Customer Reviews

Sun After Dark: Flights Into the Foreign

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

 

 

Pico Iyer's work generally alternates between fiction and collections of essays, and my personal preference is for the latter. You will find these little jewels scattered in magazines ranging from "National Geographic" to the Buddhist magazine "Tricycle". In his best pieces, he can approach the condensed perfection of Orwell.

There is not a bad essay in this collection, but two of them particularly stand out. At the beginning of the book is an account of a week spent at a meditation retreat with the singer/poet Leonard Cohen. If you're used to the vapid hagiographies in music magazines, this piece is a drink of cool water. It quotes from Cohen's songs, acknowledges the brilliance of his work, gives an unblinking account of his contradictory personality and details his day-to-day life, all in twenty pages. The effect is that of a camera zooming in from a mile above the Mount Baldy Zen Center all the way down to a wart on Cohen's face, and then slowly pulling back again. You'll have to read the piece yourself, preferably while playing "Waiting for the Miracle" in the background.

The other extraordinary piece is "Nightwalking", which describes the surreal experience of jet lag, something the author endures for at least eight weeks of every year. I read it while on an extended air-trip (San Francisco-Hong Kong-Bangalore-Singapore-Seoul-SF in a week) and cannot recall anything on paper describing as accurately an experience I was undergoing at that moment. The walking blankly along thoroughfares at two in the morning, the absurd spasms of emotion, the faces out of Hopper paintings - he has etched a precise portrait here.

His gift for metaphor unmatched. Here is a sentence about the British influence: "The..Empire..stands accused of importing straight lines and right angles to a land of curves, of making the forces of Eternity obey a railway timetable."

How can one resist such lapidary prose?

To say that my reactions to this book were "mixed" would be an understatement. The volume left me, at some points, half-decided to abort reading it altogether, but at others, deeply appreciative that I'd read it.

Pay more attention to the subtitle, "Flights into the Foreign" than to anything you might have read about Iyer being a travel writer in the spirit of the incomparable Jan Morris. That expectation will lead to a frustrated sense of false advertising. Iyer possesses some of Morris's gift for conveying a sense of place, and what it is like to be a stranger in a strange land, but only on occasion does Iyer choose to exercise it.

No, this book is about "flights into the foreign" in a more introspective sense, as in visiting unfamiliar states of mind. Sometimes, this occurs because Iyer has gone to an exotic land. At other times, because Iyer has interviewed someone with a unique perspective. At others, because he has read what he regards as interesting fiction. And at others, simply because Iyer finds himself somewhat out of sorts, for whatever reason.

The book gets off to a rocky start. Not only did I dislike the first two chapters (on Leonard Cohen and the Dalai Lama), I was offended by them. The chapter on Cohen is downright exasperating. It purports to be about someone who is trying to leave the mundane world behind and to find simpler, higher meaning. But in reality it's about Iyer's fascination with celebrity. The name-dropping is endless: Norman Mailer, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Michelle Phillips. I really don't care that Leonard Cohen wasn't able to commit himself to a relationship with Rebecca de Mornay. The chapter is really all about the chic of being celebrated, but affecting not to care. It's a pose that is at least as old as Louis XIV's court, and doesn't impress any more in its modern guise.

The chapter on the Dalai Lama still engages some name-dropping, but tones it down a bit. Still, it's remarkably devoid of a sense of place. Iyer visits the Indian town in which the Dalai Lama lives, but manages to convey very little sense of the place.

On the other hand, there are magnificent selections in this book. "A Haunted House of Treasures," set in Cambodia, is almost worth the purchase price by itself. Granted, Cambodia is a can't-miss subject, as anyone who has been there can testify. But Cohen really conveys what is haunting about the place, the thing that gets into your soul and makes you determined to get back there. He captures the voices of the children, the contradictions in the cultural landscape, the crowing roosters amid the luxury hotel construction. After reading it, my first rreflex was to share it with my wife, so that she could understand the mark that my 1.5 days there left upon me.

But there are other outstanding pieces as well. "Nightwalking," Iyer's rumination on jetlag, is brilliant, and I've never read another travel piece quite like it. It seems a natural subject for travel literature, but in my reading only Iyer has really captured the out-of-body, out-of-normal-behavior sensation of the jetlagged traveler.

Two other outstanding pieces are "The Khareef" and the immediately following piece on La Paz, Bolivia.

This book is a mixed bag. Don't buy it if you are expecting a beautiful collection of travel pieces. Only buy it if you're willing to indulge Iyer's various fascinations, even when they turn superficial and tedious. If you dislike one piece, hang on: there may be a truly beautiful one around the corner.

I loved every page of this book.

I think people looking for a run-of-the-mill "travel memoir" will of course be disappointed. However, that isn't the kind of book this purports to be. It's typical Iyer... a little travel, a little philsophy, a little retrospection, a little self-indulgence. It will take you to various places you may never get to visit, remind you of places you have visited, and take you on a wonderful journey through your own thoughts and beliefs.

