Tag: Travel

Simon Winder’s Germania: a scrumptious read for the Wanderlust-afflicted

Simon Winder’s Germania: a scrumptious read for the Wanderlust-afflicted

Sometime between traipsing along the Harz Mountains’ Grimm-like forest trails and tucking into a frothy beer at yet another charmingly nondescript rathskeller, Simon Winder casually mentions to his undoubtedly nerdy reader: “There could be an argument that this entire book should be understood to be in brackets.” Indeed, it takes a special sort of enthusiasm (for such a complicated country as Germany, no less!) and a special skill-set of hunting for precious trivia of insight in the crevasses of pompous historical brass to produce such a bursting beehive of architecture, history, folklore, Prussian militarism, Viennese nostalgia, cuisine, music, cabinets of curiosity, chocolate with ostriches, turrets, suspenders, and oompah.

Winder takes us across Germany, from the Roman times and until the morbid 1933 (although I do wish he’d continue until Goodbye Lenin! era or, if he’s feeling particularly ambitious, all the way to the Age of Merkel, arguably the other great leading female German since little Sophie Zerbst aka Catherine the Great). Much like his other fantastic book Danubia, Germania is a historical narrative knitted out of love and compassion, with generous attention paid to stuff from the arcane margins, from weirdo backwaters, from the cornucopia of Germany’s “doll’s handkerchief states,” ancient homes of Wagnerian heroes in bearskin, now reduced to comfy second-rate magnets for the middle-aged tourist whose poorly disguised modus operandi involves “sitting in groups around tables, eating astonishing amounts of sausage and cake, drinking massive glasses of lager and smoking furiously.” Stumbling in this gluttonous stupor one will inevitably walk into yet another painfully picturesque Schloss, at which point Winder will lovingly guide his reader up the winding staircase and into:

“… an attic room filled with wigs, pictures of basilisks, a giant model of the solar system, pickled geckoes, a little dog made out of seashells, wax heads, a dried cow-fish, a speculative engraving of the Ark of the Covenant, an opium pipe, shoes from around the world and, hanging from the rafters, the best and biggest stuffed crocodile ever, an ancient, gnarled Behemoth which, if it fell to the ground, would detonate in a great cloud of evil-smelling dust.”

From his ridiculously adorable glee over a nautilus-shaped drinking cup, to vivacious awe at the sight of a four hundred year old King of Sweden’s horse in an Ingolstadt museum, to a poetic moment on a Freising trek to the oldest brewery in the world where Winder feels like he’s walking through Breughel’s Hunters in the Snow, one can only feel pure envy at his unbridled passion. May we all feel as strongly about our hobbies, interests, and fancies, for it would truly be the most delicious sort of life to live – a joyous wanderer with a massive heart, a contemplative mind, and a stomach tough enough for this:

“I once went with some friends to a traditional Frankfurt restaurant which turned out to be a sort of a temple to German hard-core, with undrinkable apple-wine and guests greedily tucking into blocks of lard on black bread. On the disturbingly narrow menu, the only choices seemed to be between cuts of hot fatty  ham served with the notorious Frankfurt ‘green sauce’ (an old enemy – vinegared chopped herbs), yet another bratwurst of a kind that even I was getting bored with, or something described as a ‘slaughterhouse platter.’ In a spirit of fatalism I went for the platter. This turned out to be a central ridge of sauerkraut flanked by two skin canisters, sealed with metal surgical clips – the one filled with blendered liver, fat, and water, the other with blood and a kind of mealy material. Sticking a fork in one cause the canister to detumesce, jetting its content over the sauerkraut.” 

The man should do restaurant reviews.

Image: Nose Dance, by Hans Sebald Beham (1500-1550).

Jill Alexander Essbaum’s Hausfrau: domestic ennui on the foothills of the Alps

Jill Alexander Essbaum’s Hausfrau: domestic ennui on the foothills of the Alps

This was supposed to be a bit of light-as-Devonshire-cream reading, a fun refresher for a lazy weekend. Instead, it turned out to be a captivating page-turner about depression. On the surface, it’s a well worn out trope, standing on the shoulders of giants like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Bronte’s Madwoman in the Attic, all the way down to Sylvia Plath and her “domestic surreal.” A woefully unfulfilled housewife Anna Benz is tumbling down the nauseating rabbit hole of tepid, monotonous, safe, sated, comfortable middle-class life and all of its requisite trappings. There’s a picture-perfect house tucked in a village near Zurich. There’s the Swiss banker husband, reasonably kind, reasonably good-looking. There’s the kids, suitably sweet, and a statuesque mother-in-law hovering ever so diligently somewhere on the horizon peppered with school runs, play dates, and zoo excursions. Kinder, Küche, Kirche, living strong and proud in the land of scrupulous financiers, punctual trains, and premium chocolate.

