Do you enjoy reading books about incredible journeys? You can imagine that I do, whether they were actual or imaginary travels. Two great books that I've recently read are virtual polar opposites - Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley.
Have you ever read an author's work for the first time and feel you've made a great discovery? That's how I felt about McCarthy after reading The Road. It held me non-stop to the end. His erie tale is about the journey of a man and his young son pushing a shopping cart with their dwindling supplies though a bitter-cold, burned-out, dead-or-dying post-apocolyptic world in an effort to get to an unnamed shore. The Road one of most haunting tales I have ever read. Yet, despite horrors they faced, which included cannabalism, starvation, roving bands of murderous survivalists, and one of the bleakest environments you'll find in literature, there are signs of hope throughout the story. Small miracles occur at life-or-death moments. At the core of this tale of survival is the love between a father and son, their courage, and the flame of good in humanity that never be extinguishsed, no matter what.
It is a profoundly moving story, so beautifully written - no wonder it won this year's Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as being chosen by Oprah Winfrey. Its bleakness makes it appropriately devoid of revealing details you would expect in a travel story. In The Road, virtually everything has been wiped out, even identities. You never learn, for example, the names of the man or his son, or anyone who comes into the story. You don't know the names of any places that they travel through. You are never quite told what caused the apocolypse - it is enough to know it happened. Bleakness of person and environment is eloquently described by McCarthy but it's those little hopes and miracles he infuses into the story that kept me reading... and kept me hopeful for the father and son.
And it made me want to read more of McCarthy's work.
Then you have Travels with Charley - the much lighter and
livelier tale of John Steinbeck's late-in-life, three-month 10,000-mile journey in late 1960 in a custom-made camper truck around the USA with a traveling companion - his large poodle, Charley. Steinbeck made the journey because he said he had been writing from memory for the last 25 years. He felt that he had lost touch with America, that he knew the changes in America from books and newspapers. He said, “I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light." He was determined to look again, “to try to discover this monster land.” But his son Thom Steinbeck said in an interview in 2006 that his dad made the journey because he knew he was dying. (Steinbeck died of a heart attack on December 20, 1968, at the age of 66.)
Then you have Travels with Charley - the much lighter and
livelier tale of John Steinbeck's late-in-life, three-month 10,000-mile journey in late 1960 in a custom-made camper truck around the USA with a traveling companion - his large poodle, Charley. Steinbeck made the journey because he said he had been writing from memory for the last 25 years. He felt that he had lost touch with America, that he knew the changes in America from books and newspapers. He said, “I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light." He was determined to look again, “to try to discover this monster land.” But his son Thom Steinbeck said in an interview in 2006 that his dad made the journey because he knew he was dying. (Steinbeck died of a heart attack on December 20, 1968, at the age of 66.) Much about Steinbeck's story revolves around simple things - camping out on the road and his initial awkwardness with that kind of travel, meeting strangers, getting supplies, minor setbacks, seeing differnces in the way people live, seeing the sights - the stuff of everyday travel around America. Travel by RV was in its infancy when Steinbeck made the journey and that reflects in his descriptions of RVing.
The book unfolds on two levels - the tales of the traveling itself - when it's just him, Charley, and the camper truck he named Rocinante, after Don Quixote's skinny horse. These are often amusing and self-depricating as Steinbeck and Charley gradually become seasoned RV'ers.
The other level is Steinbeck's encounters with people - often funny, sometimes nostalgic, but also profound as they reflect the attitudes of the time. The most unsettling of these is his incognito observance of the nationally reported "Cheeerleaders" 'show' in New Orleans. It concerned the matriculation of two small Negro children in a New Orleans school. A group of stout middle-aged women - the "cheerleaders" - gathered every day to scream denunciations at them, drawing huge cheering crowds and the media as they did. Steinbeck's eleoquent denunciation of this bleak episode reminds us that racism still plagues many parts of the world.
Travels with Charley came out in 1962, the same year he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He had already written classics including Of Mice and Men (1938), The Grapes of Wrath (1940, winning that year's Pulitzer Prize) and East of Eden (1955) For all his literary classics - books that were largely were concerned with people and the effect of politics, history, and the environment on them - Travels with Charley was Steinbeck's most commercially successful book.
For anyone who loves cerebral, spiritual, or terrestrial travel, The Road and Travels with Charley are both superb reads!
Have you ready any great travel books lately?
Next time... My travels with Ernest Hemingway.
All the best to you!
Tom
Thomas Martin Smith
Author of IN THE LONG RUN: A Hopeful World Odyssey
- a photojournalist's two-year journey around the world on motorscooter Melawend
"...more than a little reminiscent of The Lord of the Rings."
- posted by a British expat in the MSNBC Travel Forum
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