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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not for cyclists but armchair travellers, February 4, 2003
Brian Hall's enjoyable account wants to accomplish different goals. One, how one bicycles across Balkans and Carpathians and the plains in between, is surprisingly absent from much of the text. Looking at the map of his route, you realize how little of it he describes in detail. Not a bad thing in itself, for the day-by-day relation of one's travel wherever it is gets annoying--like seeing home movies of another's trip--but it left me wondering why the mechanics of the route gain only attention when the bike breaks down. Almost no sensation of going up and down what must be magnificent vistas appears here; you forget that he's pedalling for months, and the heights are rarely present. Only the stays on the dreary flatlands (with one great exception in Melnik, admittedly).Now these two points--breakdown and stay in mountain hamlet--are highlights of the book, and Brian's meeting with a know-it-all "fixer" in a horrible industrial city is told remarkably well, but still I was left ignorant of so much that must have happened along the route just in terms of being on the saddle. Perhaps Hall wants to focus on the human side? Second goal of the book. In his Romanian visit with Georgina and her letter, he again gets to the heart of living under constant and evasive scrutiny. He lets one incident speak presumably for many others.
His economical telling of these events makes them engrossing, but you wonder: why so few events given the length of his route and the folks he must have seen? His natural descriptions are sparing, less vividly told than, say, his predecessor Patrick Leigh Fermor. But when he chooses to relate his visions they are wonderful: cakes in a bakery, brush fires at twilight, that mountain village near the Greek border, and the Chain Bridge in Budapest all receive glowing but tempered vignettes. His language is tbat of the Harvard grad you'd expect: mercifully not too bookish, savvy and colloquial, but with a hint of deeper insight and erudition sprinkled in when appropriate among the clearly told scenes. He intersperses historical accounts inro the work, not as smoothly as Fermor, more like an another American visitor a decade later, Eva Hoffman (Exit From History). But for the newcomer, these help. So, why three (and a half) stars? The book does not gel. After two-thirds of the book, the Romanian and Bulgarian parts, the Hungarian section that follows leaves you scratching your head. Third goal unmet. Like Fermor's Angela in the second volume of similar climes, Hall's reticence in elucidating his relationship casts a shadow on the page. For Fermor, it was out of necessary discretion. For Hall, I'm puzzled. At the start of the book, he mentions that he met "someone" in Budapest and would be going back there, but much of the Hungarian bike ride, and the whole countryside that he must have seen, is missing from his urban account. True, the best scenes in Romania and Bulgaria come near borders for Hall, but his focus on the domestic and the familial in the latter third of the book as he lives with Zsosa and visits her family seems like it should have been a separate memoir. He could have told a more complete picture of Hungary as lived through the eyes of his girlfriend's family if, you sense, he had lived there longer and taken time to travel about the nation whose language he's learning. Skilled in languages, comfortable among strangers, skilled with surviving by his wits, you wonder why Hall left evidently for Boston to write the story. Did Zsosa come with him? Did they separate? He dedicates the book to her and notes that he was surprised that she, his "love", liked it. But this only leaves us wondering what the afterward was to his story, and why he never explains how they met, how he supports himself while spending the mornings at her place writing his account, and why he then returned for home. He may have run out of money, but what about her? A worthwhile book but an elusive and intentionally I suppose--given his obvious attention to detail--circumspect story.
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