New Travel Books

Oct 27, 2023

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Books about exploring the world by bike, by car, by boat or by plane, passport in hand.

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By S. Kirk Walsh

During these past few pandemic years, travel has taken on deeper meaning: There is a heightened recognition that trips to familiar and unfamiliar destinations define who we are and shape how we view the world, our respective versions of home. The act of motion, by bicycle, car, boat or plane, shines a flashlight onto our lives, creating a shadow play of memories and new experiences. These four books thoughtfully explore the geographic boundaries — and personal boundaries — of travel, and how the convergence of the two brings new understandings of place, home, identity and one's own horizon line.

In her inventive memoir CYCLETTES (Unnamed Press, 224 pp., $26), Tree Abraham cleverly contemplates all things bicycle. Structured as a list of sorts, the book enumerates almost every bike the author has ever owned (from a model that was "sparkly magenta with squishy white handlebars" to a Kelly green Peugeot Mixte) and the many far-flung places she has ridden (Bangladesh to Transylvania). Equal parts whimsical and philosophical, "Cyclettes" extends beyond conventional narrative with illustrations, collages, photographs and other design elements. Abraham opens the book with an epigraph from Anne Carson's "Plainwater" — a nod that makes sense, given the poet's love for collage. But the Carson book I thought of most while reading Abraham's memoir was "Nox," with its exquisite, accordion-constructed elegy to Carson's brother. This quiet beauty and subtle unfolding, one vignette cycling into the next, can be found in "Cyclettes," too.

Though the author traveled to 30 countries during the past 20 years, "Cyclettes" covers much more narrative ground than riding from here to there. Working two food service jobs during high school, Abraham writes about her daily commutes: "When I biked home after closing, the air smelt like fresh-cut grass and felt of chilled glass. The ride was my buffer between worlds, a heralding to summers when time spent outside was confined only by the rising and setting sun." Soon, Abraham cultivates a peripatetic existence. About the chaotic streets of Delhi, she writes: "I soon grew accustomed to the disorder, reacting to what was in front of me, not behind. On the bike I felt instantly embraced by people; I would lock eyes with others and smirk in mutual recognition of the hysteria as they accepted me into the action, adjusting their patterns based on my movements as if we were one organism." Toward the end, Abraham reflects on the perpetual role of the bicycle in her life. "The bicycle is said to be a symbol of freedom," she writes. "But I don't think this book is about freedom. Maybe a little: the freedom to individuate, to free myself from mediocrity and an unhealthy family, to be master of my fate, to go at my desired speed. But I am free."

Diane Glancy's HOME IS THE ROAD: Wandering the Land, Shaping the Spirit (Broadleaf, 214 pp., $25.99) also charts the author's nomadic existence, mostly within the United States. Instead of a bicycle, Glancy — a versatile storyteller across multiple genres and volumes (most recently, "A Line of Driftwood: The Ada Blackjack Story") — travels by car, taking long road trips that crisscross the southwestern United States and elsewhere. As in her previous work, the author explores her Cherokee heritage and legacy and her own steadfast Christian faith through a series of fragment-like interrogations in this uneven collection.

Throughout these myriad trips, Glancy travels solo, deepening her experiences on the road. "Recently, someone asked if I minded driving after dark on my long trips," she writes. "I said without hesitation that helpers are there on the road at night. There's an endurance or resilience in the spirit world — when endurance is necessary. There's a presence that comes, even if it is only an attitude from within." As a result, her long-distance drives take on the monastic qualities of a spiritual pilgrimage rather than serving merely as a means to a destination. "For methodology, you travel. The land carries stories it will share if you ask," Glancy writes. "You research whatever can be researched, and then you listen for the voices — the torn bits of dialogue. They will be hitchhiking somewhere. Or they will show up in the morning after sleep in a car at a rest area. These roads — these little islands we bring into existence in the great swirling sea."

Questions of home and identity also drift through Dorthe Nors's A LINE IN THE WORLD: A Year on the North Sea Coast (Graywolf, 238 pp., paperback, $16), a chronicle of the author's travels along the western coast of Denmark. Seamlessly translated by Caroline Waight, these 14 essays render a personal, poetic meditation on this remote edge of windswept landscapes and wild waters. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize for "Mirror, Shoulder, Signal" in 2017, Nors has published six other books of fiction, with this volume representing her first foray into nonfiction. "Now it has begun, the line," she writes in the opening essay. "It charts a coast and continues, curving faintly outwards. Then come the cervical vertebrae. They settle one by one, stacked each on top of another, sandy islands. And the line persists, breaking borders, into Germany and on. The islands settle like smaller delicate vertebrae into Holland, now charting not a line but a living being."

After living in Copenhagen for many years, Nors moved to Denmark's west coast in 2014, where she had summered with her family as a child and where she traces her ancestral roots. As a result, an immediacy and an intimacy filter through her spare, brilliant prose about the region's history, shipwrecks and other stories. The reader becomes immersed in Nors's interior weather as well as the harsh external elements of the rugged Jutland Peninsula. At the same time, her essays provoke reflection on one's own personal geography and how memories map onto specific landscapes and bodies of water. In "The Shortest Night," the author writes: "The power of place. You came here once with all you had, left it and traveled on. And so it is filled with fragments of memory. They flicker, the fragments. They rise like dust in long unaired rooms."

Patrick Bixby looks at the intersection of bureaucracy and travel, as well as the freedom of movement, in LICENSE TO TRAVEL: A Cultural History of the Passport (University of California, 231 pp., $24.95), a comprehensive, insightful history of the "little book containing 30-odd pages of sturdy paper." Ranging from the early days of the passport (golden tablets issued to the Polo brothers by Genghis Khan's grandson) to the "health passports" proposed during the Covid-19 pandemic, Bixby offers up a formidable survey of this everyday artifact and how it defines individuals and affords varying degrees of privilege and freedom, depending on one's place of birth. In the introduction, he writes: "These precious books, held close to our vulnerable bodies as we cross borders, carry with them intimate stories about us that, nonetheless, testify to our place in much larger narratives."

Bixby, a cultural historian and an English professor at Arizona State University, also examines the role of the passport in the lives of many well-known writers, thinkers and musicians — from Herman Melville and James Joyce to Sun Ra and Salman Rushdie — and elucidates the fault lines of marginalization, discrimination and injustice that come with cross-border entry and exit. For example, Frederick Douglass was unable to obtain a U.S. passport until 1886, when he was almost 70 and traveling with his second wife on a honeymoon through Europe and North Africa.

By the conclusion, Bixby considers increasingly complicated aspects of modern travel and identity: the Trump administration's 2017 travel ban, the ongoing global migrant crisis, the surveillance technology that has ushered in a new frontier of biodata collection at airports and other checkpoints. Despite these seismic changes, the pocket-size booklet still serves its primary function. "Our passport defines who we are in the geopolitical order," Bixby writes, "where we can travel, reside, work, and on and on."

S. Kirk Walsh is the author of "The Elephant of Belfast."

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