The Knight News - A Trek Through the Odds and Ends of Europe

A Trek Through the Odds and Ends of Europe
By Jesse Leon

Staff Writer
Published: Saturday, February 6, 2010

Bill Bryson is the author of such acclaimed nonfiction as A Walk in the Woods and A Short History of Nearly Everything. His new book, At Home: An Informal History of Private Life is scheduled for release May 2010. Until then, catch up with one of his old favorites…

It takes a writer as clever as Bill Bryson to turn something as mundane as crossing a street into an exhilarating experience. Then again, it could just be that he was trying to cross a street filled with French motorists.

At least, that’s his hypothesis. “I don’t care how paranoid or irrational this sounds,” Bryson writes. “I know for a fact that the people of Paris want me dead.”

Bryson took plenty of opportunities to poke fun at the French… and the Austrians, and the Dutch, as well as many other European groups, in his 1992 travel diary Neither Here Nor There, an account of his mid-life-crisis inspired European tour. In between the jokes and everyday perils, Bryson also touches on the issues of the meaning of travel and the burdens of life on the road.

It’s not just Bryson’s play on stereotypes that makes Neither Here Nor There a good read, but his witty treatment of nearly everything, including himself. Bryson is quick to admit when he’s done something stupid, and his humor often comes off as very self-effacing.

In fact, some of the best moments in the book stem from his humorous self-deprecation combined with good old culture shock. When he tries to cross that street in Paris, he’s confronted with a “do not walk” signal that is ignored by a flock of nuns, elderly couples, and children who cross before cars that don’t move an inch. Bryson stands there fearing that crossing against the light will get him killed, but knowing as soon as the signal turns green for him all of those drivers will instantly speed forward.

Bryson skewers every European national group for its quirks. The Swiss don’t know how to have fun, the Italians are passionate and emotive to an extreme, and the Swedes are just terminally unhappy. Nevertheless, throughout the book Bryson immerses himself in their culture: eating their food, visiting their national monuments and museums, and blindly walking around just exploring cities.

This is where Bryson’s only fault lies; he obsesses too much over the food. He’s very detail-oriented in his descriptions of everything and his explorations are interesting, but very often he places too much focus on his attempts to find some lunch. Some of these searches are quite funny, like when he chooses to forgo a meal in Germany because of their off-sounding names (“shpear-of-shpittle”) and what he is told by some not-so helpful locals (“It is vat the little cow thinks vith” says one waitress), but it is at times overdone.

To write Neither Here Nor There, Bryson left his family and traveled around Europe in almost perfect isolation. Towards the end of his trek, he loses his cavalier attitude towards travel and misses the comforts of home and company. But despite that dip into homesickness, Bryson finishes the book with no regrets, and 245 pages of good stories to tell his family and whoever picks up his book.

The Knight News - A Trek Through the Odds and Ends of Europe