Books
Looking to get lost
by Paula Morris
“I go around reading cities as if they were text,” says Pico Iyer, the travel writer who says he’s from “everywhere and nowhere”.
Pico Iyer has described travelling as “the constant refining and undermining of assumptions”. So when he listens to me complain about US newspaper articles that always buy into the stereotype of New Zealand as clean, green and safe, he has an admission to make. “Whenever anyone asks me about New Zealand, I always say clean, green and safe.” He sounds sheepish. It’s “a lucky country, anyway,” he says, “because it’s escaped my pen so far!”
It’s easy to forgive Iyer, because he’s charming and self-deprecating, and the kind of travel writer who’s daring and vulnerable, insightful and ingenuous. He sees himself as “the complete everyman”, a tourist rather than an expert. He even admits to eating at McDonald’s all around the world. (“It’s really true!”)
He confessed once that “the dirty secret of travel writing is that those most uncomfortable, dangerous moments make for the best material, and on a certain level, if you are a writer, that is what you are looking for, even though if you are a traveller, that is what you are trying to stay away from at the same time”.
“Part of me is looking to get lost,” he tells me. “I choose places I’m keen to go to, the way anyone does. I get guidebooks and make my itinerary. I read up about them, but I don’t have specialised know-ledge. I have fun, the way anyone would on holiday, but I’m annotating furiously. When I walk down a dark alleyway, part of me wants to disappear down it. Even when I go to McDonald’s, it’s an investigative experience!”
Iyer began his travels early. He was born in England to Indian parents, academics who moved the family to the US when he was seven. He returned to England for his education, attending Eton and Oxford; he studied at Harvard as well, and California became a home base, of sorts.
Now, eight months of his year are spent “in a little two-room flat in Japan”, the country where the woman he describes as his “sweetheart” lives. “I’ve always exulted in the reality of not belonging,” he says. “The PEN Festival in New York sent me my bio, and I noticed they’d listed me as India/US. I asked if they could change it to England/Japan. I know nothing about India, and I don’t sound or feel very American.”
Certainly, Iyer sounds terribly English. But the man who says he’s from “everywhere and nowhere” is “happy not to call myself anything. I’m in Japan on a tourist visa, and I’ll always be an outsider. Expat often means someone posted by a company living a New York life somewhere else, and I’m just a bum! I’m known in my neighbourhood as a parasite, because I don’t put on a suit and go to work.”
For a bum, he’s very productive – as well as regular appearances in Time and other magazines, he’s the author of eight books. The titles of his superb travel essay collections – Tropical Classical, The Global Soul and Falling Off the Map, for example – suggest a writer drawn to traversing borders, oceans, cultures and genres. “Travel writer is a handy term,” he says, but Iyer thinks of himself more as “a transport writer, in terms of being transported to other states, because I’m a cross-cultural writer. But no one wants to say ‘writer of crossing cultures’ – it’s so lugubrious!”
He’s also published two novels, Cuba and the Night (1995) and Abandon (2003). “If I could write anything in the world tomorrow, it would be a novel,” he says. “But I don’t know how to do it, and my editors would be much happier if I didn’t. I would never buy a novel by me!” It’s too hard, he thinks, “competing against Ondaatje, Garcia Marquez, Ishiguro. But if you need a book that’s about Paraguay and Iceland and Bhutan, you’ll read a book by me.”
Pico Iyer’s favourite places include Cuba – “a paradise for writers, because there’s no shortage of drama and you’re constantly being spun around” – and Tibet, which “makes me feel like I’m stepping onto a roof-top. I love places that are complex.” He’s just back from a 10-day stay at a coastal monastery in California, a place to which he retreats four times a year. “Initially, perhaps, it was because I had 1.5 million miles on United and too much movement in my life. I needed to get more stillness. All I can see from my bed there is the huge expanse of the Pacific.” At the top of postcards to friends, he says, he writes “Heaven” instead of Big Sur.
When he’s travelling to write, doesn’t Iyer sometimes just want to hang out by the pool? “Very rarely.” If he can’t find an intriguing dark alley, “I’ll go to McDonald’s or turn on the TV or open the tele-phone book, because I know there’ll be something to interest me.”
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