a Bill Bryson en un viaje a Inglaterra, hace ya muchos años, Pregunté por él a la vendedora, y me comentó maravillas del escritor, Lo compré, lo leí, y me gustó mucho, Se trataba de “Notes from a small island”, Desde entonces he seguido sus libros con bastante asiduidad, y lo considero un escritor genial y divertido a partes iguales.
En “Neither here nor there” nos recrea un viaje en plan mochilero que realizó por Europa en la década de los setenta, empezando por Noruega y acabando en Estambul.
La verdad es que no tiene desperdicio, Algunos pasajes son auténticamente hilarantes, otros contienen reflexiones ridiculizantes de algunos colectivos que se ha ido encontrando, todo servido con unas dosis de humor muy británico.
Pero, no confundir con una especie de guía de viaje! Bryson no suele dar grandes descripciones de los lugares que ha visitado, ni te servirá para que no te pierdas en cualquier gran ciudad europea.
De hecho, él suele hacerlo a menudo, perderse, a veces con consecuencias nefastas, No, se trata de una divertida narración de anécdotas, salpicadas con un poco de su mala leche habitual en este tipo de narraciones.
No busquéis tampoco datos culturales en este libro, tampoco los vais a encontrar! Yo, que he procurado viajar por Europa con asiduidad, coincido plenamente con muchas de sus reflexiones, incluso las no políticamente correctas, que de esas tiene unas cuantas.
Lástima que en ese viaje no llegara hasta España! Me hubiera gustado reírme a gusto con sus disparates! Divertida y recomendable lectura.
No la colocaría entre las mejores obras de Bryson, porque las tiene mejores, sin duda, pero he pasado un buen rato con ella.
Leaving his comfort zone thousands of miles away Bill explores Europe accompanied only with his curiosity and happy smile.
Buying bread, . .
You would go into a bakery and be greeted by some vast sluglike creature with a look that told you you would never be friends.
In halting French you would ask for a small loaf of bread, The woman would give you a long, cold stare and then put a dead beaver on the counter,
No, no, you would say, hands aflutter, not a dead beaver, A loaf of bread.
Reservation problems, . .
There must be some mistake, Please look again.
The girl studied the passenger manifest, No, Mr Bryson, your name is not here,
But I could see it, even upsidedown, There it is, second from the bottom,
No, the girl decided, that says Bernt Bjornson, Thats a Norwegian name.
It doesnt say Bernt Bjornson, It says Bill Bryson. Look at the loop of the y, the two ls, Miss, please. But she wouldnt have it, If I miss this bus when does the next one go
Next week at the same time,
Oh, splendid. Miss, believe me, it says Bill Bryson,
No, it doesnt.
Miss, look, Ive come from England, Im carrying some medicine that could save a childs life, She didnt buy this.
I want to see the manager,
Hes in Stavanger.
Listen, I made a reservation by telephone, If I dont get on this bus Im going to write a letter to your manager that will cast a shadow over your career prospects for the rest of this century.
This clearly did not alarm her, Then it occurred to me, If this Bernt Bjornson doesnt show up, can I have his seat
Sure,
Why dont I think of these things in the first place and save myself the anguish Thank you, I said, and lugged my bag outside.
Stereotypes or how to insult Europeans, . .
The French, for instance, cannot get the hang of queuing, They try and try, but it is beyond them, Wherever you go in Paris, you see orderly lines waiting at bus stops, but as soon as the bus pulls up the line instantly disintegrates into something like a fire drill at a lunatic asylum as everyone scrambles to be the first aboard, quite unaware that this defeats the whole purpose of queuing.
The British, on the other hand, do not understand certain of the fundamentals of eating, as evidenced by their instinct to consume hamburgers with a knife and fork.
To my continuing amazement, many of them also turn their fork upsidedown and balance the food on the back of it.
Ive lived in England for a decade and a half and I still have to quell an impulse to go up to strangers in pubs and restaurants and say,
Excuse me, can I give you a tip thatll help stop those peas bouncing all over the table
Germans are flummoxed by humour,
the Swiss have no concept of fun,
the Spanish think there is nothing at
all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight,
and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on the invention of the motor car.
The Danish Police, . .
Two police officers, a man and a woman, both young and blond and as gorgeous as everyone else in the city, were talking softly and with sympathy to a boy of about seventeen who had clearly ingested the sort of drugs that turn ones brain into an express elevator to Pluto.
Disorientated by this sudden zip through the cosmos, he had apparently stumbled and cracked his head a trickle of blood ran from above his hairline to his downy cheek.
The police officers helped the boy to his feet and led him to the patrol car, The small crowd dispersed, but I found myself following them, almost involuntarily, I dont know why I was so fascinated, except that I had never seen such gentle police, At the patrol car, I said in English to the female officer,
Excuse me, what will you do with the boy
Well take him home, she said simply, then raised her eyebrows a fraction and added: I think he needs his bed.
Will he be in trouble for this I asked,
With his father, I think so, yes, But not with us. We are all young and crazy sometimes, you know Goodnight, Enjoy your stay in Copenhagen,
How to cross the road, . .
Even Roman drivers wont hit a nun you see groups of them breezing across eightlane arteries with the most amazing impunity, like scraps of black and white paper borne along by the wind so if you wish to cross some busy place like the Piazza Venezia your only hope is to wait for some nuns to come along and stick to them like a sweaty Tshirt.
