Customer Reviews

Molvania: A Land Untouched By Modern Dentistry (Jetlag Travel Guide)

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I would have never thought those comprehensive Lonely Planet guides would be ripe for parody. However, this book is hilarious, an observant mock-guidebook to a fictitious Eastern European country named Molvania, which sounds like a cross between the Marx Brothers' Freedonia from "Duck Soup" and the duchy of Grand Fenwick from "The Mouse That Roared". So backward is this new backpacker destination that "visitors can share a glass of locally brewed zeerstum (garlic brandy) while watching a traditionally dressed peasant labourer beat his mule". Sadly the country suffers from "bleak post-war cities and deforested hills", but at least the adventurous traveler can revel in the capital city of Lutenblag, where one can enjoy a traditional Molvanian puppet show or use the particularly unique female urinals installed all around town. Surely any book that provides the complete list of asbestos-free restaurants has to be considered essential preparation reading.

What I enjoy most about this book isn't so much the imaginative and rather sadly destitute world the co-authors created, but the way they capture the condescending tone that mimics accurately the smugly conveyed expertise of the writers behind the Lonely Planet and Rough Guide books. For example, in explaining the complexity of the Molvanian language, the co-authors state in pseudo-helpful prose: "There are four genders: male, female, neutral, and the collective noun for cheeses, which occupies a nominative sub-section of its very own. The language also contains numerous irregular verbs, archaic phrases, words of multiple meaning and several phonetic sounds linguists suspect could represent either a rare dialect or merely peasants clearing their throat." Priceless stuff here. The aptly named Jetlag Travel editors apparently have an entire library of upcoming titles, which sound equally amusing. I can't wait. So pack your toilet paper and bring those water filter tablets, as the good, dentally challenged people of Molvania will welcome you with a hearty "Zlkavszka!". Just make sure you read the instructions on how to leave before you get there. Bon voyage!

"Kyunkasko sbazko byusba?" tops the list of useful phrases in this well-conceived parody of overly stuffy travel guides (like Fodor's), and, of course, translates into "Where is the toilet paper?" The book is essentially a realistic looking satire of real-world travel guides and carries the joke to the extremes of realism including fake maps, photographs (real, yet surreal), phrases, lists of eateries and hotels, etc.

The guide details such attractions as the "Museum of Medieval Dentistry" (Muszm Dentjk Medjvl), which features a 150 minute presentation on Inflammatory Gum Disease. Details like that and the fact that the Molvanian diet is largely based on parsnips and pickled herring contribute to the faux-authenticity of this book, which is further aided by the realistic "Jetlag Travel Guide" binding.

At least one reviewer took offense that this book mocked Eastern Europe, but I don't agree: the book specifically invented a fictional country to avoid ridiculing a real nation. There is certainly no mistake that Eastern Europe is economically behind the west, but given that this book was clearly written as satire, I think in general that a reader would have to be unusually sensitive to be truly offended by this work; I agree with noted travel author Bill Bryson: "this book is brilliantly original and very, very funny." The book is a bit redundant and lengthy, which are the main detractors, in my view. It is a "one joke" book, but it is a good joke, and a very well executed one at that.

Yes, this is a one-joke parody. It's not so much what they say but how they say it. It is a brilliant parody of travel guides. However, just like a real travel guide, it quickly becomes boring to linearly read through. The best way to read it is just pick it up and open it to a random page. Read a few pages and then set it aside while you are still chuckling.

The three authors have created a brilliant parody of those travel books that always have a slightly optimistic edge to the copy despite the country they are writing about possibly being a bit of a third-rate dump. The contents follow the usual format, a brief survey of Molvanian history, geography, culture, food and drink, theatre and the arts, how to get there etc, etc and as this is Molvania there are some useful words on crime and ATMs.

The rest of the book is devoted to a full description of the five regions with information about the main towns, hotels, where to eat and what to see. In fact just what you would expect to see in any travel guide and this is why I think the book is just stunning, it looks so convincing. The attention to detail has paid off, with little colour code squares on the edge of each page, central area street maps of each town, hotel references (with those little symbols for bed, phone, karaoke or toxic spa) the use of bold type in the text to emphasise things to see or do, color panels with Traveller's Tips, dozens of photos obviously carefully chosen to depict negative aspects of the country and at the back an index, a detailed map of Molvania and a map of the capital (Lutenblag) transport system. It just looks so real and I think it is a tribute to the authors that they have managed to keep the parody text credible to the last page.

As is usual with travel guides the publishers have a plug for their titles, other Jetlag Travel Guides include, for instance, 'Let's Go Bongoswana' (formerly known as Belgium East Congo) 'Surviving Moustaschistan' (Central Asia's forgotten jewel, tucked between the break-away Soviet state of Kalashnikov and the former Persian province of Carpetstan) or how about 'Sailing the Syphollos Straits (another forgotten jewel near the oil-drenched capital of Port Halitosis)

I haven't quoted any of the great stuff in this book, you can get a flavor of this by going to Molvania (via Google) to see some pages from the book but here is a useful phrase, "Sprufki doh craszko" (What is that smell?)

As a Molvanian native, I thought at first that this is yet another one of those soulless Western monographs, good only to patronize and condescend to the locals.
Imagine my surprise then when, on close scrutiny, I found how the team at JETLAG has managed to compile an accurate and actually useful guide, an opus that will serve well all travelers, past and future, to Molvania and beyond. I find that the maps especially are a treat in their accuracy and detail, especially considering that you cannot buy maps in Molvania proper. Details of cuisine and local customs are also accurately captured, and their flavor stays with you even longer than the hangover.
There is one omission in this travel guide, however, one that I hope will be addressed in future editions: a section addressing the needs of business travelers is sorely lacking, and visiting business persons will find that they need all the help they can get while transacting their affairs with Molvanian tycoons.
Otherwise, a well deserved five stars - especially that hey have used my picture for the book cover.

