A Curmudgeon Takes a Trip & Survives To Write About It

In an era when travelers – armed with guides to local etiquette and filled with reticence to pass judgment on what they see – tread delicately into other regions, it is refreshing to read unabashedly opinionated travel writing. And when the famously curmudgeonly British food critic A.A. Gill hits the road, the results can be incendiary. His approach to travel writing is at various times caustic, hyperbolic, acerbic, juvenile, indignant, and solipsistic. But, as the essays collected in “AA Gill Is Away” (Simon & Schuster, 305 pages, $14) demonstrate, he is also one of the most astute and entertaining observers of human cultures in recent years.In his essays from the past decade, which run from a heartbreaking report on famine in Sudan to a rollicking account of his stint as a pornography director in Los Angeles (titled “When DD Met AA”), Mr. Gill refuses to succumb to cultural relativism. Here he is on the Japanese: “They’re decidedly weird. … It’s not that they’re aliens, but they are the people that aliens might be if they’d learnt Human by correspondence course and wanted to slip in unnoticed.” He declares that Germans’ relationship to history is “bizarre, even psychotic.” And Monaco during the Grand Prix is a “cavernous, bubbling, torpid septic tank. It’s the stink of consumption and corruption.”Though his pen is sharp, Mr. Gill isn’t without sympathy; indeed, he is downright gentle to the proud, pneumonic breasted women of the L.A. porn industry. He is also particularly inspired by detritus of the Soviet Union, in his essay on the draining of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, and in a portrait of Kaliningrad, the sad, little Russian island in the middle of the European Union. Once the seat of the Soviet navy, this washed up no-man’s-land, wedged between Poland and Lithuania, is populated by listless thugs in leather jackets and embittered women with “flesh-colored” hair (“the worst dye jobs in the history of hairdressing”). Nobody here has any stake or interest in the future. As he traces Kaliningrad’s abandonment by both communism and capitalism, Mr. Gill’s anger is deliciously palpable. His essays are a reminder that one travels the world not just to see, but also to respond – furiously, self-righteously, sometimes gleefully, and always passionately.***The culinary travelogue is a nearly exhausted genre that probably reached its peak in M.F.K. Fisher’s hands some years ago. But Canadian journalist Taras Grescoe gives it a new twist by using food not as a means of embracing another culture, but rather of exploring how that culture might try to kill him. In “The Devil’s Picnic” (Bloomsbury, 350 pages, $23.95), Mr. Grescoe tours the world in search of pro hibited and potentially dangerous substances: He chews coco leaves in Bolivia, tipples Norwegian moonshine, and consumes unpasteurized, raw-milk cheese in Burgundy. In Switzerland, he finds (but doesn’t sample) pentobarbital sodium, used for euthanasia.Equal parts travelogue, history, and treatise on the limitations of prohibitions of any sort, Mr. Grescoe’s book often reads as a screed against regulatory authorities (the USDA and FDA, in particular). He has little patience with governments that limit access to such innocuous – and delicious – foods as Epoisses cheese or Iberico ham, or decree that their citizens are incapable of using risky substances responsibly. (Apparently, Mr. Grescoe has never visited an American fraternity house).In spite of himself, Mr. Grescoe actually makes a compelling argument for prohibition by romanticizing the furtive behavior and clandestine camaraderie around controlled substances. Smoking in draconian California proves a useful pick-up device he flippantly dubs “smirting.” Of chomping on poppy-seed crackers and chewing gum on Singapore’s streets, he declares, “Shocking Singaporeans is as easy as scandalizing Mormons. I was going to have fun in this town – or get arrested trying.”On a particularly dissolute expedition to the Jura region of Switzerland, where Mr. Grescoe attempts to sample a potent (and, at that time, illegal) absinthe called La Bleue, he discovers a network of prolific and talented black marketers. Backyard mills abound, and local variations of La Bleue are available in bars, stores, and kitchen tables. Ultimately, Mr. Grescoe finds that the legendary absinthe high results more from the thrill of participating in the bootlegging mythos than from drinking the wormwood herb. He also acknowledges that as soon as making the drink becomes a legal, regulated enterprise (as it did when the Swiss government lifted the ban in March 2005), the inevitable large-scale milling of a sort of milquetoast La Bleue will commence, leaving homegrown bootleggers – and soused travel writers – in the dust.***In “Dreaming of East” (Greystone Books, 173 pages, $25.95), Barbara Hodgson sketches the lives of some of the 350 or so European women who are known to have traveled through the Eastern part of the Ottoman Empire from the 18th through the early 20th centuries. Illustrated by gorgeous engravings and photographs, the book offers brief portraits of women who were uncomfortable with society at home, but found freedom in their journeys.These were ladies who “did not fit in”: Lady Hester Stanhope, a wealthy aristocrat who fled England in 1810 to begin her peripatetic travels through Turkey, Egypt, and Palestine, guided by Bedouins and trailed by an elaborate entourage that included her much younger lover; Jane Digby, who shocked her contemporaries by marrying a Bedouin in 1855 and settling in Damascus, and Jane Dieulafoy of France, who was a skilled photographer and near fluent Farsi speaker. Dieulafoy’s surveys of Persian archaeology, recorded on a series of trips with her husband between 1881 and 1886, earned her the Legion of Honor. Explaining how she came to her travels (which she often undertook disguised as a man), Dieulafoy said they were a means of avoiding the insipid domestic arts of making marmalade and darning socks.There are also less obviously iconoclastic women among Ms. Hodgson’s dreamers. Some are simply spinsters and widows who had a little extra cash and an urge to see the world. They sailed the Nile in style and climbed the pyramids in full skirts and straw hats.Taken altogether, these women are an oddly anachronistic group, caught somewhere between Victorian modesty and bra-burning feminism. They charged through deserts and slept in tents but rode their horses sidesaddle to avoid the indecency of sitting astride. They led clearheaded expeditions through uncharted lands – often unaccompanied by Western men – but frequently recounted their travels with girlish emphasis on the romance of the East. As the evolutionary link between tradition and modernity, their lives and stories are as worthy of study as that of any swashbuckling Lawrence of Arabia.

A Curmudgeon Takes a Trip & Survives To Write About It

A Curmudgeon Takes a Trip & Survives To Write About It

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