Customer Reviews

The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon

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The Moon Come to Earth is a gem of a book. It's a nugget of love felt for a family, a city, and the joy of life itself. If you're interested in Portugal than it's a must, but even if you have never heard of fado, have never (knowingly) felt saudade, and don't even care for futebol, you should read it... it's more about discovery and family and raising a child than it is about Portugal. Every chapter, indeed every page brims with tenderness and humor and are written with a kind of easy mastery that comes only to truly excellent writers. I enjoyed it immensely and can recommend it without hesitation.

Graham takes readers on a surreal romp through Portugal as he encounters both the strange and the luminous: a poltergeist that tinkers with the appliances in his rental apartment; a mysterious, silent ticket-taker who appears more involved with his own inner world of thoughts and dreams rather than the "real" world of the train station where he works; a miniature Portuguese village where small, powerless children loom large as giants. In the spirit of Fernando Pessoa (Portugal's much-revered poet who wrote under a multitude of psudonyms--one for each of his many multiple, writer-ly personalities), Graham also runs up against some of his own secret, conflicting, multiple selves, as well as those of others. In Graham's Portugal, the past, secrets, and ghosts share the stage with the lovely, earthy, realistic details of Portugal--the music, the feasts, the street carnivals, the cobblestones. And some of the synchronicities that occur on Graham's sojourn are so uncanny that the narrative sometimes slips into the realm of the surreal, or magically real. You won't find essays like this anywhere else--a true original.

Philip Graham takes us on a travel ethnography of current culture in and around Lisbon, Portugal. The work is both anthropology and literary reflection and family memoir. Through these three streams of reflection we come to know contemporary Portugal through the fascinating remembering of one of America's most gifted postmodern fiction writers and teachers of creative writing.

"The Moon, Come to Earth" is more than an entertaining and revealing account of today's Portugal; it is also a tender, heart-filled meditation on the joys and hardships of family fieldwork abroad. This new and valuable work builds on Graham's earlier joint account with his wife anthropologist Alma Gottlieb of fieldwork among the Beng people of the Ivory Coast in the 1980s (Parallel Worlds: An Anthropologist and A Writer Encounter Africa).

Sample of Philip Graham's fiction works:

How to Read an Unwritten Language

Interior Design: Stories

Out of his time, out of his place.

So reads the epitaph of an exiled Jew on the islands of Cape Verde, photographed by author Philip Graham's wife Alma, and remembered in this collection of essays on the Graham family's year living in Lisbon.

And although any expat may relate, at times, to that feeling of exile, Graham's book is not a yearning for home, for the familiar. It is the diary-through-essays of a voracious, tireless discoverer of his host culture.

While Graham's far-reaching, intellectual dive into the music, literature, people and history of Portugal are the driving themes of the book, his daughter, Hannah, is the central figure. Her journey was, for me, a frighteningly appropriate reflection of my own expat journey these last few years.

Hannah stumbles through the baby steps of a new language (though she attains fluency enviably quickly), navigates the sharks and eddies of an unfamiliar new social environment, is washed up on a distant beach at the vulnerable stage of almost-adolescent.

I'm much older than Hannah, and yet as I turned pages I felt close to her; despite a warm relationship with clearly loving parents, the closing gates of adolescent silence brought her closer to my solitary expat experience, and I felt her joys and sorrows keenly. Her father paints a warm and sensitive portrait of his daughter, and their relationship is a grounding part of this book, a core tie that extends to the rest of the family, and anchors the exploration in the warmth and closeness of family.

This is where some readers may lose interest - this is not a backpacking, sex- and drug-fuelled romp through the beaches of Portugal; the family rolls their collective eyes at Dad's misadventures (dorky Dad jokes leaping off the page) while Mum does her best to keep him in line. Not much actually happens, which may disappoint adventure-junkies and obsessive travel-blog readers.

But for expats, and expat-writers, Graham's essays are a master-class in the discovery of a new culture. He is open-minded and curious, a fanatic learner about his adopted home - even counting the number of cobblestones on a Lisbon street and extrapolating to calculate those in the entire city. Carefully selected anecdotes are drawn to find the deep similarities behind glaring cultural differences, and the historical and cultural shades of the real differences. An American abroad, he laments the ubiquitousness of American popular culture, where any travelling US citizen bears on his shoulders the weight of shoot-em-up films, gangsta culture, and under-dressed, under-weighted supermodels.

