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Time to go

February 21st, 2008 Jon - Central Library

AA Gill hasn’t liked all of the places he’s visited.  For someone like me, who went to Rome and didn’t toss any coins into Trevi Fountain, this was a relief. In hindsight, I’m glad to have taken the trip, but I’m not going back there.  Just going to the mall, let alone a foreign country, makes me feel disoriented, so it was nice to learn that even travel writers sometimes have trouble making sense of all that there is to take in.

In the essays collected in AA Gill is Away,  Gill doesn’t just hit tourist destinations like California and Monaco.  Instead, he seems to spend more time in places like Kara-Kalpakstan Province in Uzbekistan, where the Aral Sea has dried up and left towns for dead, or in the Sudan, during a not-quite famine.

It’s not all post-industrial misery, sharp knives and teeth. When Gill is moved, he shares it: ”Patagonia is unfeasibly beautiful and vast.  The beauty never lets up, it’s like ocular tinnitus, a repetitive deafening of the eye, a visual peal of bells that rings from dawn to dusk…[Patagonia is] leggy and fit, a sinuous place with great curves, it’s competent and emphatic and it’s got a temper, it swears, and, most of all, it doesn’t give a damn.”

But in the midst of this description of an awesomely beautiful place is a hint of exhaustion.  I think this is what makes Gill’s pieces work.  They effectively convey that, yes, there is a world out there, and, no, it’s not like you imagined it.  It’s more.

And, though it might be tough on you, should you go and see it?  Of course, and right away.

Entry Filed under: Nonfiction, Travel