Quicksands of Talk
2016; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 124; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/sew.2016.0036
ISSN1934-421X
Autores ResumoQuicksands of Talk Sam Pickering (bio) Lawrence Osborne, Hunters in the Dark. Hogarth, 2016. 320 Pages. $25 pb. Lawrence Osborne has led a tapestried nomadic literary life, roaming countries and genres. In a way he is a Byronic figure, the wandering outlaw of his own bright mind, finding pleasure in pathless woods and rapture on lonely shores. At the moment he lives in Bangkok, but in the past he has lived or set books in Morocco, the United States, France, Mexico, Italy, and Central America, among others. He has roamed Dubai and tramped through Papua New Guinea. In addition to writing novels, he is an accomplished travel writer, a matter that greatly influences his fiction. Talking to strangers is as dangerous as quicksand, the main character of Hunters in the Dark is warned. Unlike novels, travel books float on the quicksand of talk. Not long ago at a bar in St. Maarten, a man informed me sotto voce that he worked in Norfolk on nuclear submarines. “My clearance,” he said, “is top secret, the highest of the secret grades.” “I shouldn’t tell you,” he said later, “but this year a comet will strike the earth. Experts think the comet will be twenty miles wide. Everybody in the government knows about the comet. They are keeping the knowledge to themselves and making plans to insure their survival. You are a nice man, and you should be prepared too. But don’t tell anybody I told you about the comet.” “I won’t,” I said. “Thank you. I am forever in your debt.” “Years ago in Dubai my brother-in-law was a spy,” an American told me, as we sheltered from a rainstorm in a back alley in St. Thomas. “On the embassy roster he was listed as a military attaché,” the man continued; “being an attaché wasn’t deep cover enough for my wife, so she told the Chinese ambassador that her brother had been sent to Dubai to repair refrigerators.” Life, the nature writer Alan Devoe said, consists of “drifting ephemera.” Unlike novelists who bake conversational quicksand in the kiln of narrative and convert it into fiction, travel writers collect ephemera, not usually tying the pieces tightly together with cause and effect but simply weaving them through each other and time in loose wordy chains. In Bonaire recently I saw a woman wearing a Minnie Mouse backpack. Minnie lay smiling on a grassy plot. She wore pink pumps and a pink dress. On her head a pink and white polka-dotted ribbon waggled gaily. Behind her, daisies bloomed white and yellow, the colors so bright that their petals almost twirled. Beneath [End Page 344] the pack, however, the woman’s attire was markedly different. She wore a jumper across the front of which appeared a garish representation of the Last Supper. In her right hand the woman held a paperback. I asked her what she was reading. “It’s good. But you probably wouldn’t like it,” she said, showing me the title, Pregnant with the Rancher’s Baby. “Well, I’m not sure,” I replied. “A man whose chosen life it is to contemplate the phenomena of earth—intently staring upward at clouds and downward at lichens, and trying by sight and scent and touch and hearing to enter as deeply as he can into intimacy with the myriad-faceted life of his planet,” Devoe wrote, “such a man early discovers that he can compress his findings and feelings into no neat whole nor render any orderly connected chronicle of his impressions and reflections.” Although travel writers can force neither trips nor people into neat wholes, writing momentarily frees travelers from their everyday identities. “It is a peculiar thing,” Don Diego Vega, or Zorro, explained in Johnston McCulley’s The Mask of Zorro, “the moment I donned cloak and mask the Don Diego part of me fell away. My body straightened; my blood seemed to course through my veins; my voice grew strong and firm; fire came to me! And the moment I removed cloak and mask I was the languid Don Diego again.” For a moment, as Hazlitt put it in “On Going A Journey,” the...
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