BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Voyage Along the Path of Worldly Insights : THE SIZE OF THE WORLD, by Jeff Greenwald (Globe Pequot Press; $22.95, 420 pages)

Among the snags and snarls that Jeff Greenwald encountered in the global odyssey that he describes in “The Size of the World” was a glitch in the laptop computer that he carried in order to post his dispatches on the Internet.

“A few letters on my keyboard were sticking,” Greenwald reports from “a purgatorial desert backwater” in Africa, “especially the overused ‘I,’ which was something of a private embarrassment.”

As Greenwald concedes, he writes about himself as much as anyone or anything else that he sees along the way. Even when he muses on global and sometimes cosmic matters, he adopts a confessional stance in which he is the turning point of the globe, the eye through which the universe regards itself. But despite his moments of self-absorption, which might be annoying in a less accomplished writer, “The Size of the World” won me over.

Greenwald may be hot-wired to cyberspace, but there’s something slightly antique about the whole enterprise. Greenwald rules out any form of air travel, and sets himself the goal of circumnavigating the globe without leaving the surface of the Earth.

“In March of 1994 I would turn 40,” Greenwald explains. “As a birthday present to myself--and as the ultimate challenge of my career--I wanted to rediscover that the Earth is round.”

For Greenwald, as for all travel writers, the oddities and grotesqueries of far-off places are his stock in trade. So he fills his account with a fabulous and fascinating collection of miscellany, ranging from the origins of the fortune cookie to the horrors of female circumcision.

One of the harder truths that Greenwald encounters is that the information revolution has not changed human nature or the realpolitik of nations, and some of the torments and troubles that the author endures have afflicted travelers for centuries and millennia.

“I had set out to discover the size of the world, not my capacity for suffering,” writes Greenwald. “But the planet, I had already learned, was not only big; it was made even bigger by unfriendly borders, religious fanaticism, bad weather, floods and wars.”

Greenwald characterizes himself “facile and cynical,” but we soon realize that he is an earnest seeker after some higher truth, a restless pilgrim who seeks out the shamans’ various faiths: a marabout (or Islamic scholar/priest) in West Africa, an eccentric Indian guru with an upscale international following, even a homage-paying visit to Paul Bowles in Tangiers.

“Strange travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God,” wrote Kurt Vonnegut, and these words become Greenwald’s mantra on what he calls “a global kora”--that is, a devotional circuit around the Earth.

“The Size of the World” deserves to be compared to some of the classics of travel literature, including Robert Byron’s “The Road to Oxiana” and Graham Greene’s “Journeys Without Maps.” Like his exalted predecessors, Greenwald uses an essentially purposeless trip to exotic places as an excuse for writing a book that tells us as much about the author as the places he visits.

“Are you happy now?” Greenwald asks himself while crossing Africa on a crowded train, “traveling like this, this rhythm under your feet, the smelly toilet a few steps away, a tubercular Muslim praying and coughing by your feet, dry Africa rolling by? Is this what it takes to make you happy?”

And then he answers his own question: “Yes. Yes, it was.”

The best description of “The Size of the World” is the one delivered by the author’s literary agent to the anxiety-ridden author himself on the very eve of the journey.

“Jeffrey, Jeffrey, Jeffrey, Jeffrey,” the agent told Greenwald.

“This is what I love about you. You will bitch, you will moan, you will kvetch and complain. Then you will come back and write these people a great book.”