Added excitement, . .
I cant think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.
Suddenly you are five years old again, You cant read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you cant even reliably cross a street without endangering your life.
Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses,
Bill Bryson is the ultimate arm chair traveler's writer, He takes you into the very homes of Europeans and gives you his personal point of view,
Enjoy! Huh, Turns out Bryson is a dirty ol' bugger!
This travelacrossEurope journal is fun, educational and entertaining, I love travel and I like learning about faroff places, Europe has been done and overdone, yet I still find it fascinating,
Bryson's recollections are from when he wrote the book in the 's as well as from a previous trip he and his friend Katz took.
Regardless of when the reminisces come from, details ring true from the experiences I've had of the same places, such Paris and parts of Italy.
Apparently some things never change, However, it was cool to get his take on the place,
At times he gets a little grumpy, but overall this is lighthearted and goodnatured, He has a adequate store of patience and his takeitasitcomes attitude keeps most of this from sinking into endless gripes.
Fun as this was, it's not my favorite of the six or so of Bryon's works I've read to this point.
I haven't found this in his later books, but earlier on his writing seems to show a distracting obsession with sex.
That's fine. I mean, I'm a dirty bird too, but I really don't want to know about the fetishes of a midaged man.
I am one and it's not pretty, Hey, I'm sure that's someone's bag, Somewhere out there some sad sod is thinking, "I wonder what gets boring, bald and wrinkled old Phil from accounting off" But that's not me.
. . not yet anyhow. Who knows maybe someday my sexuality will warp in an unexpected way,
Oh, who am I kidding, . . zip Fun read!! Seriously this book sucks, Big time.
Bill Bryson is as funny as ever you can't avoid guffawing at some of his observations: but this is a booklong exercise in sarcasm.
It's as though the author is saying: "Look, compared to these braindead Europeans, see how clever I am!" Being a sarcastic SOB myself, I can understand the attitude but find it difficult to sustainpages of it.
And really, for a travelogue, it does not give the reader what he/ she wants information on the country traversed.
We are treated to pages and pages of descriptions of the dreary hotels the author stayed in it seems that he cannot find one meeting his exacting standards anywhere, the bad and expensive food he had to stomach except Mac Donald's, of course, the totally unappealing people he had to deal with and towards the middle of the book his pornographic dreams which run as subtext in streamofconsciousness.
I felt that ol' Bill here was trying to squeeze humour out of his trip like one trying to get that last dollop of toothpaste from the tube.
And having visited Istanbul, I can tell you that his impressions of the city are the diametric opposite of what I experienced in.
Either the city has drastically changed in two decades, or it shows different faces to the entitled, holierthanthou American and the inquisitive Indian, on the lookout for fresh experiences.
Give this book a miss, Bryson's other books are better, Notes from a Small Island and Neither Here nor There are Bill Brysons early travelogues concerning his journeys through Britain and other European countries respectively.
Both of these books are the strongest and the funniest of Brysons earliest work and undoubtedly established his reputation at that time as a travel writer and commentator of repute, producing engaging and very entertaining travelogues.
Now very much the AngloAmerican having lived at times in the UK and now holding dual UK/US nationality Bryson writes here very much as a young American abroad with all the cultural and language based misunderstandings that predictably ensue.
Whilst all this could certainly have been trite, pedestrian and clichéd as well as probably unfunny and verging on the xenophobic, what Bryson does here though is very much far from that the joke more often than not is on him and just as importantly, the jokes are more often than not very funny.
What also comes across in addition to the humour, is the open mind and love although admittedly occasionally hate that Bryson has for travel and exploring other countries and cultures.
Brysons more recent books are now no longer limited to the travel genre and have been of varying quality he still however produces some great reads every now and then most recently see: One Summer: America,but this was where it all started.
In this book travel writer Bill Bryson wrote about a whirlwind trip through Europe that seemed designed solely to give him something to write about rather than a journey he actually wanted to take.
I didn't take notes so Bryson's stops in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Lichtenstein, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Austria, Italy, etc, blended together into a continuous blur of traveling, finding hotels, walking around, looking at things, eating, drinking, and so on.
I could hardly distinguish one city from another,
Leichtenstein
Bulgaria
Bryson's observations are meant to be humorous and sometimes are but they're almost always snide and critical.
Again and again Bryson complains that the cities he visited were dirty and filled with litter had menus he couldn't read served bad food that cost too much harbored surly, unhelpful or purposely obstructive service workers clerks, waiters, hotel staff sported poor transportation with inconvenient schedules wouldn't accept whatever kind of money he happened to have allowed panhandlers in the streets sold useless merchandise and on and on and on.
Käsknöpfle from Leichtenstein
Kachamak from Bulgaria
Bryson has a probably welldeserved animus toward Germany for the Holocaust and Austria for electing a former Nazi to be president but his extreme hostility is a jarring note in what's supposed to be an entertaining romp.
The book is also heavy with sexual innuendos, has numerous comments about prostitutes, describes lots of excessive drinking, and contains 'dirty' language that's offputting in the context of a lighthearted travel story and I'm no prude.
On the positive side Bryson's descriptions of some of the sights he sees are interesting: the northern lights, museums, parks, historic sites, artworks, and so on.
Still, I had to force myself to finish and was glad when he finally went home, Not one of Bryson's best efforts,
Northern Lights
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