Greetings from Molvania

In fifth grade my class was given an assignment that involved inventing a country from scratch, right down to making a salt-and-flour relief map. My creation was Iberocco, an island off the coast of Spain that combined Andalusian allure with good things like couscous and democracy.Now I write guidebooks for a living, so I guess I was on to something. But the authors of “Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry” (The Overlook Press, 176 pages, $13.95) have outdone my profession by concocting a thinly fictitious East European country and dousing it with a toxic dose of “Lonely Planet” wisdom. The result is restaurant write-ups that advise prospective travelers where to find the best deep-fried salad in “Lublova,” and a diagram of a phony Parliament building that includes a “Coup Leader’s Room” and gun rack.Australian authors Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, and Rob Sitch have spared no kernel of creativity to produce what is the funniest faux guidebook ever written. Does it matter that it’s fake? Not really. Something this ribald and scathing speaks more truth than your run-of-the-mill handbook to, say, Montenegro. The place-names may be mouthfuls – Slutceck, Smogjstrum, Vajana – but are not immediately outlandish to anyone who has ever pored over a map of Slovakia or had the questionable fortune to motor through the Polish hinterlands.When I first spotted it on a bookshelf in Paris, I, like others, mistook “Molvania” for a real guidebook to some obscure landlocked nook of formerly Communist Mitteleuropa. It is constructed like the real McCoy, from chapters on Molvanian history and politics (which are riotously colorful) to hotel reviews as detail-oriented as any you’ll find in mainstream Fodor’s or ACCESS guides. Indeed, “Molvania” one-ups the rest. I only wish I’d had something as painstakingly thorough as a map legend delineating not only national parks and museums but also “Minefields (World War I)” and “Minefields (World War II)” when I slogged through a summer in Moscow 10 years ago.The book is worth the price for the photo captions alone, paired throughout with badly taken pictures that seem to have been culled from Soviet tourist brochures (read: propaganda) from the 1970s. Thus we have “Molvania’s capital Lutenblag – where old world charm meets concrete.” Beneath a picture of a woman with a microphone wearing a floral print apron reads: “Molvania’s biggest pop sensation, Olja, combines hot Latin sounds with Cold War rhetoric.”Then there is the sidebar on the Father of Modern Molvania, “blurred visionary” Szlonko Busjbusj, who famously shortened the Molvanian alphabet by 33 letters and amended the constitution to include a Bill of Rights guaranteeing all citizens the right to bear a grudge.In the chapter on the Western Plateau, you’ll read about “The Local Drop”: “No one spends much time in Sasava without being offered a glass of biljgum, the locally brewed brandy. This highly scented, thick liqueur is quite unlike anything you’ve ever tasted – unless you’ve inadvertently swallowed fabric conditioner – and is generally offered at the end of a meal as a means of prompting guests to leave.”Now, this is all good fun, but isn’t there also a touch of cruelty here, an underlying insensitivity to the cultural traditions of countries economically disadvantaged by years of war and/or indentured servitude to totalitarian regimes? Yes – but so what?The reality is, much of the European landmass is pockmarked by mortar shells and massacre sites, radioactive debris and ugly apartment blocks, and no amount of typical guidebook fluff can will that away. There is a reason many rural areas in Hungary, Romania, and Belarus are so glum: They have never really recovered from their peoples’ passivity when faced with the plunder of their neighbors’ property and worse. In some respects there is precious little that separates such places from Molvania, “the world’s number one producer of beetroot and birthplace of the whooping cough.”An even more subversive punch is directed at the writers of guidebooks. Note the qualifications of imagined contributor Philippe Miseree: “A professional traveler since his youth, there is not a city or town Philippe has not recently been disappointed by. No matter how obscure the destination you can bet he has been there before you and found it not half as good as it was in the 1970s.” The conceit common to “Lonely Planet”-style guides, that someone else knows not only what was best for him but what will be best for you, too, is apparently ripe for renovation.Every vocation is slightly ridiculous when you stop to consider it closely, but a prime example is the writing of guidebooks. What kind of people are we if we need users’ manuals for our very surroundings, foreign or otherwise? While guidebooks have their place, often it is on the shelf back home, because as travel companions they too often lead to a scripted experience, which is to say a false experience. Sometimes, the best you can do is simply drift.By creating the definitive brief of a bogus country, the authors have not only lobbed a welcome grenade at an entire overheated industry but unwittingly held up a mirror to the face of global tourism, with its shell-shocked global villagers and increasingly extortionate departure taxes, luxury hotel organizations, and environmental groups that exist only on paper, and countries that sell out their perhaps limited cultural resources for the sake of a quick buck. Whether you’re going everywhere in the world or nowhere at all, the exuberantly acerbic “Molvania” is the essential guide. Buy it and you’ll be laughing your way to a revelation.Mr. Grant created Split, an “anti-tourism travel review” on the Internet, from 1995 to 2000, and currently writes for www.bonjourparis.com. His latest guidebook is “ACCESS Paris” (HarperCollinsPublishers).

Greetings from Molvania

Greetings from Molvania

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