NONFICTION - Oct. 27, 1991

DISTANT ISLANDS: Travels Across Indonesia by Charles Corn (Viking: $21.95; 264 pp.). While the demand for armchair traveling is rising now that the recession has put a big squeeze on our vacation time, the supply of original and exciting kinds of travel literature seems more circumscribed. Former book- publishing editor Charles Corn will not change this equation in “Distant Islands,” for while he has composed a vivacious portrait of a nation surprisingly underreported for its size (the world’s fifth most populous), he dons a number of familiar hats in these pages.

He’s the jaded city dweller yearning to be liberated by the primitive. He finds his salvation in an islander’s cleavage (“Lewd the woman was not, but her openness in acknowledging her assets, accentuated by the traditional low-cut bodice, spoke of a womanliness rarely encountered in the West”) as well as in her culture’s philosophy: “If natural forces played with the lives of men, the gods so willed it, and men must act accordingly and venerate what was finally unfathomable and unknowable and unchangeable. The realization burned in my heart like a beacon when it began to rain.”

Corn’s other hat resembles the one that British colonialists used to wear while grumbling about what a mess Third Worlders are making of civilization. Railroading through East Java, he notices that the seat next to him is missing, the trash pail is overflowing with litter and the air conditioning is on the fritz. “A waiter served up a cold meal . . . which I washed down with warm beer. Dessert was a can of Dole fruit cocktail opened by the waiter and poured into a beer mug containing dirty ice, which I declined.”