the travel Bildungsroman

Eat Pray Love and The Sex Lives of Cannibals have three things in common: they are books, they are topsellers and they are about travel. The two are not, however, both good. In an effort to see what folks are buying, reading and liking travel-log-wise, I read both.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love, does a fantastic job of exploring her emotional progress in various exotic settings. I began to drool while reading her descriptions of Neapolitan pizza and had fleeting fantasies about visiting Bali but overall learned very little about the people and places she encountered on her travels -- especially in India where she spends 99% of her time in an Ashram. Gilbert's true journey is not through the physical locations that create the setting for the novel but through her psyche. While the latter is a somewhat interesting as an exercise in introspection, it falls a bit short of satisfactory for the readers looking to read about exotic places and their inhabitants. One has the impression that one is reading the author's most intimate journal entries (especially during the encounters with her Brazillian paramour) -- so if you're into that, pick up the book, read and enjoy.

In The Sex Lives of Cannibals, Mr. J. Maarten Troost uses his odd-ball perspective, daily mishaps and victories to create an interesting picture of the folk of the nation of Kiribati (pronounced KEER-I-BAS, he will remind you several times). His sense of humor leaks through every page such that I often found myself laughing out loud (in public) as I read. Thankfully, he saves any self-psychoanalysis about his behavior, decisions and love life from the pages of his novel. The reader is therefore able to enjoy his adventures and get a sense for what it might be like to actually live in an isolated, Pacific, nation. This novel is a travel bildungsroman: we learn in the end that the shiftless youth has, in fact, grown into a man but he allows the reader to infer this through action -- there is little telling and much showing. And, too, we get a sense of who the I-Kiribati (kind hosts to this young man during some years of maturation) really are.

After reading these works, I must conclude that Ms. Conlin and Mr. Zimmand, two teachers that shaped my writing through an insistence upon the use of active verbs rather than the passive voice, terse and pithy prose, and passages that "show" rather than "tell" (SORRY for this sentence), were absolutely correct! I also concluded that should this blog, my journal and daily emails ever coalesce to form a creative work suitable for publication and public consumption, it should be more Troostian than Gilbert-esque.

I do hope Troost writes again to reveal to readers more crazy things in this world that we may or may not ever have the chance to see ourselves. Good author.