Title: How to Travel Without Seeing: Dispatches from the new Latin America
Author: Andres Neuman
Translated from Spanish by Jeffrey Lawrence
Publisher: Restless Books
Year Published in English: 2016
Price: Rs 899/-
Pages: 252
I’ve got to go out and make my way
I might get rich you know I might get busted
But my heart keeps calling me backwards
As I get on the 707
Ridin’ high I got tears in my eyes
You know you got to go through hell
Before you get to heaven
Big ol’ jet airliner
Don’t carry me too far away
Oh, Oh big ol’ jet airliner
Cause it’s here that I’ve got to stay
— Jet Airliner by Steve Miller Band
“Perhaps the greatest travel book, the most unpredictable of all,” Andrés Neuman writes in the closing paragraph, “would be written by someone who doesn’t go anywhere and simply imagines possible movements. Facing a window that seems like a platform, the author would lift his head and feel the rush of the horizon.”
That’s the line which Neuman could use at both ends – right at the beginning or as a final wrap-up. That’s because he has a very different take on the travel itself. “These days,” he explains in the introduction to ‘How to Travel Without Seeing’, “we go places without moving. Sedentary nomads, we can learn about a place and travel there in an instant. Nevertheless, or perhaps consequently, we stay at home, rooted in front of the screen.”
The narrative structure is unique too. Instead of taking notes to be expanded later, Neuman concludes each of these on-the-spot with or without his comments. The result is a collection of singular paragraphs, one for each observation and separated by asterisks, written majorly on aeroplanes, airports, hotel rooms and cafes. Spanish-speaking world’s most outstanding writers, Andrés Neuman was awarded the coveted Premio Alfaguara prize in 2009, and was sent on a 6-month whirlwind tour of 17 Latin American cities and a US destination — Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Santiago, Asunción, La Paz, Lima, Quito, Caracas, Bogotá, Mexico City, Guatemala City, Tegucigalpa, San Juan, Santo Domingo, Panama, San Salvador, San José, and Miami.
What came out of this dizzying journey is a fast-paced work that is quirky, funny, literary and truly anecdotal. Consider this: “From my room, I can just make out Monte Ávila, which I knew first as a publishing house before I realised it was a mountain. It’s nervous greenness surprises me. I suddenly recall a Venezuelan joke about the Argentine ego. Why do Argentineans climb to the top of El Ávila? To see how the city looks without them.” Or, hear this one. “On my last night off during the first part of the tour, I’m attacked by a sudden, absurd, and euphoric desire to go to a roulette table and wager all the money I have left. I ask where there’s a casino. My friends remind me that Mexican law prohibits gaming. “For that,” says one of them, “we have politics.”
One must admit that it would have been a serious loss for the English-reading world but for the spot-on translation by Jeffrey Lawrence. Since the book is written around 2010, some of the references are dated – the H1N1 virus scare in the region, death of Michael Jackson and so forth.
But much of the narrative weaves in history, politics, culture, literature, films, food and hotels of Latin Americans – all written in a style of journal jottings and told as graffiti, slogans, advertisements, conversations, TV snippets, customs declaration forms, poetry and quotes from the vast Latin American literature. Neuman is an extremely well-read person, to say the least.
He is equally observant. In La Paz, he discovers a poem graffitied by the feminist collective Mujeres Creando: “After making your dinner / and making your bed / I lost the desire / to make love to you.” In Lima, he refers to the menu of a seafood restaurant which begins with a quote from James Joyce: “God made food; the devil the cooks.” In Mexico City, he discovers a book by country’s former minister of education, Ms Josefina Vázquez Mota. It’s called Dios mío, hazme viuda por favor: El desafio de ser tú misma. (My God, Please Make Me a Widow; The Challenge of Being Yourself).
You also read amazing tales of strong Latin American women like Esdras Parra who was born a man and became famous as a short-story writer. Later, she underwent a sex-change operation, hoping to be loved a lesbian woman she adored. But having rejected by her, she stopped writing stories and instead took to poetry until the day she died. Neuman quotes an article on her by one Carlos Flores who says:” Esdras Parra had such balls that when she decided to get rid of them, she did.” In a Mexico City cafe, a friend tells Neuman that “in this same restaurant, I saw the actress Maria Flex for the last time. The grand dame came in and everyone felt silent. At that moment I recall that a reporter once asked her if she was a lesbian, and she responded, ‘if all men were as ugly as you are, of course, I’d be’. Nobody in the restaurant dared to speak to her. She had a special presence. Maybe she was already dead.”
In the end, this is neither a treatise nor a tome on Latin America; it’s an about the borders, the airports, the people and their destinies. “Latin America is a detective novel. Only, rather than outsiders, its protagonists are those in power”, Neuman reveals. It’s inspiring too, especially for those who want to get a feel about the region, and maybe write about it. Above all, it offers an entirely new dimension to the travel writing. So much so that you may be inspired to keep similar jottings on your next journey.