The reader is never explained what is the poison festering under such picturesque a facade (there are some scant nods to childhood trauma, but not much to go on). We are only led to accept the facts – Anna Benz is a serial cheater, engaging in infidelity with a mechanical rigour of an athlete. She finds little comfort or solace in this walking on a razor’s edge. Instead, there’s only desperately delicious darkness, thick and viscous like licorice.

Leafing through these litanies of busy nothings, the reader just knows something is coming. A jolt. A bolt of lightning. A catharsis. The only thing left to unveil is whether this is going to be the kind of seminal event that gifts redemption, or the final plunge into the abyss.

“Grief is not simple sadness. Sadness is a feeling that wants nothing than to be sat with, held, and heard. Grief is a journey. It must be moved through. With a rucksack full of rocks, you hike through a black, pathless forest, brambles about your legs and wolf packs at your heels. 

The grief that never moves is called complicated grief. It doesn’t subside, you do not accept it, and it never – it never – goes to sleep. This is possessive grief. This is delusional grief. This is hysterical grief. Run if you will, this grief is faster. This is the grief that will chase you and beat you. 

This is the grief that will eat you.”

Jill Alexander Essbaum, Hausfrau

Two themes run in powerful streams through the heart of this book – psychotherapy and German grammar. Outside home, her therapist and her German classes are just about the only nodes on an otherwise barren network of Anna’s activities. Rolling off the tongue of Anna’s therapist are nods to Jungian mono-myths and origins of pragmatic Swiss mentality, and to Freudian dream interpretation. Dawdling over her German homework, Anna feels the clinical solitude of these complicated language rules: “The disconnect between ‘general’ and ‘specific.’ The vast, vapid chasm that divides ‘this particular one’ from ‘some of them.'” This language evades Anna, contributing massively to her alienation in this picture-perfect country:

“She thought about Switzerland. Where a smile will give you away as an American. Where what isn’t taboo is de rigueur. Cold, efficient Switzerland. Where the women are comely and the men are well groomed and everyone wears a determined face. Switzerland. The roof of Europe. Glacier carved. Most beautiful where it is most uninhabitable.” 

Jill Alexander Essbaum, Hausfrau

Anna, she says, “was a good wife, mostly.” Alas, depression doesn’t care much. And even in punctual Switzerland there are days when all trains run late well into the night…

Image: Nonchaloir, by John Singer Sargent.

Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu: The enduring relevance of “go East, young man”

Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu: The enduring relevance of “go East, young man”

Pico Iyer did for the travel genre what Anthony Bourdain did for the culinary arts. With thoughtful reflections on world’s most enduring attractions (as far as the Western gaze is concerned, at least), executed in impeccably eloquent prose, Iyer has traipsed around the globe, from revolutionary Cuba to aethetically minimalist Japan, discussing airports, jet lag, diaspora, cultural appropriation, displacement, identity, and the very essence of global spirit under assault by winds of history.

Today, reading Video Night in Kathmandu, written in early mid-80s, is an interesting exercise. This travel narrative is an echo from a time when the geopolitical theatre was playing a decidedly different movie: China hasn’t entered the WTO yet, Hong Kong was still the crown jewel of the British Empire, USSR was still alive and kicking, and Rambo and Madonna were at the zenith of Pax Americana pop culture. Other things were already as par for the course then as they are now: Thai sex tourism, Bali’s it’s-already-spoiled-paradise kitschization, Tibet’s enigma, Myanmar’s isolation. In Iyer’s Asia, globalization is already in bloom but still fresh enough to still get you excited about being able to order burgers and Pepsi in Nepal.

Travel according to Iyer is both an elegy and a eulogy, a love emoji from Othello to the unfortunate Desdemona, a guilt-laden sentiment only amplified by a thousandfold in today’s age of Instagram hyper-tourism. Today, forty years later, we have moved a wee bit further on the spectrum from a Babel present to a homogeneous Esperanto future (to use Iyer’s gorgeous expression), but we are not fully there yet (and who knows if we’ll ever get there).

