Geoff Dyer, White Sands *** 1/2

White Sands is a collection of short essays or stories loosely on the subject of travel. I picked it up after reading a funny excerpt from the title piece on the back cover: Geoff and his wife pick up a hitchhiker in the New Mexico desert, then see a sign warning them not to pick up hitchhikers because of nearby detention centers.

The first chapter follows Geoff on a trip to Tahiti "in the footsteps" of Gauguin. It raises interesting questions about why we travel to the places that we do, and it captures the traveler's balance between interest and disappointment. In fact, these are recurring themes in several of the chapters.

I liked the first half of the book better than the final half. The pieces were more thematically related and had a better tonal balance.

Robert Moor, On Trails ****

Like many nature writers, Robert Moor starts exploring a concrete part of our outdoor experience (hiking trails) and eventually finds that it is central to human experience. If often find such writers overly metaphysical, but Moor manages to keep his prose and ideas down to earth by often returning to the fundamental experience of the outdoors.

I was particularly intrigued by the idea of trails as externalized intelligence, which Moor first introduces when discussing insect trails. The trails themselves capture knowledge that none of the individuals have. It reminds me of a philosophical question about the status of written language: do books have ideas in them or just instructions for reconstructing ideas?

Jose Saramago, The Elephant's Journey ***

I thought I was done reading Nobel-prize winner Jose Saramago. I loved his earlier work but was disappointed with books from his later years. But I came across The Elephant's Journey in the Milan airport bookstore, and it seemed like just the kind of trifle to occupy me during a nine-hour flight to New York: a fact-based fable about an elephant traveling from Lisbon to Vienna in 1551.

And indeed it was. The story was pleasant, written in Saramago's signature digressive style. It featured too little of the titular elephant, in my opinion, but it was a light "beach read" perfect for travel.

Francise Prose, Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern ***

I picked up this biography of Peggy Guggenheim in the gift shop of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, in preparation for visiting Peggy's home and art collection in Venice. The author never met Peggy, so her portrait is based on written sources, primarily memoirs from Peggy and her colorful circle of friends. She (Francise Prose) is a novelist, and she organizes the story thematically rather than purely chronologically.

Peggy was an interesting character, although not a particularly pleasant one. The book was a nice complement to our visit of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni and the Guggenheim Collection.