The book is steeped in Portuguese literature; I've added a long list of authors to my "to read" list, and a healthy dose of motivation to my stagnant Portuguese learning. Graham pays homage to many great past and contemporary Portuguese authors, especially the multi-faceted Fernando Pessoa with his multitude of personas (an apt metaphor for expatdom, and for cultures), and finds the source of Portuguese appreciation for their authors in their sea-faring past:

"With so much of the national identity based on great feats of exploration in the distant past, writers are the one's who mainly continue this tradition, though they're plucky, patient explorers of a different sort, discovering interior empires."

Here, the Portuguese are sensitively drawn to life; his recurrent mentions of saudade, a complex, untranslatable sense of longing, tie the book together, give it a depth and poignancy that one would expect an initially disconnected set of essays to have missed. The flavours and smells of the Portuguese's food are sharp and present; their cities and villages brought to intriguing half-light; their music an alternately passionate and haunting melody that follows Hannah's story to an unexpectedly sad but hopeful conclusion. And it only seems right that Graham's memories of the country are as complex and conflicted as the country itself.

I was delighted to come across this book while halfway through my own year in Lisbon. The tales Graham tells of his own struggles with life and bureaucracy in Lisbon were at times laugh out loud funny and at others poignantly sad. You quickly get sucked into the story of his family and the struggles they had in adjusting to life abroad, which he uses to showcase excellent insights into the culture and history of Portugal. A real masterpiece, and a must read for anyone who has ever lived overseas.

This book reads like thoroughly wholesome literary fare. All the good ingredients are there: the signature telling detail (the sliver of the river Tejo seen from the apartment), the self-deprecating humour, the metaphor - now elegant, now clever - the well structured sentences, the savoury cooking recipes. All the comfortably exotic `notes' are deftly played out: the struggle with a cantankerous electric system in the newly acquired flat, the slovenly train ticket seller, the confused taxi-drivers, the hint of craziness in the local traffic, the uphill struggle with a foreign language. In Lisbon the many personalities of Pessoa make their predictable appearance; the well-known argumentative streak of Samarago is shown up to good effect as counterpoint to the author's high-minded political concern about his own country. Other literary figures duly make cameo appearances. The good people of contemporary Portugal get full marks for having returned their country to democracy; their struggle with modern life's precariousness is muffled by a loving description of their joyful resourcefulness in juggling contrasting roles. Persecuted minorities get their just deserts (from Jews to wolves) - and well-calibrated perfunctory dollops of history are placed at strategic turning points in the story. I'll recommend this pleasant - if bland - book for a `creative writing class', or as homeopathic cure for homesickness. They don't come any better.

The theme underlying the narrative is the family facing adjustment adversity in a foreign land - united, loving, attentive, and cooperative before the challenge. There is never a jarring note, nor anger; just mutual understanding, or freely given forgiveness. As the pre-teen daughter struggles, all the right moves - from moving her to a better school, to having her join a choir, to surreptitiously spiking her soup with blended-down chicken breast - are deftly worked out. Only once is this middle-class Panglossian world disturbed: on pg. 135 the author is tempted to advise a Brazilian family about to begin a similar experience in the US: "go back home NOW, now while you can, GO HOME NOW". But this attitude is put down at once on the next page as "self-loathing".

As chance would have it, this book arrived on my desk as I put aside Lev Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata. The two world-views could not be more different. Tolstoy's nightmarish world is one of conflict, chaos, contradiction. Self-hate and moralism struggle painfully - their opposite views never to be resolved. Tolstoy embraces life as he recoils from it - only to die at a railways station as he tries to escape, once more, from his own comfort zone.

In order to understand foreign worlds Odysseus changed his name to `Nobody'. This was not just a clever precaution, but an imperative of survival success: to stay alive in a foreign world one might first escape one's own comfort zone. Millions make Graham's choice each year, not of choice, but of necessity (and without a `home' to return to at the end of the experiment) - and somehow survive. Becoming a `nobody', scuttling most elements of one's `identity' in order to acquire new defining elements is a difficult compromise (in Avishai Margalit's sense On Compromise and Rotten Compromises) to make, often just short of a rotten one. Maybe Mr. Graham will produce next time an engaged - rather than just engaging - story; and return to tell his unique tale?