This was a slow read for me, and mostly not because I was savoring it. I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t in the right mood, or maybe this just isn’t the book for me: maybe I wanted a travel book more than I wanted a book about globalization and multiculturalism, or maybe the ways things have changed since this book was written\/published (it came out in 2000) mean that it hasn’t aged that well. There were things in this book that made me think of Alibis<\/i> by Andr\u00e9 Aciman, which I really liked: Aciman and Iyer both write in part from\/about their experiences of living between or across different places and cultures, and there’s a concern, in both, with connection or disconnect, but chunks of Iyer’s book felt more reportorial than personal, which perhaps made me like it less. <\/p>\n
Of the seven chapters\/essays in this book, my favorites were The Global Marketplace, in which Iyer, jet-lagged, wanders a bit in Hong Kong, and The Alien Home, in which Iyer writes about living in Japan as a foreigner, though there were bits I liked in the others as well. I appreciate Iyer’s eye for the humorous or quirky or telling detail, like when, in “The Airport” (which is about spending a bunch of time at LAX sometime in the late 1990s) he writes this:<\/p>\n
Around us, in the free-for-all chaos of the Customs Hall, beagles were sniffing busily (in coats that said AGRICULTURE’S BEAGLE BRIGADE on one side, and PROTECTING AMERICA’S AGRICULTURE on the other), and a voice on the PA system was calling out for one Stanley Plaster; on a bulletin board, there was a letter from a child (bewildering, surely, to a person just arriving from Guangzhou) that began, “Dear Taffy, We liked your show. You are cute, smart, and a good sniffer. . . .” (68-69)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I wanted more little snippets, details seen or overheard, like in The Empire, when there’s this, about a player on England’s cricket team: “he grew up in the East End, and his father used to stand on the street selling birds. The trouble was, they were homing pigeons” (241). <\/p>\n
Other pieces, like The Multiculture (about Toronto, immigration as vibrancy, Canadian literature, the literature of exile) and The Games (about the Olympics and their ideals\/tensions, focused largely on visits to Atlanta in advance of and then for the 1996 Games) felt way too long to me, though I liked Iyer’s description of how he tries to step away from the pageantry and big events at the Olympics to experience something else, whether that’s curling in Japan or baseball in Barcelona.<\/p>\n
I think I appreciate the final piece, The Alien Home, for being one of the more personal-feeling pieces in the book, and also for being one of the most lyrical, with sentences like this: “And sometimes, on these sharpened sunny days, when the cloudless autumn brightness makes me homesick for the High Himalayas, I fall through a crack somehow, and find myself in a Japan of some distant century” (272). Or this, about Kyoto: “I still catch my breath when I see the lanterns in the autumn temples, leading up into the bamboo forests, as into another life, or hear the temple bells ringing along the Philosopher’s Path at dusk” (285-286). There’s also a beautiful description in this piece about driving up Mount Hiei after a snowstorm, the world made silver and white and quiet. I would read a whole book of this, gladly. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This was a slow read for me, and mostly not because I was savoring it. I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t in the right mood, or maybe this just isn’t the book for me: maybe I wanted a travel book more than I wanted a book about globalization and multiculturalism, or maybe the ways things […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8238\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}