If you want a straightforward travelogue or love "package tour" travel, you probably haven't read Iyer's previous books and should skip this one. The later chapters dragged more than the rest of the book, hence, 4 stars. At its best, the book captures the essence of travel as experience--the unavoidable confrontations with self, as well as the opportunities to transcend the mundane, familiar kinds of existence. Iyer spends extended periods in Asia and South America, with stops in the US and Europe. He also relates the experience of going so many places and losing track of place, as well as time. He reflects on change and how our conciousness recognizes it. Like many travelers, he meets interesting people in often unlikely places. He led me to take a deeper look at the Dali Lama and to view Leonard Cohen in a different way. I'd forgotten that Cohen was not only an overrated writer/performer ("Suzanne" was one of the most covered songs of my adolescence and easily one of the most annoying), but also a self-indulgent, mindscrewing, misogynistic jerk. But he appears to have met his match in a Buddhist tecaher and a discipline that takes a deep focus on oneself to the point of getting beyond indulgent self-absorption. The Dali Lama comes across as a well-traveled soul--moving over time, as well as place and culture. Iyer understands the rootlessness, the quest for experience, and the losses that such a life imposes. For people who love adventure and appreciate the adversity of travel, it's a great book.

His best work since "Falling Off the Map." I love the piece on language in India and on Leonard Cohen. He paints his mother (off page in several essays) with elegant brushstroke, and I find myself wanting an essay about her as well. Some of the Buddhist pieces need a tad of editing, but that's a minor complaint.

I've read Video Night In Kathmandu and enjoyed it thoroughly. Pico Iyer is the poet of travel literature. With an admirable way with words, Iyer is indeed a writer like no other.

This collection is simply not as impressive. Some of the stories are so weak in content that I wonder if someone else wrote them. Even though Iyer's observations are sharp and his prose is a pleasure to read, it is obvious that some of the locations were not even thoroughly researched or explored. At the end of the day, the reader gets an earful of what went on in Pico Iyer's mind, with only an inkling of what happened around him.

I bought this book specifically to read about his conversations with the Dalai Lama and his insights on the issue of Tibet. Even though there is some "balance" in his views, I still find his interview to be lacking in substance. Typical of run-of-the-mill articles by Western writers, there's hardly any attempt to see things from the level of common Tibetans - the non-activists.

This book would be an excellent gift for the armchair reader who appreciates colourful prose and musings, but there is really very little information that will be useful to the explorer or reader who wants a bit more factual depth.

The titular star In Sun After Dark comes from Albert Camus, who wrote that he was born "halfway between poverty and the sun." The quote serves as a touchstone and a frame through which to view a disparate collection of essays, the common theme of which aspires to be the search for hope in even the darkest corners of the world.

"We travel most ...when we stumble, and we stumble most when we come to a place of poverty and need...."

In this latest volume of travel reminiscences, British-born Indian Pico Iyer claims to take the reader on a walk through the dark side, essays on visits to some of the world's lost and forgotten countries, from Cambodia, to Yemen, Bolivia and Haiti. And when Iyer sticks to the theme, his writing shines.

"...luxury, for some of us, is measured by the things we can do without."

Unfortunately, it seems either Iyer or the publisher decided to pad out the book with several pieces only marginally related to the theme, and so besides a memorable Kafkaesque journey through Yemen (that will have anyone who has lived on the Arabian peninsula laughing), we also get entirely forgettable book reviews, unrelated (if interesting) visits with Leonard Cohen and the Dalai Lama, and an insightful discourse on jet lag.

"...space and time open up as soon as you take leave of the simples ways in which you define yourself."

I took this book on a recent journey to Vietnam and despite its uneven content it was a mostly rewarding companion. I suspect many readers interested in travel or in Pico Iyer should find in it something of value, if only small passages like the ones I have quoted here, and with which I end.

"One virtue of grandparents, of seasons, or deer who come down from the hills, is that they remind us that we don't know everything, and can't make the world up entirely from scratch; much of it - most of it - is beyond our reach, even beyond our reckoning."

I am Pico Iyer's biggest fan. After his rather spacy and disappointing last novel, I loved this "classic Pico"! I too thought the Leonard Cohen piece was especially amazing and also loved the piece about the Dalai Lama. A very very cool book with lots of beautiful nuggets written, of course, in the most poetic language imaginable. A perfect book for the armchair traveler.

I am a fan of travel writing but Iyer (in this book) is often opaque and sometimes in a muddle. "...the feeling of desolation, the air of stillness and unsettledness." Why use three adjectives when one would have sufficed? Reluctance to edit or be edited? Is "unsettledness" a word?

What about page 72 when an author's words are described as rising "to a pitch of antique sonorousness."? The word is, I believe, "sonority," yes?

Perhaps the cover photo (taken from a moving vehicle) should be a warning. The reader is in for something cobbled together in slapdash fashion - a windy attempt to sell bloated pretensions as engaging and worthy insights

Pico Iyer apparently has something of a cult following, and well, I guess his writing is an acquired taste. He's introspective, and on a first name basis with his old family friend, the Dalai Lama, and hangs out in the mountains above Los Angeles with Leonard Cohen and his Buddhist guru, but for all its potential, none of this was very interesting to me. Jet lag is a theme visited throughout the essays, and reading this book made me feel like I was suffering from it myself.
You don't learn much about the places described (that is, when Iyer actually writes about a place), but you learn about what's going on inside Iyer's head, and frankly, I just didn't get it.