PS - To all Molvanians and neighboring natives who have spoken negatively on this one: please lighten up, this is a fine read (two minutes at a time), one of the best jokes related to that part of the world, enjoy it!

I lived in Romania for two years and travelled to Moldova and Bulgaria several times, and boy could I relate to this book! It's the book I should've written; it's like they went through my journals and letters home. I also appreciated their parody of other travel guides, like the Lonely Planet series. Like other reviewers have said, it's not a book to read all in one sitting - it's more of a coffee table (or bathroom) humor book.

I'm a Yank fortunate enough to have purchased and read this book almost a year ago while in New Zealand. Now I'm buying several copies for friends... It's spectacularly funny, very authentic in appearance -- look at every page carefully, the smallest details are some of the best, like the individual street names on the city maps, and those are mostly in about a six-point font.

Simply said, I was reading this book in public, and was laughing so hard I started to cry. I decided I couldn't read it in public anymore. Here's to hoping that some of the promised sequels are really on their way to the publisher as I write...

A brilliant parody of travel writing and a merciless satire of more ridiculous aspects of Eastern Europe, this is a healthy cold shower in a deluded world of bleeding-heart intellectuals pretending to admire every place on earth as long as it is not America.

Having been born in Lithuania and freely confessing of my Eastern European heritage (which some consider offended by this humorous book), I say this to you: yes, it is perfectly acceptable to laugh at unfamiliar cultures, especially if there is no evidence that a country may offer a great deal of objectively valuable material to admire.

After all, the Eastern Europeans (and pretty much everyone else) laugh at America, UK, Western Europe and their neighbours. It is called harmless fun. It is acceptable precisely because it is harmless.

And there is nothing wrong with making fun of filthy toilets, lame "ethnic" restaurants, bumpy roads, grotty hotels and pathetic parochial "landmarks" that are of no serious interest to anyone in the world. Condescending? Maybe. Do the countries of the authors of this book also have ridiculous and stupid things? Absolutely.

In the world before political correctness, it was acceptable to laugh at things which were funny. Of course, this arrangement did have its downside: occasionally people would get offended. It is like skiing: sometimes you fall down, and may even get hurt. But skiing is fun, that's why people do it.

And humour is like that, and should be like that. If it is worth anything at all, humour may - and will - offend at times. A humour which is incapabale of offending is also incapable of making people laugh.

It is doubly acceptable and admirable to poke fun at writers of similar literature who write this kind of stuff about real countries, because they do not even have an excuse of ignorance. The self-important, talentless, annoying bores (about half of them work for Lonely Planet, others are equally distributed between all the remaining guidebook publishers), who are on the shining path of setting the world right, deserve every bit of ridicule that this book throws at them.

This book is a long-awaited kick in the teeth to the entire lazy, cliche-happy, lowest-common-denominator industry of shamelessly bad travel writing, with its pathetic prefabricated babble about "narrow cobbled streets", "colorful markets" and "local character". You thought those half-witted authors with an imagination of a telemarketing copy writer could not be stopped? Well, now the tables have been turned. Enjoy the revenge.

Along with Graham Chapman's A LIAR'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Jerome K. Jerome's THREE MEN IN A BOAT, and Neal Pollack's THE NEAL POLLACK ANTHOLOGY OF LITERATURE -- not to mention the long-out-of-print National Lampoon TRUE FACTS collections -- MOLVANIA is one of those books you just can't read in public, because you're howling with laughter, you can't breathe, you can't see, the dumplings are coming out your nose, and everybody thinks you've got mad cow disease a long time undiagnosed. It's inspired, it's clever and it's really, really funny.

Zlkavszka. ("Hello" in Molvanian)

I've written a few chapters in travel guidebooks over the years, and in my travels I've leafed through many more of these sometimes-haughty volumes. That background was enough for me to instantly smile at the idea of a fictional satire like The Jetlag Travel Guide to Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry. The idea at first seems so simple and clever that it's surprising someone didn't come up with it sooner.

Unfortunately, like a comedian who only tells jokes about one subject, this gag started to wear thin long before I reached the end. I've seen some criticism of this book for being insensitive toward Eastern Europe, where the made-up republic of Molvania is purportedly located. But I think the real problem is that my knowing smiles at the purposely bland explanations of Molvania's currency exchange and mail service soon give way to the ability to almost guess the punch line before reading it.

The book does have its moments, mostly because authors Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, and Rob Sitcht are skilled at accurately mimicing the tone of various travel guides found in any backpacker's backpack. Amazingly, the book seems to have given birth to a cult of misinformation about this would-be country: one bogus news report I saw announced that Molvania had been removed from the Eurovision song contest, where it would have competed with a song written in badly broken English that starts with the words in the title to this review (the music video is available online).

Despite its strengths, I see the whole project as an intelligent and worthwhile joke stretched far beyond its value. I have read that there are more Jetlag Travel Guides on the way -- one about a made-up Latin American backwater, and another about a fictional African nation. After reading the Molvania edition, I can only hope that the announced future plans are another elaborate hoax like the one that created this unfortunate toothless republic.

Grovzsgo! ("Goodbye" in Molvanian)