The contemplative nature of travel within INVISIBLE CITIES

(University of Chicago Press and Sylph Editions/American University of Paris, 2018)

BY NICHOLE L. REBER

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As a travel writer who writes about my experiences of living abroad, I confess to being difficult to please when it comes to travel memoirs. Preference goes to authors who share more of the culture, less of themselves. Every once in a while, a travel tale comes along that makes me wonder what Herodotus— an ancient Greek known as the Father of History and the world’s first travel writer— would think.

A few decades ago, travel literature included books like Riding the Iron Rooster, in which Paul Theroux captures his daily experiences on a train across China. The next leg of the journey involved Bill Bryson’s books like Down Under: Travels from a Sunburned Country, in which he gets pissed in bars across Australia or other, predominantly white countries. Then Elizabeth Gilbert talked a lot about getting fat and getting laid in three disparate countries we learn little about in Eat Pray Love.

More recent forays through travel writing lead to informative and evocative writers like Doug Mack, who in The Not-Quite States of America spurs some raucous laughter as well as insightful and mind-boggling curiosity about colonialism American style. Another terrific travel writer from today is Kira Salak. This woman is to true exploration what Jane Goodall was to apes. In books like Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles to Timbuktu, readers bite their fingers while following her harrowing efforts such as kayaking solo down West Africa’s Niger River toward the Saharan city of Timbuktu. Readers truly interested in worldly voices would be hard-pressed not to enjoy Indian writer Gita Hariharan’s Almost Home: Cities and Other Places. This  riveting collection of highly literary essays brings to life folklore and historical figures from the far-flung and familiar places she’s lived and visited.

Mack, Salak, and Hariharan write travel books that enrich us like the work of Herodotus. Their work enlightens and delights armchair travelers and globetrotters alike, because, I would argue, they capture travel itself and the places traveled to. They don’t get mired in self-involvement.

Another recently published travel book, Sylvia Brownrigg’s Invisible Countries, offers insight into the contemplative nature of travel itself while, ironically never explicitly telling readers where we are. Not to be confused with Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, this 40-page booklet is part of the Cahiers Series published by Sylph Editions. The experiences are surreal as the accompanying images of clouds and landscapes by Tacita Dean.

Invisible Countries is a series of seven not-connected essays told in the third person. In these essays we pass through customs, grow frustrated and even snubbed when checking in to a hotel that claims not to have our reservation, pronouncing words in a foreign language – becomes fraught; the traveller’s urge to escape and seek adventure vies with her sense of melancholy and anxiety at feeling unmoored. Brownrigg explores border-crossing, cultural misunderstanding, touristic voyeurism and naïveté, as her visitor attempts to navigate the environments she encounters.

 

 

Rather than help the reader get to know these countries, Brownrigg keeps us at arm’s-length from the undefined places she visits. Admittedly to this travel writer, trying to suss out the actual countries she’s visiting and guising in fictional names such as equatorial Oruko, island nation of Samarkind, and Ixar is an annoyance. But by the end of the book that feeling turns to something more like camaraderie. The well traveled share a unique and esoteric commonality, not unlike space travelers, celebrities, and military personnel. The brevity of the book further lends itself to this by making us feel we’ve just run into one such friend and shared a quick conversation, catching up on our recent excursions.

Brownrigg sets us squarely in the middle of undeniably international travels:

“The officials at the border wear magenta jackets that look more like jovial party attire than sober uniform, and the manner of these tall, jovial men appears relaxed, although (or perhaps because) they are amply armed,” she writes in “Countries and Names.”

She at times infuses a bit of humor— an essential carry-on piece for global travel. Such is the case when quickly summing up Thanistan in “Countries and the Dead.” “You don’t have to be dead to travel to Thanistan, but it helps,” she writes. “The dead traveler is less likely to mind the country’s heat and aridity, or be inconvenienced by the scarcity of appetizing food and potable water.”

 

Later in this essay she asks, as we are want to do upon recognizing we may have chosen poorly, “Why, then, would anyone living choose to visit Thanistan at all?” Her response, in what may have been my favorite part of the whole 40 pages, is to poignantly capture the essence of travel, the reasons for travel that go far beyond checking it off a bucket list, earning bragging rights, or reinforce that their own country is superior. Her explanation of why people visit this country exemplifies one of those brilliant moments in which travelers/readers discover one of their own.

Of course travel helps people “increase their knowledge, to expand themselves,” she writes. “They hope to understand their own country better by understanding others (in the same way that a reader seeks works in translation); to expand their awareness of humanity (as a parent takes a child to the zoo); to broaden their thought (as a Sunday-afternooner goes to an art museum or a concert).”

The traveler who visits countries that other people would instantly grimace at are wise, philosophical.

“Hidden Countries” is another excellent— and haunting— essay in which she travels to Alluria.  This is the kind of place the less adventurous traveler might choose to relax, play, forget, where Lenny Kravitz sings “Eleutheria” in the background. In the continued effort to read between the lines and decipher which country she’s writing about, it’s hard not to think of some Caribbean island in this essay, especially because many people she knows have visited the island yet no one seems to know it beyond the touristic facade. We follow right along with her as she begins asking around to see behind the curtain.

“Where, she begins to wonder, are all the others? Where… are the real people?” She asks a bartender and a concierge. The essay takes on elements of drama and suspense as her holiday continues and she eventually (and accidentally) sees a razor-wire-topped stone wall that promises to break the illusion of a place sun-and-sea-soaked in permanent tranquility.

Travel with Brownrigg through the island, through the world, and through the mind of a traveler. Pick up a copy of Invisible Countries and experience a different sort of travel writing that adds to Hariharan’s, Mack’s, and Salak’s worldly voices.

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Nichole L. Reber picked up a love for world lit by living in countries around the globe. She’s a nonfiction writer and her award-winning work has been in World Literature Today, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Lunchticket, and elsewhere. Read her stories on a Chinese cult, wearing hijab in India, and getting kidnapped in Peru at http://www.nicholelreber.com/.