I've read many glowing recommendations
of Bill Bryson's books. I've also read a few comments that weren't
especially enthusiastic. Myself, I have been in the "not
enthusiastic" category. I remember reading A Walk in the Woods
several years ago and liking it moderately. On the other hand, I
retained a very negative impression of Neither Here Nor There, his
book about travelling in Europe.
After reading Sheila's recommendation
for In a Sunburned Country at the Deliberate Reader,
I thought I'd give Bryson another go. This book about his travels in
Australia has been published as Down Under in the UK, and that's the
edition I got from the library.
I quite enjoyed this virtual trip to
Australia. After all, it's clear that Bryson loves Australia, despite
the dangerous wildlife. Even when he's making fun of people's quirks
or the strange things he encounters, the overall tone of the book is
positive, and he finds much to love, admire, enjoy and recommend.
After Down Under, I decided to give
Neither Here Nor There another chance, too. My overriding impression
of it from the previous reading was 'negativity'. As I recalled,
Swedes were depressed and depressing, Norway was cold and expensive,
German food atrocious, etc. I had felt that he made most of his jokes
by looking for something to complain about in a funny way. But maybe
I remembered wrong?
Now that I have refreshed my memory, I
can perhaps write a more balanced review. There certainly are more
positive comments than what I remembered. Even in the places where
Bryson was not happy, for example Stockholm, he did find something
good to say, something to appreciate and enjoy. And yes, there was humour, and not all the jokes were about putting something/someone down.
As for the negativity, Bryson
definitely found a lot to complain about. It seems to me that
Parisians cannot do right by him: when they're more polite than he
remembers, he starts to feel uncomfortable, and when they're rude,
he's happy because it reinforces his opinion of them. Bryson
criticizes Sweden and Norway for their strict laws and orderliness;
he says they're "determined to squeeze the fun out of life"
because, for example, the serving and selling of alcohol is
restricted...
The one thing that really bothered me
in this book were the constant references to sex. Whether he's
looking at foreign language TV and imagining what people say, or
looking at certain type of shops in Amsterdam or Hamburg, there
always seems to be innuendos - or plain, explicit comments. Call me a
prude if you will, but this book has more of that than I can
comfortably deal with. Down Under had some, but not quite as much and
as often as Neither Here Nor There.
While reading, I had to remind myself that Bryson travelled and wrote in 1990. He went to Yugoslavia before the
state dissolved into bloody and violent wars. It feels poignant now
to read about a peaceful, picturesque little town called Sarajevo,
known mostly for the incident that sparked World War I. The name 'Sarajevo' now brings the more recent war to my mind first.
The last 23 years must have seen many
considerable changes elsewhere in Europe, too. In Neither Here Nor
There, Bryson was retracing a journey he had taken in 1973 and
commenting on the changes he noticed. What would Bryson make of the same
places in Europe now? At the very least, he would find more
restaurants open on a Sunday in Stockholm, and probably serving better food...
It's
understandable that I don't always agree with Bryson's opinions about
the places he visited. I'm a woman, a Finn, a Scandinavian, a
European. In the 1990's, I was a twentysomething student, and
when I have travelled in central Europe, I have mostly looked for
very different things than Bryson. Of course our points of view and
experiences differ. Our expectations, too. I'm glad I gave Neither
Here Nor There another chance and revisited the Europe of my youth,
seeing it from a perspective so different from my own. The second
reading left me with a much more positive impression of the book,
though I still would not recommend it to everyone without hesitation.
No comments:
Post a Comment