Video Night in Kathmandu is an Hieronymus Bosch iconostasis of Bali, Tibet, Nepal, China, the Philippines, Myanmar (described as “a malfunctioning guinea pig of fundamentalist socialism”), Hong Kong, India, Thailand, and Japan. The verdict on these lands is complicated:

“Bali drew its strength, its magic and its eerie purity from the ancestral currents that pulsed through its soil, currents that Westerners could sense, perhaps, but never touch; just so, the moving yet unwavering faith of Tibet would withstand the ravages of tourists, I hoped, as surely as it had withstood the vicious assaults of the Chinese. Burma had calmly closed its door to the world, and China had opened it up just enough, so it planned, to take what it wanted, and nothing more. Prodigal, hydra-headed India cheerfully welcomed  every new influence from the West, absorbing them all into a crazy-quilt mix that was India and nothing but Indian; Japan had taken in the West only, so it seemed, to take it over. As for Nepal, and Thailand even more, both gauged Western tastes so cleverly and adapted Western trends so craftily that both, I felt, could satisfy foreigners’ whims without ever becoming their slaves. Even Hong Kong, the last pillar of the Western Empire, was now getting ready to return to Asian hands.” 

Pico Iyer, Video Night in Kathmandu

Pico Iyer, a product of Indian, English, and American heritage and, being keenly aware of this legacy, cannot talk about the East without the Raj, the Foreign Office, and Rudyard Kipling. Globalization, some would say, is simply a mutated colonization, a virus adapting, so to speak, to better feed off of its host. As such, the jury is still out on whether “a Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”

Image: Beyond Street by Swarat Ghosh.

Tony Parsons’ Departures: The magic of travel in seven stories from Heathrow

Tony Parsons’ Departures: The magic of travel in seven stories from Heathrow

“Airports were often just the punctuation marks of a lifetime, the twilight spaces between places and people, the no-man’s-land between what had happened and what was yet to be.”

Tony Parsons, Departures

Few who have been subjected, willingly or through insidious pop culture osmosis, to romantic comedies’ crown jewel Love Actually, endeavour to forget the legendary airport scene. Not even the most granite-hearted of misanthropes could roll their skeptical eyes at that endearing thread of faces and embraces, all to (formerly) dishy Hugh Grant’s velvety tenor going on and on about how “love is everywhere,” how “love is all around,” and all this life’s hapless pilgrim has to do to resurrect their faith in humanity is to pop over to the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport.

Next time you’re sequestered in some nauseatingly bureaucratic queue at Heathrow (or CDG or any other three-letter IATA combination for that matter), pick up a wee collection  of Tony Parsons’ short stories Departures, a 100-odd pages of smirk, hope, stress, ridiculousness, enthusiasm, regret, new beginnings and yes, love, that irreplaceable conductor of life’s symphony. Unlike the analyzed-to-bits scene in Love Actually, these morsels of airport life are not so much about what goes on in the Arrivals gate as they are about the humble yet vital work that throbs, every minute of every day, in the labyrinthine innards of world’s second busiest airport. What occasionally reads like a manifest promo piece to Heathrow, this collection is, above all, an appreciative hat tip to men and women of aviation who feed and water that enormous heaving beast of an airport and all those who come through (and those, for legitimate or not-so reasons, who don’t).

The stories are seven and all different. There’s a woman confronting her very banal fear of flying (and an even more banal one of seeing the in-laws). There’s an airport animal health inspector cloistered in the animal reception centre with a red milk snake wrapped around his arm and a blue-eyed starlet by his side. There’s a pair of geeky air traffic controllers exceedingly proud of their job, a pilot stoked to be flying Boeing 777s and another who lost his license (and his marriage), a no-nonsense passport officer taking down drug mules but showing clemency to two very different girls stepping onto British soil on the same day toward their pink unicorn wish “to marry their boyfriend Prince Harry.”

None of it is terribly genre-bending. Not all of it is even particularly moving or insightful. There is one quality, however, that not only unifies these stories but also animates them with the kind of unmistakable spirit that makes an aesthetic grouping of words worth reading. The knights of Heathrow all without exception share genuine, effervescent enthusiasm for their work, a childlike excitement, a purity of spirit, and honest passion for their respective 9-to-5s. In our cynical age of boarding pass + passport Instagram posts, in a time where air travel is notably less glamorous, a perfunctory bourgeois activity almost wholly stripped of its former vestiges of romanticism, exoticism, or at the very least exclusivity, Tony Parsons’ Departures show air travel through the fairy dust of childhood wonder for what it truly is and what we, scoffing globetrotters, chose to forget – air travel is pure unadulterated magic. From birds, to bats, to Leonardo da Vinci’s visionary ornithopter sketches, to the stuffy tin can that takes us to that all-inclusive summer beach holiday, it’s all pretty amazing. Perhaps next time at Arrivals we, exhausted, sweaty, and jet-lagged, can exchange our “ugh” for:

“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings…

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”

John Gillespie Magee, Jr., High Flight

Image: IMithila Madhubani, Depiction Of People Onboarding At Darbhanga Airport. iMithila