Poverty’s richness from a distance

Travel writing is a hardy genre. Despite being belittled by some highbrows, it is as much a Darwinian survivor as the beggars and brigands, geographic and archeological features travel writers seek out to celebrate. Does the genre persist and thrive because of the prodigious talents -- De Tocqueville, Melville, Stevenson, Twain, Greene, to mention a handful -- who have been drawn to the exercise? Or does the challenge of spinning touristic straw into literary gold exert a special attraction on strong writers?

Pico Iyer, whose six previous volumes of travel reflections attest to a vocation rather than a sideline, appears predestined for the job. “I am entirely Indian myself, by blood, though born in England.” That phrase, “entirely Indian,” has a curious echo coming from one who grew up shuttling between boarding schools in Southern California and Britain, who set out before college to explore great swaths of Central and South America and who cheerfully reports from Bombay that his grasp of Hindi is “nonexistent [and] would have provoked more than multidimensional yogic laughter.” Those of us who grew up more rootless than rooted, whether in the geographical or cultural sense, know the almost illicit allure of daring to claim to be entirely anything. Though Iyer doesn’t belabor these themes, this collection of otherwise fairly straightforward travel and travel-cum-interview pieces (spiced with multiple references from Camus) also includes two armchair essays on fiction writers: W.G. Sebald and Kazuo Ishiguro. Both could stand as models of examined rootlessness, of the self-conscious exploration of otherness, in their lives as well as in their novels.

Iyer offers a more immediate motive for his newest work, “Sun After Dark: Flights Into the Foreign.” “A few years ago, when America was enjoying a period of prosperity unprecedented in its history, I decided to take myself off to the poorest countries.... I didn’t think that these places were more important ... but nor was I ready to believe that they were less so.”

Yemen, Cambodia, Tibet, Ethiopia, Bolivia, Easter Island -- these are some of the exotic locales vividly invoked, through calligraphic, brushstroke-like prose, in these 17 essays. For example, he writes on Tibet: “The thin air gives the whole plateau a sense of unnatural illumination, so you feel, as you pass through late summer fields of wild mustard, as if you are not yourself, but lightheaded, prone to dreams.... Women in turquoise braids labor up the steep, thin ladders

Impressionism is, of course, inherently, proudly subjective. It prizes emotional response and the play of allusion and association, and laughs off the wild-goose chase of objectivity, let alone omniscience. Though “Sun After Dark” is always a deeply responsible book, both educated and enlightening -- on the maturing of the Dalai Lama, a longtime friend of Iyer’s, or on the melancholy history of Aden -- the author’s point of view is more or less limited depending on his familiarity with the place he’s trying to capture. His take on Haiti -- “[M]en walk around the central square with bloodshot eyes.... Haiti’s most famous gift is ... what we call voodoo and zombie” -- is, he acknowledges, the view seen mostly from the terrace of a luxury hotel. The account of a supernaturally charged romantic fling in Bali may suffer from a similar superficiality. But the ruminations on his encounters and epiphanies in the Deer Park of Nara, an ancient Japanese city, weave personal memory with a subtle inhalation of place and a dancing insight. He writes of watching grandmothers walk paths with children: “The very old and the very young live on the edge of things, and are closer to the woods.... [T]hey don’t have to go and check in on the daylight world.”

Not all of “Sun After Dark” is concerned with poverty. The first (and somewhat disconcerting) piece finds the author in a Zen retreat outside Los Angeles, as a guest of the flamboyant and hardly penurious perennial enfant terrible Leonard Cohen. Or perhaps he means poverty as much in the spiritual sense of humility and simplicity. The underlying zeitgeist, sometimes central and sometimes submerged, seems to be a quest -- in Iyer’s case, informed by the practice of Buddhism -- for what might be termed spiritual unity, an essence to be distilled, in a paradoxical, Jamesian way, from exposure to religion’s many particular manifestations.

If so, we can look forward to further travel books from Iyer, who cites Christopher Isherwood’s belief that “the ideal [travel writing]