White Sands
Experiences from the Outside World
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
'It seems certain that the apple in Eden grew on the tree of knowledge of elsewhere. Up until that point Adam and Eve were happy where they were. Then they ate the apple and it was slightly disappointing to them and they started to wonder if maybe there were other kinds of apples elsewhere, if there were crunchier and crisper and sweeter apples to be had from somewhere else. They began to think that there might be a funner place, where the food was better. They even began to suspect that paradise itself might be somewhere else . . . From there, to keep the history of the world as brief as possible, it is only a small step to package cruises and supermarkets stocking the full spectrum of exotic fruit.'
Taking the form of ten journeys, White Sands is an exploration of why we travel from perhaps Britain's greatest globetrotter. Episodic, wide-ranging, funny and smart, it marks a return to the subject of Dyer's Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It, albeit with the wisdom of age.
From viewing a lightning field in the Mexican desert by night, to chasing Gauguin's ghost in French Polynesia, from falling in love with a tour guide in the Forbidden City of Beijing to tracking down the house of a childhood idol in LA, Dyer pursues all permutations of the peak experience, explores the voyage through time, and plumbs the effects of distance. In his trademark style he blends travel writing, essay, criticism and fiction with a smart and cantankerous wit that is unmatched. This is a book for armchair travellers and procrastinating philosophers everywhere.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
When Geoff Dyer writes about his travels to places like Tahiti and California, he’s also writing about the search for meaning, world history, our penchant for disappointment and so much more. Reading White Sands is a meaningful experience—we found ourselves reflecting on big ideas every few pages. But Dyer's also very funny, making sharp-tongued observations about everything from Gauguin’s artistic ambitions to the perils of hitchhiking. This is a book we’ll be returning to many times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"What a certain place a certain way of marking the landscape means; what it's trying to tell us; what we go to it for": these are the themes that loosely connect the nine essays in Dyer's (Another Great Day at Sea) scintillating new collection. In "Where? What? Where?," Dyer discovers a village soccer field while retracing Gauguin's peregrinations in Tahiti, and reflects that "much of geographical travel is actually a form of time travel." In "Space in Time," while visiting the lightning-rod studded landscape of Walter de Maria's The Lightning Field in Quemado, N.Mex., he writes that massive outdoor art installations of this sort "have more in common with sacred or prehistoric sites than with the rival claims and fads of contemporary art." Dyer's essays are more than simple travelogues, and are about deeply personal experiences in which he serves as both a distant observer and active participant. This dichotomy is especially evident in the title essay, which recounts his unsettling encounter with a creepy hitchhiker on the road from Almogordo, N.Mex., to El Paso, Tex. Most of these pieces are distinguished by Dyer's humorous insights and caustic wit, but the book's concluding essay, "Stroke of Luck" (which recounts his temporary loss of vision after he suffers a slight stroke), is more evocative than the others, leaving the reader to appreciate the author's trained eye for details of the world's more far-flung locales. Color illus.
