Summer reading

Commonweal, June 20, 1997

Thomas Swick

Thomas Swick is the travel editor of the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and the author of the travel memoir Unquiet Days: At Home in Poland.

A collection of pieces gives me the same pleasurable rush of expectation that an all-you-can-eat buffet must give a glutton. It is a mystery to me why publishers hold the form in such low esteem. I still remember my librarian friend coming to the tennis court one late summer afternoon in 1975 and handling with a jeweler's delicacy a newly arrived copy of Cyril Connolly's The Evening Colonnade. The table of contents--"Oxford in Our Twenties," "Farewell to Provence," "Little Magazines"--intrigued me more than the chapters of any novel could. There between the covers of a single volume awaited the elegant workings of a well-traveled mind.

I got a similar thrill recently on seeing Pico Iyer's Tropical Classical: Essays from Several Directions (Knopf, $25, 314 pp.). In books like Video Night in Kathmandu and The Lady and the Monk, Iyer has carved a niche as an astute analyst of the subtle and increasingly frequent interchange between East and West. He is a leading voice in the new school of travel writing that no longer simply describes a place but helps to explain it.

Tropical Classical has the traditional literary collection's miscellany--pulling in travel articles, profiles, book reviews, essays. But it differs slightly in that many of its pieces share a theme, which is the happy intermingling in contemporary literature of two seemingly disparate worlds: the sensual tropics and the more cerebral, or at least more structured, northern climes. Iyer picks three distinct genres--poetry, fiction, essays--and finds in each a modern practitioner--Derek Walcott, Michael Ondaatje, and Richard Rodriguez--who has demonstrated "the ability to season high classical forms with a lyrical beauty drawn from the streets and beaches of their homes."

Many of the reviews in this collection are of writers--Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Romesh Gunesekera--who inhabit this new terrain, which Iyer must be the first to have mapped, if not identified. V.S. Naipaul is not included because, though he wrote eloquently of his childhood in Trinidad, he did so in the studied cadences and syntax of the English canon. But I think he should probably be given some credit as a forerunner; he was, in a sense, the Jackie Robinson to Rushdie's Deion Sanders.

The unrelated pieces are no less interesting-travel essays ranging from Ethiopia to New York (a city, Iyer notes rightly, which one always recollects in black and white) and lengthy profiles, including the most enlightening one I've read of the brilliant and reticent travel writer Norman Lewis. The world of collected pieces is in good hands.

The same unfortunately cannot be said for another of my favorite literary forms, collected letters (though it will be interesting to see who will publish the first e-mail correspondence, and who will bother to read it). The immense pleasure I had last month reading The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy (W.W. Norton, $27.50, 304 pp.) was surely heightened by the knowledge that it was one of the last of its kind. And no collection could better demonstrate what we stand to lose through this demise.