy talks about "Paul Bowles meets Monty Python" (wha?) & "lovechild of Joseph Campbell and Anais Nin" (wha? wha?)-- but all a feeble honrable attempt to give a handle on work like nothing else this one reader has ever read. Fantastical travel, I'd have to call it, mixing humor with spooky and well, plain amazing. Book flap says "postmodern"... which is like saying David Cronenberg is, well, postmodern. Oh well, yes. If you like travel writing at all, climb on board this strange wild astounding book. He has a couple others out, I shall be giving a crack at those too.